I went back to work this morning. I realised during the day that the more I hated it, the emptier I felt, and the emptier I felt, the faster time went - because I felt nothing but indifference in the end.
During my lunch break, I took a long stroll down one of the city's most beautiful parks, which happens to be only a stone throw away from my office. As I walked by the lake, the winter sunshine was shimmering like a thousand diamonds in the water. Crispy leaves on fire beneath my feet, I stopped at the sight of a huge white bird grooming itself right by the edge of the lake. It was no mute swan this time, but a pelican - massive. As I stopped to take a picture, it suddenly turned its long orange beak towards me and began waddling with extreme clumsiness in my direction only to stop by the low barrier that separates the public from the bank of the lake.
It stopped there and just posed in front of me as I took pictures... and then when people started gathering around me to watch it in awe and take pictures, too, the bird set off back towards the water... but as it did, the huge wings it had to drag beside its body made it waddle so clumsily that everyone started laughing.
"Look how he's walking!" said one woman, out of breath from laughing.
But all I could think about is Baudelaire's poem... It all felt so much like deja-vu, in the sense that I'd mentioned that poem a couple of days ago... and there I was, looking at the real-life version of its true meaning... in all its splendour, so much so that it hurt.
On my way back to the office, the random thought of Peter Pan came to my mind, and right at the back of my mind a thought went: "You're in Wendy's city, just remember that." And then I started looking all around me and it was true. I am in Wendy's city.
The Albatross
Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.
Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.
That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!
The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.
- Charles Baudelaire
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