Purple

And now for something slightly different…musings from underneath a bridge in Pyrmont a long time ago

 

Standing still.

Watching her from across the narrow, desolate street under a low overpass bridge. She pushes all of her belongings not in a trolley as has come to be expected but rather in a baby’s pram.

Did she once have a child who’s imprint surely remains in the pram or did she find the pram discarded on the curb by parents when their child outgrew the seat with feet dragging on the ground? The pram comfortably holds what it is designed to hold. It holds a life.

Her life contained in small ripped plastic bags.

She pushes the pram to the pylon holding up the bridge, holding up the highway. Seeing support. Looking for the softest patch of the inhospitable concrete which she finds and claims by laying down a bright purple sleeping bag extracted from a dark grey bag. How the colours work together make no sense.

Living a grey life in a purple bag. The contrast must be excruciating and contradictory. But maybe she needs the purple so the grey isn’t so bleak and all consuming. Maybe the purple saves her. Maybe it is just a purple sleeping bag she found or was given or stole and nothing more.

It’s the middle of the afternoon but she is settling down for the night. It is a life so hard and every necessity so rare only sleep could provide a momentary escape. There are no signs of the green bottles in brown paper bags. Sleep appears to be the only way to cope without having. And I open the car door, get in, and drive away knowing that nothing, nothing would ever allow me to cope with living in that purple sleeping bag on the grey street.

 

And with that I shall leave you with a thought from somebody else and a photograph from me.

“Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness”  – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

~ by unspecifiedrihan on August 1, 2012.