Pollination

The backtire of my bike is a bit flat, but it works. I am biking towards the city center. Most of my day I have been inside my room preparing classes, looking either at my screen or at one of the four walls that surround my bed and my books. After dinner, rice with carrot and tofu, coloured with some dried sichuan peppers, fresh lemon leaves, garlic, fresh curcuma, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and gochugaru flakes, I leave the appartment, get on my bike, and move myself towards the noises of the inner city. I feel as if I have made no decision, reaching my destination with the same level of determinacy as a leaf blown by the wind. I want to be among people, apparently. Look at them, hear them, feel their presence without necesssarilly striking up a conversation, without actually interacting. The sun has almost set, and it is not yet fully dark but the lights of the cafes and restaurants spread that orange-brown coziness that attracts humans like sugar attracts wasps. I am one of these wasps. I do not enter anywere, I just want to take a little walk, and put my eyes on other people walking by, couples or friend groups sitting on the terraces, and the kitchenstaff visible in the back of the restaurants, already cleaning up. A lot of the people here are also here to look at people, to be among people, people with whom they do not speak or interact. Just glances, but never long eye contact. Basically everyone is here to, among other reasons, see strangers, but nobody has actually long eye contact, because that would reveal that they are looking at the other, that they are observing. All the people are there to watch people, but they cannot be seen watching people, or at least not experience that they are seen watching other people. These are the rules.

Flowers and fruits exist for seeds and polls to spread. They exist in order to make sure that seeds spread as much as possible, reaching as many different places in order to, hopefully, land somewhere and click, match, with a fertile underground, with a place and time that welcomes the sprout that lies within. I am walking, crisscrossing other people, and I don’t feel like there is a particular reason. But I wonder, perhaps that what attracts me right now is the likelyhood of catching something, to click with something, to crash into something or someone, like the fruit waiting for the bird or the flower waiting for the bee. In fact, I was thinking about exactly this possiblity when I arrived at the city center: maybe I will meet this or that person I know, maybe I will get robbed, maybe I randomly decide to enter a bar, maybe.

My walks often are like this I think, my walks often are like traveling flowers and fruits.

It was only a short walk, but I swallowed a seed so I needed to go back home. A bit in a hurry while also overthinking my words I biked back past the water and the houses. It started sprouting during my walk, and now it grows and needs to get out. I open up the door, reach for my laptop, and go sit on the balcony. I am typing, and looking at the last bit of sunshine of this day.