Rubbing Shoulders

The unbearable closeness of being

Wherever I turn there you are.

And you and you and you and you. On the streets and in the tube. You and your crew. Your family and you. Everywhere I look there are more of you.

Work done, I climb on up and out the basement office. Up the stairs into the air and the evening bird song, the last strangled cry of an old lie.

A lingering wilderness that knew a far different uncrowded sky. Less whirring wasps and watching eyes. Counting and tracking and boxing our habits.

I’m jostled and shouldered and excused and apologised, I bundle and bump into the torrent of people, the press of shoulders and musks and parcels and problems.

Worries work through their faces, hide under masks, overwhelmed and buried by the press.

The people boxed in, packaged and shunted through the dark clay underground then zipping over the prickly, rust-covered roofs, dead gardens and pigeon coups and lonely jumpers blurring as the suns last blush turns sour.

Shadows deepen and lights wink on, stars in a city, no lights above. I lean in my standing, resting for a moment, cursing comes quickly tonight. I straighten. Stand on my own, leech no support from the strangers in the press.

The clock ticks and the stops beep, a drone modulates the names and places and keeps us safe from a gap two inches wide. The widest space we see until we’re disgorged into our own freezing boxes, our thin-walled spaces, dark and cold and slowly heated.

Solitude at last. A single person in my hobbit hole, a pile of books with green worlds and fantasies of heroes and happy endings.

But first, I log on and connect, seeking the someone in the press that would hold me. If they knew me.

A story in response to Mark Farrar’s thought-provoking prompt on Population Growth.

If you liked the tone of this story, try another in the same world next: The City is Everywhere