I've been thinking, today, about settings. But not beautiful or meaningful ones, just ones of solitude or emptiness. Places like an abandoned street, an empty classroom, at night, filled with empty desks, or a store before it opens. These places make us feel so vulnerable without the protection of familiar noises and body heat.
Emptiness leaves a person in a hollow space feeling transparent, as though they can be seen for miles -- and be seen through. Like being on a cold, abandoned street corner where strangers peer through their windows at you, without your knowledge. There you are just shivering, being watched.
Or being in a classroom, flooded with your mistakes and embarrassments from that day, still fresh and painful. Looking at the desk of the mean girl -- who you know will be mean in this small town, forever. Feeling proud that you worked harder and stayed later than anyone. Disillusioned. Not yet knowing that no matter how hard you work some people are just meant to do better, and some (like you) will never be the best.
Now you're an adult, with the confusing days of walking down the street to see your friend and sitting in hard desks are behind you. Now, you're alone. In a store. In silence. Not entirely void of contact, the other associates are working silently just out of your eyesight, but you are alone non-the-less. In silence, you daydream about going back school and about all the false starts which lead to where you are now. At a work place where you humbly count your nickels, in the cold, breath frosting in front of your face as you purchase a diet Sunkist (oh the irony of "sun" in your dim life) from the noisy and embarrassing machine outside.
This is an empty listless setting. Life.
