on a walk

In a painted corner, words fail me, in the class — this space that I have voluntarily entered with these other humans, who also entered voluntarily also — adjusting our collective visions and expectations so that they are in an eternal alignment, or internal alignment, or infernal inferno. In that painted corner the suggestions range from rescue to BREAK THROUGH THE WALL behind the back, to a basic “Let’s get outta here!” And so we do. A stroll through town to the bus station to get ice cream soaking up the brilliant sunshine that is here now. Fragment: approaching the bus station, an old man sits on a bench in the sun. At the corner of his mouth, as we approach, I see a sparkling diamond (this is a sign, but I do not know it, it penetrates my head like the summer sun Light on North Atlantic water. It is Light from the sun reflected in sweat or spittle.) We walk by to get ice cream in the kiosk. Moments later, the same old man comes slowly down the sidewalk, stumbling against a folding sign, almost falling. Somebody says he is drunk. He comes closer, I cannot understand the words that grind out low and wet, like his eyes, watery, red, angled outward. Joona translates, but I don’t catch it all. The man wants to go to the Police Station. He lurches through our little group and moves 20 meters down the walk until he falls face forward to the pavement, one aluminum cane pined under his bulk, the other lying across his recumbent form. He lies still, slowly some other people hanging out come walking over, we are watching. Joona says, We are nothing better than the others, if we only speak and do nothing. I think this is what he says, though there is more passion than the words convey. He walks over to see what can be done, apparently an ambulance has been called. There is blood. Those standing, kneeling around the man are also somehow perplexed, maybe drunk, or just confused with the intensity of life. The man hardly moves, hands come away from his head with blood on them. The ambulance crew comes and rather nonchalantly does their job. Rubber gloves. We finish our ice cream and shuffle along in the gritty gravelly stuff they put on the sidewalks in winter. Walk to the churchyard through pools and puddles of snow melt, through the graveyard. There is a new grave since last Sunday. Fragment: three, four boys, one hitting, kicking another, bigger boy, while two others watch and help this bullying, one kicks the victim’s bike over, the small boy grabs the boys hat and runs off, the bigger boy in pursuit. We walk around the block to the school and there are the two, the offender crying, with mud all along on side of his clothes, he has taken a fall, still holding the bigger boys hat, a teacher from the College has stopped his car and is trying to mediate the situation, the boy attacked is accused of bullying, and we walk back into the lab, re-entering cyber-domains feeling richer and full of life. Somebody observes, More things happened on our walk than in the last two years I have lived in Tornio!