2025-12-03 Freewrite

In the boldness and throng of the crowd I disappear. Signs bloom overhead, voices competing for space over cars and tuktuk drivers. Everything here wants to take the attention, but then so does everything else. It buzzes and swarms in my eyes. Keep moving, don’t stop. The crowd of people mills and gawks, we each imagining what kind of person to be here. One woman plays a Chopin etude on an electric piano seated beside a char siu stall.

I disappear so that I can see. When the others are not here, I have to wait for my own desires to bubble up. I have to wait for the blur of people and mass of sounds to briefly part, to give me an opening. I cannot make one myself, the whole is too great against me. When I find a clearing, when I don’t feel the crowd against my back, the heat of the fire against my neck, I can see. Or rather from there I can see what I’ve seen, can take stock of the color of her cheeks or the texture of the hawker’s tired eyes. I can feel the sights wash over me, again, all at once as a singular vision.

I see couples and friends and strangers all jockying for space. The crowd splits a pair in two. He reaches through and grabs her hand. Allegiance is a funny thing, how quickly we can see where lines lay.

My ears are overwhelmed and yet I hear nothing. Even my native tongue, through the whole of the scene, feels strange in the mouth of another. Here beside the crowd, a man smokes a sweet-smelling Chinese cigarette, another rummages through a bright orange tote bag, all of us watching a scene before us that feels alien to us.

It is time for me to leave. The crowd has sent me away, rebuffed me with its heat and light and swelling. I am only to be sold here, to walk and turn away menus until I am convinced or perhaps worn down by hunger and exhaustion. It is not a place for me, it is a place that battles against me in its size, and it is time for me to leave.

Just beyond the bridge I can feel myself again. I am still quiet, hidden away beneath layers and folds, tucked away as a child, but I am there. I coax myself out, find many small moments of quiet. They are there, somehow, beyond the steady hum of cars and chatter and well-meaning people, beyond the scaffolding and neon and dull cracks in the pavement, beyond it all is an unshakable quiet. It is the quiet that lies beyond all but comes from within, seemingly. It comes from the place where sound comes from. It comes from the place where silence comes from.