The city, the lover that houses you, sleeps. Or not. We walk home on a late sunday night and there is that feeling, that walking at the side of a big animal that sleeps, but not quite deep as you think he should. Not as deep as you would think is safe for you. How safe is to walk at the side of a big sleeping animal anyway? But then again, how unsafe is it to walk a late sunday in Utrecht?
The shops where my daily groceries are bought closed, but the tea houses open, sweating cigarette smoke to the street through the joints of their closed doors. Between curtains one sees the serious bearded men looking at a table with dominoes, or rummy cub or scrabble chips. I can’t decide which because we walk along, and this is but one other still photo in the movie of the night.
The electrical delivery bikes are dropped, almost thrown away, with the same disarray that discarded toys had in the room of my son, in that long gone time of his childhood. The city needs not these toys now, abandoned at the side walk. They will be reawaken, tomorrow. But it is sunday night now, and there are no deliveries and no requests no more. The toys rest, and we walk along.
We walk and walk. The sympathetic and the scary homeless people that haunt this street are nowhere to be seen. The side streets and the vitrines, in the night light, are slightly different. The beautiful graffitis have another hue, and they are telling us something else. The absence of light can be the presence of something else, something that sleeps in the day and that is awake now, as awake as it can be here.
The big animal that is the city, that big animal that sleeps, it doesn’t. Is awaken in some other way.
Just like the tea houses, the massage parlors are open. Colored light is what drips out through the joints of their closed doors, but the curtains are well close and we can’t see what the masseuses and their clients looks like. I have never seen anybody entering or leaving a massage parlor open at night, but open they are, inhabited, their closed doors waiting for anybody to walk in, and be massaged.
In a poster advertising forthcoming office space there is a word game with “now” and “here” and “nowhere”. It seems quite confusing for advertising of rental space “here” anyway, but I keep thinking about it, turning it in my mind and talking it over with my beloved. Creation, discovery. Nowhere. Now. Here.
The sleeping city that is nowhere, is now and is here.