observations in the park
observations in the park
It's the first sunny day in a month or two during the second straight coldest winter in a century or something like that. which means: instead of bright cafes and streetlife in June there are people hurrying around in coats and hooded jackets and shivering from the rain. But finally a day hits and everything magically transforms and suddenly the girls are allowed to wear their new miniskirts and the boys are strutting around in tank tops.
there is a couple that is uncontrollably kissing and groping at each other on the grass. not making out, they look like they are trying to bite each other's faces off. they both have long blonde hair and the same long gangly bodies so it's impossible to tell where one face beings and the other ends. The cling to one another for dear life and everyone else holds their breath expecting to see blood spilling somewhere... maybe it is! sex looks like that to nonparticipants.
two fresh girlies in black are playing ping pong. one of them wears a heavy metal t shirt, the kind with bloody gothic font and roses and dragons and things like that. next to them is a matching set of two scrawny red faced men in heavy metal t shirts also playing ping pong. ping pong is a really big thing here; there are tables scattered throughout the city, a testament to the Soviets, as Kirill told me. It's even more intense in Eastern Europe, where even all the factories had a ping pong table on every floor. There is something wonderfully proletarian about ping pong, something attainable and jolly that doesn't exist in tennis.
four boys play hackey sack. they all wear baggy jeans and smart, trendy clothes just like most hackey sack players at home do. I'm not enough of a hackey sack connoiseur to tell if they are good or not; who cares? they are having fun!
two tall, ultrahandsome men are talking intimately on the grass, arms slung carelessly over one another. they are both incredibly handsome and I want to befriend them and eat dinner with them and be coddled. I miss my buzzing group of melodramatic gay friends and all their crazy sex stories. I miss getting advice on my hair and nails.
there are the men that hiss at me through their teeth. Hayden told me that's how men flirt with you in Egypt. I've always wondered if it works. In Germany? in Egypt? Hsssss. An abbreviated form of "Hey Baby what's your sign?" or "Let's have a roll in the hay?" Are there deeply lonely men out there hissing at me thinking in the back of their minds, "This is a girl I want to take home to my mother." or "She could be the one who bears my children!"
Do I look pathetically or romantically lonely or just plain alone. I always had crushes on strange lonely boys yet here I am the one alone, a small, strange and lonely girl. I wonder what people think, because I'm curious, and if someone had some romantic notions of me, like I was a madwoman in trouble with the law or a visiting sushi artist from Indonesia that would make my day. I spend so much time staring and observing, and it'd be nice for someone to do the same thing to me (but not in a creepy way)
