Today’s a sunny day. Blue skies, shifting flocks of clouds, and the drab, ephemeral warmth of Spring. I’ve had days like this before. In fact, every day I’ve lived seems to be but an echo of another. Changed, but ever the same.
It’s the same cast as every other day. The waitress, who replicates my nods and smiles, is but the reflection of an infinite, multiform figure that echoes towards the converging green of a mirror. Those two young boys, one tall, one short, are just alternate doppelgängers of my younger brother. The older man could have been one of my professors. The lady with the buggy one of my mum’s friends from when she would pick me up from French class and talk to them until it grew dark.
I can recognise haircuts, headphones, choices of reading material. Bookmarks, clattered assortments of pharmaceutical paraphernalia spread across the table. First dates, old couples, one-sided attractions, and estranged and mournful individuals.
Each possibility, each thread, spins itself a new path on the everyday tapestry, and as the mundane repeats itself again and again, I read the patterns that form in the overlaying echoes, and smile.