Importantly Ordinary

As the sun settles down to sleep, its gaze turns the air golden. Its drowsy smile catches on everything – the trees, the benches, the birds – and turns this park into a single, firelit emerald floating amidst a sea of shining bric-a-brac.

I always stop here to take a breath on my way home. The air is sweet under these blossoming fig trees, the stalwart Guardians of this path. My heart beats again when I am here. Here, I see not towers brushing the sky, but the clouds on their daily journey. The nearby stream glows softly with the evening’s grace, its gilded surface ebbing and flowing – but, from beyond it, a swift glimmer catches my eye.

A telegraph pole reflecting the sun’s dusky rays back to me.

Its pockmarked and knotted wood is studded with nails. The bark has faded, bare compared to the boughs of the blossoming trees. And yet... it does not seem wholly out of place. As the sun’s fingers loosen their grip on this oasis and the concrete kingdom beyond it, trinkets embedded in the post gleam like jewels against its shadowy surface.

Each silver piece, though its message is lost, once held something important; combined, this myriad of barren remnants created a mosaic of life. Every metallic fragment once bore a request for help, a manifestation of joy, a blessing.

Why would I reach into the unknown, blindly hoping for a response?

In this eventide, who would answer my call?

In this city, I am nothing more than a raindrop in an ocean of people. Too small to matter. Too swept up in its currents to make an impact. Too ordinary to be remembered. My ambitions have been saturated with my desire to be accepted and now are colourless on this canvas of time and ideas. Why should the passer-by care about me, who is without purpose or necessity?

This darkness that lives within me is determined to drag my gaze from the light, to rip the sun’s warmth from me and pull me down. It wants to corrupt my roots and gnaw through me from within.

But this shadow pulling me towards oblivion, it cannot live only in me. Surely it must exist in others. Its despair, though infectious, can be overcome – it did not stop these people from attaching to this post a sliver of their life, a shard of kaleidoscopic memory.

To live and to feel, to help or be helped – that is what they asked of us, of we who, like them, are a nail in the post. But why should being ordinary make us unimportant? The rhythm of our city is orchestrated and carried by each person’s echoes calling to the others. Can that symphony of resonance not hold as much beauty as the thrum of birdsong?

This post, as it stands before me, proud and resolute, is not simply wood and metal and elapsed ideas. With its ephemeral pages of testament, it is a monument to our instinctual need for connection, our desire to be important. It is a guardian – no, a guide – of our explorations but it was us, we who are solitary and small, who harboured its powers. We planted the post. We answered the calls. We should revel in the affinity we have with each other, just as the figs embrace their intertwined roots, just as these nails map an archipelago of time and emotion.

The stories that this post tells span eons.

We may all be but a speck, a fragment, a drop – but, with each other, we form the ocean. In unity, perhaps we are not so small, and each of our blessings make us all shine brighter.

The whisper of a bee draws my attention to its dance through the grass. A weed grows impossibly between the post and its concrete foundation, and bobs with the music of the bee’s flight. It does not matter that the flower is broken and dull, for it gives golden dust all the same. Content, the worker floats away on the cooling breeze, visiting flowers both bustling and bereft of petals, attending to each bloom with care and delicacy. Some are beautiful yet lack substance, while the delights of another’s ambrosia is hidden by an unappealing façade – regardless, all should be celebrated, for they each are an expression of life.

The sun has closed its eyes at last over this park and my city. The constellations of iron embedded in the post’s surface begin to fade in the twilight.

I pause.

Write.

Add my own star to its sky.