Madness and the city

I may be up early most mornings but Sunday mornings are by far the most unique.

Every other day the city feels alive already by the time I leave the house. The streets roar with the traffic of those already on their journey into work, people line the bus stops with expressions of quiet resignation to the forthcoming day and cyclists whizz past commuting with conscience.

Sundays are like no other day.

Sundays are ghostly quiet on my walk into town with only an occasional passing car to break the dead silence. The streets seem peaceful and quiet until I enter a city both alien and familiar. On Sundays the city feels threatening and not quite belonging to the ordinary.

All around is strewn the wreckage of the previous evenings excesses. The ground is strewn with evidence of half eaten takeaways, doorways smell of piss and sick can be encountered on multiple occasions. Signs and symbols of the drunken animals who left their reason and control at home and indulged their primitive savage nature and lusts on the city.

In pubs and clubs they threw their arms around each other professed their love to lifelong friends and strangers. In the streets they indulged in a violence they would never have contemplated while sober. They met and touched intimately those they had only just met as their desire for sexual satisfaction overcame their usual restraints.

Couples raged argumentatively to each other in furious anger over the most unimportant and trivial matters. Years of care and love broken down and wrecked for little to no reason.

Wilds nights of violence and lust and police sirens and laughter and tears. Nights that you will never want to forget or nights you wish you could not remember.

And on occasion amongst the ruin feet stick out of the doorways of those who have no where else to be. Unless they have already risen and dead eyed wonder the city looking for the first person to spare them change.

In the silence of the city you hear occasional shouts or laughter from those who have not yet ceased their evening to return home. It is a curious game to navigate by these sounds to avoid the animals still prowling the street.

It is a strange opposite world of our own, the comet tail of a city run by base instincts and twisted versions of ourselves made manifest.

And when I sit and drink my coffee I watch as this alien landscape is transformed and civilisation returns. I drink my coffee and watch as the silence is filled and normality returns.

I thought I would tell you about this alien version of our city as it transforms back to the ordinary, and far less interesting, version of itself.

I love this city in all its aspects but only Sunday excites as a walk into town. On every other day I listen to the news or music, but on Sundays I leave out the earphones and I listen to the city.

And the city speaks to me of madness, love, passions and life.

I love what the city says to me.