[An unimaginative and uninspired writer (that's me, thank you very much) finds herself, once again, in a writing slump. Unable to come up with an idea for her next Vocab Free Write, she contrives a plan (a brilliant one) to find a prompt and presses shuffle on her iPod, hoping to draw inspiration from a song lyric hiding in the depths of her playlist.
"Well, I'm just people watching, the other people watching me."
-People Watching, Jack Johnson
Miraculously, the lyric manages to coax some inspiration to emerge from the poor writer's brain. Okay, she thinks to herself, I can work with this.]
People-watching is his favorite hobby.
While some people enjoy cooking or singing, he has the pastime of sitting on the bench in his favorite park and watching the people around him.
But it's not so much the watching that he enjoys.
No, his favorite part is the stories.
As he people-watches (probably not a real word, but he uses it often enough so) he likes to take a guess at the history hiding behind each pair of eyes, behind each smile.
And he finds it to be rather fun.
(Actually he finds it to be enormously fun, but he doesn't like to sound too eager).
Sometimes the backstories he makes up are rather mundane and have a chance to be entirely true:
The woman playing frisbee with her labrador is taking a break from the boredom caused by the small cubicle she works in.
The boy laughing with his friend is hiding the unchanging, immutable love he harbors for her.
The man smoking a cigar across the pond just got fired from his sinecure; despite its simplicity, he still managed to lose the job.
Sometimes, though, he draws from the most bizarre corners of his brain to come up with the most ridiculous backstories he can manage:
The couple sitting on the edge of the fountain are actually leaders of an insurgence planning to overthrow the reigning demagogue of the Canadian government.
The young man walking around with the dark sunglasses used to be a famous movie star before he spent all of his riches in the megalomania of success.
The child (not very) surreptitiously hiding from his mother behind the bougainvillea was actually in training to be the next James Bond.
And this is how he spent his days.
Watching.
Stories.
Watching.
Stories.
Watching.
And vaguely, he wonders if the habit is ever reciprocated. He wonders if anyone ever people-watches him.
(There's that word again; the one that's not really a word but he uses it anyway).
A small part of him hopes that other people look at him and try to think of his story.
A big part of him hopes they don't.
And the entire part of him (that doesn't really make sense, but the message gets across just fine) certainly hopes that, if they do try to make up his history, what they come up with is very far from the truth.
Because the truth is awfully depressing.
(Because the truth - that the man you saw people-watching only has a couple more weeks to enjoy his hobby because of the cancer eating away at his insides - is awfully depressing).
YOU ARE READING
Etcetera
RandomIn which, a student throws together all of her short stories. Most of these were written for my english class as free writes, and a lot of them will probably be nonsense. Please enjoy
