Hum

The pavement beneath my feet hums, low enough to be ignored, but just loud enough to make my bones tremble.

It’s a distant and echoing thrum that glides up my feet and rushes into my hair, slightly ruffling the air around me as everything turns just a little, just a little bit blurrier. It carries me; I don’t have to move. It’s those roller skates that I wore while my mother pushed me from the back, it’s those pair of shoes that had nice mini skater wheels attached to the bottoms of the soles, it’s the black moving belt that carried me up the ski slope when I was five.

The city hums, it hums so low that nobody else notices. Or have they noticed already but simply do not care? Do they simply step over the trembling mass of blood and muscle that pumps beneath their feet, step over with a careless step, carrying themselves further into the whirlpool which we name “daily commute”?

I wonder where the fine line between -ed and -es lies, the line betweenwho I was and who I am now was drawn. I am standing on the wrong side of the line, and I have no way to cross it, for it has already run away from me so far that I cannot find it again. It’s like a graphing website where you zoom out too much and then zoom in too much in the wrong place, so you end up trying to find the origin but have no way to even find one of the axes, never mind both.

I don’t even recognise where I am standing; the bright sunlight is on me, I am on the hum of the city, the people are around me, but I do not know who I am, I do not know where I was, and where I will be.