A stack of photos, the taller the more significant the event, people posing upright like so many matchsticks in a line. Smiles plastered on, frozen in time, micro-albums a panel after another.
Select shots of performances in motion, insufficient for flip-page animation even when stacked in number. But you did not look around at the gathering, and watch the meaningful show of candid interactions at work. The mother fussing over the child run off into the scary topography of human masses.
The child more alert than the crowds of oblivious, preoccupied adults, bored, expressionless, glum youths, gazing at disciplined ant trails leading into grassy soils surrounding the paved grounds,
upon which red plastic chairs park haphazardly around wooden table disks upon metal crossbars for legs. And even that may not be an actual recordable video footage, just my imagination from too many such incessant cyclic happenings.
Anyway, sunset gives way to brightly horizon-lit night, the usual costumed characters make their festive way amongst the mostly immobile and sedentary sitters, minds blank in their usual white noise of daily deadlines after this.
While a stone’s throw away, a heartlander worries about the sustainable cost of a supposedly cheaper, but no longer, hawker meal from downstairs stall. Or 5 stones away, toads in temporary puddles after thunderstorms dying in season, lustily croaking before they dry up, and rings of tiny toadstools emerge to replace, shaded under park trees.
And islands of mental stones away, individuals play-live at other image-rich, digitally ephemeral saved societies, more natural, intent, genuine.