Yesterday was a little damp and gloomy, and I was walking Eddie taking in the hint-of-Autumn air when I noticed a couple a distance ahead of me along the path. They were just standing there, not talking to each other, just standing. I didn’t pay much attention to them, as I instead considered Eddie’s usual fascination with the smells of the damp grass that the path cut through. Eventually though we proceeded to slowly work our way along the path, and I observed that the couple had split up a little; the girl, likely about twenty years old, had walked up the path towards us, the boyfriend (I presume), working his way some distance behind. Still not speaking, just looking around, walking aimlessly as if trapped by each other’s gravity.
Eventually Eddie and I passed them, and after awhile I looked back and saw the two still back there, a slight distance from each other, walking in weird circular orbits around each other, still hardly talking, if at all.
It was then that I realised it was like I was in a Terrence Malick movie. As if I had dropped into a scene from To The Wonder with Ben Affleck sulkily walking aimlessly with Rachel McAdams or Olga Kurylenko, or Christian Bale with one of the several women of Knight of Cups. Suddenly I was living in an arthouse movie, or maybe, I considered, those Malick movies are not as fanciful as I had first thought.
Unless, of course, Malick was hiding somewhere in the shadowy bushes, filming everything, shooting a future project on a wet Sunday, in which case it really was a movie and the world really isn’t so strange and I want my eventual residuals for my star turn as ‘man getting wet walking his dog’.
the ghost of 82 