May
9
2009
Love death and an Existentialist crisis
The constant sound of sirens in my ears is beginning to vex me. I feel perturbed , raw - there has just been a huge accident just outside my flat and the road is crammed with police cars, ambulances, cars belonging to specialist doctors the works. I was chilling at home (read SLEEPING) when my cousin called me to say that she was coming to park her car in my driveway so that she could walk the approx 200 meters to the station and get the tube into town to meet her man. She only lives around the corner and so I went downstairs expecting her to appear any second and she did on foot . She explained that the police had cordoned off the road just before my house and that’s when I took a really good look and saw that the road was cordoned off both ways. I walked her part of the way to the station and we literally had to cross the road and walk through the park in order to get past the cordoned off area and as we walked that’s when I saw the enormity of it. 4 cars and several bits of debris littered the road. One car was overturned and there were people trapped inside. Crowds had begun to form of either end of the road and on either end of the cordon effectively boxing the accident area in. Now I must admit that I looked as I walked past, driven by some kind of morbid curiosity - also the fact that I trained as a nurse once upon a time and have seen my fair share of guts and blood has meant that I am not squeamish about these things. I left my cousin near the station and headed back home and that’s when I took a good look at the crowd, people had camera phones out and were taking videos , others were running from their homes and chattering in excited glee, grown women and men holding their young children in their arms creeping closer and closer to the police tape to get a better look (why would you bring your kids out of your home to see blood/guts/what looked like certain death) Across the road from me there was an old man with a big camera taking pictures and that’s when I began to feel sick. What is wrong with people? No one seemed particularly worried about the people trapped inside -the crowds just seemed to have some kind of blood lust- people scrambling for a better view of the mangled kids in the car, of the ambulances, of the police in fact there was only one guy who seemed visibly shaken. Some dudes even tried to chat my cousin and I up, right there, by the broken glass and a scene so horrific it made my blood run cold.
It was a painful reminder of my own mortality. In a week where I have been to the doctors for a lump in my breast, been informed that my last blood test showed abnormal liver function results , bumped into the ex boyfriend of the woman my soon to be ex husband has shacked up with, been feeling generally out of sorts and this week has not been a very good week. I feel anxious, agitated, stressed out and very VERY vulnerable.
I don’t know ..sometimes I despair, mankind seems to have lost all sense of humanity. Death is all around me in the papers, on the news, on the streets I guess its inevitable but sometimes I wish it wasn’t so in your face.
