As I walk through Shoreditch in the soft warm light of 6pm I notice all the traffic around me. Buses stop, brake, restart, unaware or unconcerned of the people running behind them, trying to catch them in a frantic sprint of bouncing bags and clothes in the middle of the kerb.
It’s interesting, the way we sometimes see people on the streets. Because when we’re all busy, thinking about our concerns, in a rush for a meeting, or just with our heads in the clouds, we notice them but we don’t see them. Or rather, they just seem like background actors, walk-ons playing a small part in our life, filling the streets and our days, no past nor present, just there in the moment. But that happens just when we don’t stop for a second.
East London has always encouraged me, however, to stop. And it’s not the kind of static stillness, rather a dynamic one: the people keep moving, and sometimes they stop by – or you do.
There was a time I stopped by this homeless man. He was sitting in Brick Lane with a cardboard reading “will get slapped for money”, or something along those lines. That’s when I stopped and sat next to him, trying to figure out why and how he got there, and that’s when I suddenly got to live briefly, by and large for ten minutes or so, the life of a man who once had a girlfriend, who had travelled to some exotic place in South-East (I don’t remember well and he didn’t explain clearly, because the location is never as important as the facts themselves), and used to be a fighter until he broke up with, which is why slaps are not a problem to him, because he is used to it from all the matches. That’s also when he started rambling, getting into a conversation that did not include me anymore, an agitated rant about something I didn’t understand, so I left.
There was this other time I was sitting in a tiny plot of grass by the church, and these two guys enjoying the warm, caring sun started talking about how great it is to be in London, where they had moved recently together to start an adventure, and everything was so new and lively and beautiful that they couldn’t help sharing it with a complete stranger, associated with them just by the tiny daisies they all are lying upon.
And the taxi driver who took me home one afternoon, who told me the incredible story of his life, which I would have never imagined anyone could have had. About being rich, then losing all his money and moving here, and he told me all this smiling, and I could see he really was happy, because “I have a family, and I rose from the ashes and I’m healthy, so what else I could ask for?”. A £15 taxi trip that made me reconsider many things.
The fashion student whose jacket looks amazing, so intensely black with golden patterns, who asked me for a lighter and then told me about her passion, how she dropped the college to follow her dream, and added me on Instagram and then I knew about her life, about her and she truly exists for me, and minutes before she didn’t.
The secret, unnoticed lives of passers-by can be our lives as well, for a couple of minutes or for the time-span of a coffee, if you just ask them to tell you. You could do that everywhere actually, talking to strangers to make sense of their presence, why are you here now, what brought you here, where were you before. For some reason, though, I feel like in East London that’s much easier.
