Scenes from a life I did not live

Am in Lon tmw so could meet you at waterloo after my meeting around 5? All well my end. Speak tmw Tx

I've never texted the wrong person by mistake myself*, but I suppose it must be easy-ish to do. I occasionally get a random message, or sometimes am treated to a long voicemail message consisting of the sound of half heard muffled voices through the phone owner's pocket.

There's a strange illicit thrill to receiving a random unintended moment of someone else's life. Who is meeting whom? Why at Waterloo? Is that kiss a meaningless friendly thing, or something more significant? Before you know it, I've constructed an entire scenario of affairs, desire, deception, furtive assignations and stolen kisses on train platforms. It's one of those rare moments when you're suddenly taken out of your own life and catch a glimpse of the normally unimagined, unnoticed, hidden or ignored world of others. A reminder that as we shuffle through our own concerns, other lives are happening, everywhere, indifferent to us.

*My phone's decided to text or call random people by itself plenty of times, though.

Absences

There seems to be a chill in the air, a general ennui, disillusion and withdrawal. Where does this come from (apart from here)? Am I just imagining this, spurred on by a few coincidences and my own unproductivity to a hyperbolic conclusion? Maybe now that the days are stretching into the evening and the sun strains to bring in the spring people have simply realised that there are other things to do. Or perhaps it's simply a fallow moment before new buds appear. As I stumble over clumsy attempts to shake off my creative torpor I'm reminded of this poem:

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.