At one end of the street I start walking and watching, wondering what the individual stories are, whether their movements veil secrets, what the snippets of conversation signify. I get lost in thought five minutes into this walking and watching. When I reach the other end of the street, I turn around and start back.

Little kids making the public streets their private playground, attractive teenage guys with their dirty jokes and riotous laughter, anorexic girls giggling and gossiping about diets and shoes and did you see that slut and her boyfriend?, balding, weary businessmen with potbellies and a skewed centre of gravity, middle-aged celebrity-wannabe fashion victims with painful heels, silver-haired bags of wrinkles and walking sticks, beggars pretending to strum the guitar for cash, young lovers with sweet nothings and arms entwined.

Each of their tales is real to them, gives them sufficient reason to remain alive, like redeeming truth.

I imagine that we are like spiders, self-indulgently spinning a web out of our yarns, even as we are prey on a larger, more intricate one, something annoyingly intangible and incomprehensible. Each web we weave is unique, never seen before and never seen again.

A child picks up a branch. Ethereal silk clinging to a stick, a white torn flag blowing in the breeze.