I would cry on your shoulder if only you would let me (cry on your shoulder)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the world is bigger than most people think it is, and simultaneously smaller than we could ever imagine.

Few things succeed in amazing more than the moment when, at peak rush hour in one of the biggest and busiest tube stations in central Shanghai, i look up at just the same moment as some individual forty metres away happens to look up and, due to the convenient randomness of the nature of physics, there happens to be a perfectly straight lack of people from my own eyes to theirs and, looking up and across this gap in a fraction of a second we make eye contact, furrow a little, and at the same moment realise that this is not an awkward, one-off shared intimacy with a stranger, but rather someone quite familiar.

They say that more than a hundred thousand people pass through that station in an hour. And there he was, and i saw him. What a delightful course of events.

Every time that i meet someone in Shanghai, having not first arranged to meet them, i am struck by this. There are, by most counts, a lot of people in Shanghai and, while it is only natural that some places should have more draw than other places, the count of both places and people, not to mention times, is still sufficiently high that the occurrence of a spontaneous bumping-in-to-one-another is not something at the top of my mind. And yet it continues to happen.

Perhaps i have no right to be surprised, and only my maths is at fault.

One place where i do expect to bump into people is in my home town, a small town with, if not literally one pub, well still literally enough one pub. A bump is not necessarily the right word. Mostly we do not speak. But unlike in Shanghai, i never make the mistake of thinking that i am anonymous here. A look around at the other patrons, hard-laughing and soft-smiling, and i can count, always, a sprinkling of familiar faces. In school we aspire to leave this place, to make like Dick Whittington and he cat, but in the end, we end up back. For family or familiarity, exhaustion from somewhere bigger, denser, and at the same time sparser.

To meet the same people over and over again is comforting, and it is exhausting. The familiarity smothers me in a repetition of introductions and re-introductions. Everybody knows my hopes and dreams from years ago and my hopelessnesses and successes from even further back. You were always good with numbers, they say to me. Remind me again who Pythagoras is, i reply. And then we fill each other in on what went wrong since we last spoke, tally up the deaths and the pregnancies, and reel off a new list of future plans to be slowly ripped into pieces before our next meeting. Are you still planning to do that PhD? I ask. I’m working now, and everything is going alright, they reply. I didn’t want to bother my parents anymore.

It’s going alright, we say, gesturing at the mundaneity that is our day-to-day-to-day. Gesturing at the little office dramas and the salary slowly decreasing year on year. No, i don’t really do music anymore, they say. No, i stopped drawing years ago. And i feel selfish for taking this negative outlook but why does growing up mean repetition and burying creativity?

If only we had the time to do these things, or the motivation to set aside the time to do these things that makes us actually happy. If only we could take a break from work to laugh and think back to how things were when we had the biggest dreams and all of them could become real. Some authors write paragraphs to fill whole pages, an insurmountable cliff of words that we can crawl up to the edge of and slowly lower ourselves down, carefully finding the footholds that allow us to descend safely, hugging the words, feeling the words, getting lost with our face pressed to the rock until suddenly we realise there is the ocean tickling its way over the top of our shoes and we realise that we’ve made it, and then we can move on to the next paragraph and repeat the same process all over again. A small joy.

I can shout, and it makes me feel alive. I can dance and sing on the streets, and it makes me feel alive. I can be remembered as joy and passion, because that is life. I can strum along to a song you love and start to cry as i realise what the lyrics are trying to express.

Are you crying over a pop song? You can ask me, and i can feel like i am too emotional.

And i can cry on your shoulder, if you would let me cry on your shoulder.

I can cry on your shoulder, and you can put your arm around me and lean your chin against my head, just above the top of my ear, and you can hold me as i cry. This pop song that i am crying over, this shitty pop song, that i played for you learning its geography on the fly, because the lyrics reminded me of home and now and what is going to happen, eventually. I can do that. You just have to let me.

Put it aside. The colour of life is grey, and this is a washed out purple, drunk up by the paper it is poured into, a thin line of pigment at its boundaries where a meniscus hesitated for a moment before conceding.