You were twenty-something last year, running about in another city. It’s already December now, and December is about to end. You exit another building as a soothing electronic track plays in your earphones. You take a few steps down and look at the time. It’s late. You’re always too late, but you tend to make it still. You always make it.
You find yourself running on the sidewalk; cars, traffic, blaring horns muffled by the music in your ears surround you as you raise your hand for the taxi to stop. As you walk towards it, you feel yourself immersed at this moment, your earphones swinging slightly, your grown-up self, a montage of how you got here from that other city from that other December, and how this was all so alive.
Everything was alive, even the smallest pebble on the road was part of this elaborate scene being shot by someone. You don’t know who, but you feel someone’s watching. The music starts to pick up, as does your heartbeat, and a soundtrack begins to form around. You ask: How is everything so much in synch?
This is when it hits you: the scenes, the movies, the books, they weren’t art. Life was art. Your life was art. You didn’t have to live it like that movie, that scene, that book, that chapter. It was this, all of it happening so cinematically, you could be sure someone’s watching.
As you get into the cab, you look all around. You look at people going about their business. You give it one hard look. You take that in, and you make sure you remember. You make sure you remember it all down to the smallest detail for one day, you will steal from this masterpiece to create an imitation of it, and they’ll call it art, but you’ll know the truth.
You figured it out. It was the other way round. It had always been the other way round.