Stream of Consiousness

— J. Chr. de Vries

A handsome man in his forties, with short blond hair and a trimmed beard, walks down the street. He glances at an attractive young woman who is walking about ten meters ahead of him on the other side of the street. She wears a form-fitting long dress that perfectly articulates her figure. The man crosses the street and follows her. She disappears around the corner, and the man quickens his pace. When he turns the corner too, she has vanished. He spots a terrace.

The woman had gotten into her Audi Q3 and driven away. After a hundred meters, she stops for an elderly couple which is crossing the street; the woman sits in a trolley resembling a cross between a walker and a wheelchair. The man pushes the trolley. The woman in the car is contemplating the transience of life; while walking on the street, she had been content with her age, enjoying her body, but now she is startled by her future. It will only deteriorate.

The elderly couple enters an alley. The man pushes the trolley calmly forward, but stops abruptly when he sees a Moroccan boy of sixteen years old with a baseball cap on his head approaching them. He is afraid of the boy and pushes the trolley as close to one of the houses as possible. This causes the trolley to wobble, and the shopping-bag falls off, its contents rolling all over the ground. The boy rushes over and puts the groceries back into the bag.

After the boy had put the shopping-bag back on the trolley and politely greeted the couple, he walks out of the alley. He turns right and sees a young, sexy woman in a super-tight pair of jeans walking along the sidewalk across the street. His mouth falls open, feeling his hormones raging through his body. Impulsively, he quickly crosses the street in an attempt to catch up to her. But he is too late; he sees her board a bus that immediately drives off.

The young woman gazes half-dreamily out of the bus window. She hadn’t noticed the boy with the baseball cap at all. But a little later, when the bus halts at a stop, she looks into the eyes of a dark muscular man with an afro hairstyle, who is waiting at the stop. She can’t take her eyes off him. She suppresses the urge to get off the bus, though not without some difficulty. The man glances at her briefly, turnes around, and walkes away.

The afro-man hadn’t paid much attention to the woman on the bus; he noticed her looking, but he wasn’t interested in her. That isn’t surprising; the afro-man is attracted to men. He had just gotten off another bus and is now walking in the opposite direction of the bus with the woman. He turns a corner and sees a terrace ahead. Initially, he intended to keep walking, but he spots a man sitting at a table whom he finds so attractive that he stoppes.

The man at the table is a blond man in his forties, with a trimmed beard. He pays no attention to the dark man who sets himself at the table next to him, stands up, and then calmly walks down the street.

— J. Chr. de Vries, Loosduinen, February 29, 2024