Sunny Day Real Estate – Diary

Inch by inch, then mile by mile, they corrode the core of you. Eating away at what some say is a soul while others disagree; who’s to say whose story adds up? Your dreams are set in concrete and glass, towering all around you. You – dwarfed, hunched over, lurking in the shadows – become one with them. Either all in or absolutely nothing, depending on which side of the bed you last graced before landing flat on the floor, off to bounce your way through the live-long day. Rabbit run.

Is the best really behind you? Or is it yet to come? Is it right here, in the now, eight billion hearts beating as one, the universe, your chakras, your aura? Is the best buried somewhere deep within us all when we reach outwards, extend our arms, hold one another in a warm embrace? Is it found at the core of every selfless deed, silenced by the quietness of every such act? If so, is it in quietness that the best of us is found? Can a selfless act ever be ostensibly other-minded? You find no answers in the sculptures around you.

Which isn’t to say you’d find them in Bornean rainforests, or Maldivian beaches, or Albanian alps. The core of what it means to be alive and human is just as likely to be at the bottom of a bag of chips as anywhere else. In fact, it’s most likely that you’d find all of life’s inner workings unravelled there, far from the massive things that obscure them: bright lights, big cities, cozy cottages in the Piedmont with tire swings by glass lakes. The inner workings of any operation are ugly, kept out of view by fronts: every racket masquerades as a corner shop, every scam is draped in a Massimo Dutti two-piece, every clumsy deal is sheathed in rubber-stamped black-and-white. 

In between the towers, the Dog Star, singular, shines bright. For you alone.