Voices

Voices speak to me in three languages translated into bad English, which I need to translate for myself into understandable English, I mean not necessarily good English, just understandable to me.  "Do you hear voices?" asked me Dr Z, who's now retired, informed me the Chinese doctor who sits in his old office. Retired is also Dr A, the surgeon who operated on my hand, messed it up when I couldn't move my fingers after two weeks, smashed the cast and operated again, the second time succeeded, and warned me that I wouldn't have feeling in my little finger.  On that prediction he was wrong.  Price paid for careless drunkenness while bicycle racing.

I was wrong when I hooked up with this woman whom a good friend called 'dame' after he met her in my absence, I should have gotten the hint then, but I was blinded, after all she initiated the relationship,  maybe women initiate all relationships, despite what men believe, anyhow,  afterwards the director of the club that she made me join told me that she knew the first time she had seen us together that we weren't made for each other. Why didn't she tell me then?  I remember I was wearing a leather jacket, Wranglers, looking like a Marlon Brando wannabe, David Beckham haircut, sneering at the stuffiness of this establishment, hell what did I expect!

I walk down the Avenue looking around me, passing a guy pushing a garbage can which he leaves on the side of a building and walks back, I keep glancing around, I see something across the street, a tattoo shop called "The Sacred Rose", next door to it a Japanese sushi restaurant, colorful signs in the windows of both storefronts, the man asks me if I'm lost and looking for some place, I tell him, no, I just see potential photographs, that's how I word it, he asks where my camera is and I tell him it's in my backpack, but I'm not sure it's there today, the backpack feels light and these DSLR cameras are heavy.  I don't find a picture in the scene, there have to be three interesting elements in every photograph I figured a long time ago, and here I only see one or perhaps two, so I keep walking, still looking around,, up and down.

I cross the street in front of the station and I spot a small silver cross on the ground, it looks to be made of metal, I bend down to pick it up, it sticks to the asphalt, it takes me a minute to get it off,  luckily no cars drive by, I know I have to have it, it's some kind of a sign, I peel it off at last,  it's thin, made out of aluminum foil, the patterns on it tell me it is a religious symbol and not a sticker from a fruit, vegetable or some other product.   I keep it, move on, lose it somewhere immediately after taking a photograph of it at home.