WHAT FASCINATES ME

People fascinate me. Once you’ve sat looking for a time, you can read people like book spines along shelves in a library. You might not know the contents fully, but the titles are telling. If you’ve sat longer - like me - you get to read the blurbs too. Sometimes the books in their entirety…

I’m a looker.  I can sit hours on end staring at people. At a café, on a train, in an airport lounge, at the beach; the location is irrelevant. I just need people there, someone to look at.

I suffered from extreme shyness as a youngster. This a by-product of sexual abuse from two separate man-devils, combined with a strict parenting style where my father’s hands often spoke louder than his words.

So I sat and I watched. And as I grew older, the watching evolved into examining, then classifying. I sought to discover why people were. What made them them.

Decades later, I am able to pick the genre of a person within seconds: Drama, Horror, ChickLit, Fantasy, Adventure, Thriller, Classic, Humour, Non-Fiction…

In mere minutes, I’ve read their blurb. People are books. If you like reading books - which I do - you soon understand we all carry titles and descriptions. Genres are people. Books are people. Some only a few pages long; others great, convoluted sagas.

On the bookshelves of living, we each tell our tale without knowing. We speak our story in silence. Observers like me wander between the rows, trailing fingertips along dusty, musty volumes, bulky explanatory tomes or shiny colourful children’s covers.

I know all about you. I’ve seen you a thousand times over the decades. You change your name and your location often but there’s a version of you permanently on the shelf. I’ve read it.