Everyone knows that moment.

You’re walking down the street, it’s a sunny day and you’re absorbing everything around you. The sky and the rhythm of the street, the people who race past you like possible loves, enemies and dreams. All of sudden everything slows down and you zoom in on a couple sitting on a bench on the boulevard. They keep stroking each other’s hands and kissing. Not in a vulgar way but in a soft and charged fashion; something you don’t see every day. Something that puts the rest of the street out of focus, and surrounds the young lovers with a fuzzy halo of obscurity.

Then comes that moment:

 You can’t help but sighing to yourself… I wish I had that, you think. They seem like the very idea of lovers. The very ideal of happiness, for the fleeting moment that you share with them. That they share with you. But you keep walking and the lovers always remain the ideal that you turned them into, frozen in time, like Romeo and Juliette. However, as you walk on down the street tears may be falling from the lovers’ eyes as they embrace for the last time. It’s over and they wanted to say goodbye on neutral ground, at the spot they used to go for coffee.

You roll on down the road and the young man whispers to the young girl “feel like coming to see my place”… they are slightly intoxicated after a particularly good first date, and all the man really wants is sex. The girl hasn’t decided yet…

The warm feeling you feel is slightly clouded by something icy, something dark. Jealousy. You’re actually jealous of an image, a frozen moment in time, an ideal. It’s so easy to fall in love in the city, which sells us ideas that we can’t have. Dreams that are merely dreams…

As you arrive home evening has begun to fall and so has the rush of the street, the rhythm of the day. Slower, slower, winding down…

As you approach home the evening is pierced by a scream… and another. A man and woman are fighting passionately, fighting as if their life depended on it. Every syllable is so charged that it’s almost beautiful. You should be jealous of them. To fight that way you must really need to care about someone…