Welcome to Aftershock Weekly this fine Wednesday morning. Today, I want you to write from the bus window. Or more accurately, from your reflection.
Outside, the city moves in cold streaks. Inside, fluorescent light casts your reflection into double exposure: you, and a version of you watching.
You see the kebab shop glowing like an altar, a man in a puffa jacket talking to himself, the wet shimmer of pavement giving back everything and nothing all at the same time.
But over it all, your own face floats like a ghost in the glass. Superimposed on terrace houses, on cyclists, on rain.
There are two worlds here: the one outside the window, and the one inside your head.
One is real. One is memory. One might be a premonition.
Write what you see through the window, and what you see in the window.
Write what happens in the overlap.
Write the person you thought you’d forgotten until a corner passed, and remembered everything.
Write the conversation that never happened, but still echoes faintly in the glass.
Think of the worlds within worlds that flicker when driving.
How images layer: a school bus reflection, a streetlight caught in a raindrop, the sudden knowledge that something has changed.
How we see beyond. How we see between.
And how we are all of them at once, just at different moments in time.
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