Shibuya Crossing

It's scorching hot today. Thousands of kilometres away from home I'm walking through an overcrowded, anonymous city. I got lost a long time ago and now I'm standing glued to the spot in the midst of a bustling crowd that is in constant movement around me. It is almost as if I stood in a river and water ran around me. But it's not a pleasant moment: it's not refreshing, not calming, I can't see the shore.

I don't know why but all of a sudden I raise my eyes and look up as if I'm searching for a way out. Then I see an elderly man standing alone behind a window. He's in a skyscraper with a glass front but only a few of its windows are see-through and it seems to me as if he looked down on me.

His view from above surely gives him a good overview and a notion of distance at the same time. The way he's looking out the window makes him seem lonely and abandoned, just like a reflection of my own situation and mood. Nevertheless I see there's something else, something melancholic, something gloomy, something that I don't feel, something that might be related to the things he observes. An insight that has disclosed itself to him but remains invisible to me. Maybe a memory I don't have.

And while he's standing at the window looking down, I imagine that the distance between him and me, what he's watching and what I'm seeing, what he knows and what I assume, is bigger as it seems to the viewer of this picture at first: The lonely man at the window, his eyes set on the most crowded crossing in the world.