Near Failures #45

I normally don’t like too much complexity in my compositions, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that such complexity is difficult for me to get my head around. But this time was different.

I’d just bought something at the 7-Eleven at the foot of the suspension bridge I cross every day on my way to work. I live just on the other side. As I put whatever it was I’d just bought into my bag, probably a juice or a rice triangle, I looked up and saw what seemed to be a kaleidoscope appearing and disappearing in the scene outside.

There’s no way I consciously noticed all of the independent details: A child climbing into place on the back of an already-occupied scooter, three heads atop its featureless driver under the competing arrangements of umbrella groups that matched the colored height marks on the inside of the door; another kid reluctantly approaching the automatic doors, his mother transformed into an anthropomorphic Slurpee, her hands, sandwiched in between the cup and a Chinese opera puppet, opening her purse in anticipation of a purchase within; the repetition of the lightball with the fan on the right as well as the snacks on the table…the one element I did pause for a fraction of a second for, after fumbling to get my camera up before the scene disappeared, was the scooter on the left, the grey matching that of the woman on the right. Everything else was just a barely registered canvas that I painfully wanted to examine at my leisure at a later point. Thankfully I squeezed off a shot before the door opened, the scooter left, the umbrellas descended the bridge, and everything returned to its previous state.

Not long after I took this, the 7-Eleven closed and boarded up.