Superorganism

The European city park. Usually well-maintained, always picturesque, scattered people in grownup coats walking to their heres and theres. Smooth green expanses almost as far as the eye can see, interrupted by grey statues and fountains. Usually a river nearby.

It's not hard to experience a bit of an ego death when you go into a European city park. Your life and its context wash away, replaced by the asphalt, and that dog over there, and whatever's hidden behind the next corner around the fountain. You cease to exist as a platonic form, and your mind and body become part of the park's biomechanics.

Watch: while you move around the fountain, someone fifty paces away stops on a bridge and looks over to the next bridge. In a wide, field-dominated part of the park, a tired person throws a tennis ball for their discordantly energetic dog, using a plastic arm extender so they don't have to work as hard. By the river, a little further up from the person on the bridge, a young couple pause to pull their larval child out of its vehicle and sit down on a bench, dandling it and chatting about next Tuesday's yoga class that she plans to attend while he watches the baby. It doesn't matter what they're talking about. Not really. All that matters is that they're on a nice park bench that hugs and soothes their aching backs, the baby isn't crying, and there is, for the moment, nothing else to do.

A jogger flails awkwardly along, smiling and mouthing along to whatever's coming through the earbuds. A runner takes focused, soaring steps that take her farther along than seems logical each time she takes to the air. Another doesn't run so much as he lifts himself up a long set of stone steps, heads back down, and does the same thing again, but this time one foot to the left. He has been doing this since six AM, and by now is marvelling at the time it's taking. But a commitment is a commitment, so up and up and up he goes, legs solidifying, face well beyond flushed, lungs doing their best. The park needs his energy to keep an eddy going under that first bridge, so he keeps going.

A pigeon balances on a rail under an overpass, sun in front, shadow behind, preening itself. Not a big day for scraps so far, but it's still early. Plenty of day left before it'll have to try the more fruitful but less hospitable streets. It stares at you as you get closer, considers running while you take your phone out, poses for a cool shot or two, and flaps to the pavement as you pass by.

Jackhammers come from just outside an entrance to the park, but that's an important part of it as well: the park is of the city, and the city is in the park. Even the monuments bear a mark signifying their germination in the brown and busy world outside, which they are obligated to still represent in the heaven in which it has landed.

This one is here because the city got a new water supply in 1861.

This one is here because of a rich American emigrant who didn't forget where he came from.

This one is here because of the trouble the Nazis stirred up, and the local boys who went to take them down.

This one is just a bridge. It's here because this spot needed a bridge.

When the time comes that you drift out of the park, off to whatever mundane destination awaits you, the park diligently returns your self to you, fetching it from the big pot where it keeps these things. It's been mixed up a bit while you were away; there's bits of other selves in there now. The couple, the baby, and the joggers and the pigeons and the rich dead American, as well as a large amount of the park itself, its green leafy watery essence having seeped into the holding pot. Your self is returned to you, but it's not anything like the self that you gave up when you came in.

Your own platonic form will eventually filter all of this out. Life will grind the non-you bits away. Don't worry when you notice this happening; all it means is that you should go to the park again.