4. between the desired and the common

Ido Frances

At night I dreamed that I lived in a place where there was no need to tie a bicycle. Such an ideal place as Copenhagen, or one of those other Scandinavian cities that compete with each other at the top of the UN Global Happiness Index. And in that place there are no thieves sawing locks in the wee hours of the night and if there is, then they will do it gracefully; In the living room, put together a jigsaw puzzle of 1000 pieces, with a warm fireplace in the background that blows to the sounds of jazz music, and blueberry scones pastries are waiting on the table next to a cup of filter coffee that is slowly dripping from selected "Third Wave" beans.

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When I woke up, I drank a cup of elite black coffee and went downstairs for the daily hundred-meter walk. As I kicked open the building door (not because I'm some cowboy, I just did not stock up on alco-gel and did not want to touch the handle) I saw my bike spread out to their fixed post. Suddenly I noticed that on the rusty iron basket someone had thrown away his disposable blue latex gloves, which he must have bought at an exorbitant price in light of the situation. I was wondering who is that person who treats someone else's bike basket like it's a public trash can? I straight away answered myself that it must be the same guy who would rent one of these electric scooters whose alarm sounds like it was taken from Hitchcock's shower scene, and park them in the middle of the sidewalk. And even more than that! It's probably the same one that will spew its tasteless chewing gum to the urinal and leave the same chewy mass that looks like the brain of a really small bird on the fragrant rubber above the drain hole. And the same synthetic piece that was chewed for such a long time that it lost all its flowering ability will get stuck in one of the corners and absorb countless different pee fragments in a transparent shade to mustard yellow. And she would stay there until the end of the day - then the cleaner would pick her up with blue latex gloves and mumble a juicy curse to that garbage who couldn't wait a few moments until he found a tin can.  

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Anyway, I let the gloves stay in the basket and continued for the morning walk. Who has the courage to touch with bare hands a used disposable glove in these tumultuous days? I was afraid that leaving the gloves in the basket would create the herd effect (an effect that we in Israel like to adopt) and it would become another street tin. But I chose to be optimistic and think that such a thing would not happen because maybe the corona would make people change and not throw more sticks into the urinal. When I finished the round I saw that a plastic bottle of a pint of cola and a cup of paper coffee with the logo of the only place still known to take away had been added to the basket. "Between the desired and the common, there is the dream as compensation," I consoled myself with a sentence a university lecturer once told me, and I toyed with the thought that one day when it was all over and back on track, I would fulfill a purpose similar to that of a disposable cup of coffee and take myself from here.