The Importance of Nothing Early in the Morning

It’s dark when I wake up. The light emerges from behind the buildings as I leave home and take the scooter. I asked Pepa one day what it is she likes about Barcelona. She said it was the golden light in the afternoon. I saw that light this morning before the sun shrugged sleep off.

The roads were clear but a wave of traffic crept inwards towards the centre.

I stopped unconsciously at the white line, waiting for the lights on the other side of the road to turn red before giving it everything my 50cc’s got. A horn sounding in the placid tranquillity of early morning is an offence to the ear. I looked left and saw a fellow motorcyclist in silver plastic sunglasses signalling to me. “You’d better put air in those tyres mate”. I turned to look down at the back wheel. “You won’t see it that way” he said. The lights changed and the moment evaporated into a roar of motors competing for pole.

Yellow men-at-work road markings channel us into chicanes and make us brake where before it was throttle that was called for. Trucks and buses sit across junctions on hatched boxes. Motorbikes edge forward tilting this way and that under wing mirrors at the traffic lights. To move on a scooter is to live. To stop and wait is to die. That much they share with sharks. Poetic justice perhaps; it is often constant restlessness that gets the motorcyclist in the end.

Red cats’ eyes embedded in the roadway delineate the outside lanes, flashing bright but dimming in the dawn light. Delivery trucks and cars parked with hazard lights bristling get little understanding from policemen with pens and notepads in hand. Bus lane infringers get photographed by miniature-Mercedes mounted with cameras and spotlights. Their drivers do not resemble the more prim folk who drive similar little-run-arounds later in the day.

Buses pass by with passengers dreamily holding on to bars and poles and rubber straps hanging from the ceiling. They are mostly women and immigrants. They catch your eye for a moment and stare at the street-surfers who ferociously zip by their window so early on this fine morning. Surrendering control to the bus driver can be a blessing or a curse. The motorcyclist surrenders nothing as he throws down his bottom dollar at ever lane change.

Nothing happens on the way in when your face is held in stasis inside a helmet with the visor down. Nothing happens inside a bus looking out at the golden light turn ever more silver. Nothing happens on the pavement waiting for the green man to beckon you across. Nothing happens at that time of the morning. We all just silently change places. We mull things over, we make plans, we yearn for sleep while, frustratingly, we lose the ability to find it.

Morning starts dark and brightens to gold here in late October. When the face awakens we forget that. We forget about nothing.