Things.

There are things lying on the crosswalk that shouldn't have been left there. A plastic comb with three broken teeth, a crumpled receipt whose ink has faded into a ghost of numbers, a glove without a partner, a key without a lock. They're not there by chance—nor by design. They're the remnants of actions that once held meaning and are now stuck between two sidewalks. Things that no longer know where they came from, let alone where they're supposed to go.

The wind sometimes shifts them a few inches, as if trying to give them direction, but even the wind has no plan. The comb scrapes briefly against the asphalt, the receipt flutters like a nervous butterfly, and then comes a moment of complete stillness. The sun burns a white line down the middle of the road. No one crosses. The world holds its breath for a moment for this mess that no longer forms a story.

They're in the way, literally and figuratively. An approaching car slows down briefly, not out of fear of hitting them, but because their presence evokes an inexplicable hesitation. As if the driver suddenly realizes that every route, no matter how straight, is littered with things that have lost their direction. Together, the objects form no whole, no system, no logic. Their distance from each other is neither coincidental nor chosen. They lie scattered like thoughts that no longer fit into a sentence.

Whoever looks sees an allegory of oblivion. Not the poetry of lost objects—that's too romantic—but the emptiness of things that can no longer return to their origins and are too tired to roll any further. They await a foot, a tire, a broom. Yet picking them up would be pointless. The comb will never again untangle hair, the glove will never again touch skin. They have lost their function as one sometimes loses one's conviction: silently, almost unnoticed, until suddenly one realizes that nothing moves anymore.

The cohesion between them is so minimal that even an ant examining a receipt can't find a pattern. They share only the fate of desolation. As the sun shifts and the shadows lengthen, it seems for a moment as if they are approaching each other—but that's merely an optical illusion. In reality, they drift apart, each in its own insignificant direction, like driftwood in a too-calm sea.

On the other side, the sidewalk waits impatiently. There, life moves on, hastily, purposefully, with plastic bags full of things that still have a purpose. But here, in the middle of the white lines, a small anarchy of meaninglessness has arisen. Time slows down, meaning evaporates, and even the zebra lines seem to lose their order.

I wait for the light to turn green, then cross with a little too much care, as if I'm walking through a graveyard of intentions. The receipt sways briefly in the path of my step. Perhaps it's greeting. Perhaps it's trying to remember that it was once proof of something that existed. On the other side, I don't look back. Things remain where they are—without origin, without direction, without each other.