Margarita SAMOILOVA

I don’t have to look up to see St Paul’s Cathedral. Swiping my finger across the touchpad is enough. St Paul’s. On your steps Bernard Shaw hid his Pygmalion and the flower girl from London rain. On your steps I was supposed to stand this summer. But suddenly everything has become virtual. Sometimes I seem to live inside a monitor. And now St Paul’s turned out to be built of pixels, not stone and instead of murmur of boisterous London streets I hear steady noise of my laptop’s processor. St Paul’s Cathedral has settled in the “new normality”. I want to peel the virtual shell off it. But all I can do now is animating the picture with my imagination: make the buses move and people talk and take photos. And imagining that I am being a part of the place, of the city. It all seems to be paused for a while. A moment – and all the crowd start its everyday moving, and on the steps of St Paul’s there will be people again. Characters of a new play, though not Shaw’s but life’s.

Screenshot: Google Maps