I’m on the train home, as I get off the train I run into my roommate who is getting on the train. We wave and say something quick to each other in passing. As I go through the station gate, I see my roommates mum. She waves me over and we start to chat, she even convinces me that it’s a brilliant idea to hop on a bus to Eastwood. Completely trusting in her I hop on the next bus. We drive for a bit but then we stop in a street I didn’t know and everyone else gets off. I walk up to the front and see that even the bus driver is packing his stuff together. I stop in front of the ticket machine and even though I don’t ask the bus driver he answers ‘It’s a fancy pants festival, didn’t you know?’ as an explanation for his metallic pink tights. He gets out of the driver seat and climbs out of the bus, he just leaves the doors open and walks down the road. I look down and see that I’m wearing my stripy clown pants so I guess I fit in all right.
I follow all the people in fancy pants, it gets dark and the crowd grows bigger. We reach an open park and stop at a railing to watch the ice skaters down below. I text my roommates and a friend to tell them to come down here because it’s so great. When they arrive it’s fully dark. We walk along the railing, the ice rink goes on for a long time. After some time the ice becomes a river. We decide to sit on the sidewalk. Our friend sits in the middle , his feet dangle over the edge and into the water, all our feet only reach half the distance and don’t touch the water. Zoe jokes about the ducks: that he should watch out that they don’t nibble on his toes. She’s still going on, making duck noises when a huge killer whale surfaces right in front of us. Our friend quickly pulls his feet away very very quickly. We’re all speechless, the whale is gone as if it was never there, swimming deeper into the water. We look at each other in wonder.
After some time we get up and keep walking. The footpath gets thinner and thinner, until we’re almost walking on the water and wall at the same time. Zoe steps onto the water and realizes that it’s solid, frozen. She laughs and runs down the river. We follow her, more slowly and a little wobbly. As Zoe runs the frozen ice shifts and a giant cube of it flips. It’s Styrofoam underneath. We keep going only after some time we end up climbing over growing Styrofoam cubes. They get bigger and we climb so steeply it’s like climbing a mountain. We get the feeling we’re almost there, but once we reach the top, Zoe and me pulling Nesh up, we see that there is a big gate/fence blocking our way out. We turn and look back to long way we came. I sigh knowing we’ll have to walk all that distance to get back home. I can even see the ice skaters from this high up. It’s cold and I wonder if I will ever get back home. Our friend yelps as he steps on a unsteady cube that crumbles and sends the mountain tumbling.
I slip down and see the others disappear in their own little tunnels. Once I’m under I lose all sense of dimension or scale. I could be just under the surface or miles below, I also lose sense of where up and down is.
After a long time of struggling I give up, mainly because the screeching of Styrofoam on Styrofoam is horrible. So I just kind of float there.