People Watching

Delprøve B - “People-Watching”

Death is always hard to go through and it takes a bit of getting used to living a life with one missing. But it’s the circle of life. Everybody is being born and everybody dies. Sometimes people pass away when they’re not supposed to. Maybe they get a disease, maybe they get killed or something even worse. One thing that is especially hard is when you have to bury your own children, because as a parent you’re suppose to die before them. Burying your parents is also hard to go trough or other loved ones. But the worst part must be missing the lost ones afterwards and have to live a normal life without them being there.

This is being portrayed in the short story “People-Watching” written in 2014 by Julia Gray. The story is being told through Paul’s point of view and how he’s dealing with the loss of his sister called Turtle.

Through the short story we go through a day in Paul’s life, but sometimes with flashback, because he constantly get reminded of his dead sister by things they see or talk about.

The day starts with Paul drawing while they watch people passing by with another student named Kajsa. Kajsa wonders why it’s called “people-watching” and not “watching people”. Then Paul comes with the clue that he has a lot on his mind when he says: “We don’t say ‘spotting trains’. If we did, it would sound like they were bleeding.” Trains can’t bleed and it sounds very violent. If this is the first thing he thinks about when he hears “spotting trains” there’s clearly something wrong. Even though his and Kajsa’s conversation about it is over, he continues to think about it. He then comes up with a long list of words. The list ends with the word “soul-destroying”. This symbolises his state of mind. His soul is destroyed by the death of his sister. There’s a lot of people who feel like this, when they experience death. When Turtle died, she took something from Paul along with her.  

He continues to get his thoughts back on turtle. The next memory pops in, when Kajsa ask him on how well he knows the station, which they’re sitting next to and then he’s thinking about that time, when him, Turtle and their mother would go to London to look for the Paddington Bear and when he said goodbye to her because she was going to Thailand. It’s if he is fooled by Turtle, because she had some problems with eating disorders and she was supposed to feel good and be happy from now on. But something isn’t quite right.

His thoughts gets interrupted by Kajsa, who claims he doesn’t care about people since he hasn’t drawn any. He do like people, that’s is not the problem. He just find it difficult to have contact with people, because everything reminds him of Turtle. It’s very hard to go through, so the easy way out is just blocking away all the things that reminds him of Turtle, even though it means to cut the contact with people.

His mind still wanders back on the goodbye with Turtle. She was supposed to call them when she arrived in Thailand, but she never really did. That is the first danger sign that something isn’t right, but the family came up with a reasonable solution on why she hadn’t called. He then freaks out about drawing other people, because he finds it very unpleasant because all he sees is death. He even admits it. But Turtle’s death goes hard with him. Everything he sees turns into something that reminds him of Turtle and then of course death.