I saw this beautiful lady on the corner of Munro and Grantham Streets, West Brunswick. She’s hanging around the corner of an abandoned shop. I did a u-turn to go back and take a photo.

On the windowsill inside the shop, a cat sat, fuzzy and plump. It looked well enough. The windows were papered over with old newspapers, not yet yet yellowed, and leaving a little space for the cat to watch the passers by. There were two handwritten signs above the cat. A conversation of sorts. If an animal’s life wasn’t involved, it would be laughable.

The beautiful lady is fleeting. At anytime she could be replaced with imagination, a spray of colour and fumes, and a tag.

I wondered how long she will stick around, and how much she has seen. I thought about the conversations she’s heard – of young couples coming home from the nearby hip bars late at night, holding each other close and laughing at the night that had just been, of the school children telling their parents what they learnt at school that day, of the arguments and tears and good news beared after long days of hard work, and hopefully not of any wrongdoings.

She’ll keep all the secrets. Because, perhaps, soon she will be gone, and no one will ever know she was there, or what she knows.

I hope people stop by to stare and gasp at her, like I did. I hope that the lady on the corner is loved and respected. She is beautiful enough to be loved and respected. Though beauty shouldn’t be the reason love and respect is given. And I hope that cat is loved and repsected by its owner too.