In my dream I was lost. It was a very pleasant feeling. I was in a place I have never been before. It looked like a forest, but I couldn’t see much because of mist. So I walked and walked and walked. The grass was soft, and I was barefoot. It was a very pleasant walk. After a while I could hear a song, reminding me a lullaby my grandmother used to sing. I thought she was there, and went in that direction. I came to a hut. There was no door, and I could see a fireplace inside and nearby it there was a very old woman. She didn’t see me or at least didn’t pay any attention. I came closer. She was blind. Sitting on a floor, she was humming her song while weaving a carpet. It was already very long and looked very strange. It didn’t have a shape. It rather reminded a cloud. If I looked at it, were wasn’t any partcicular design, but many complex ones. When I looked at it closer, I could see many different patterns, though it was difficult to follow them: I tried to do so few times and was lost each time. When I looked again, I couldn’t find that string again, or saw different things. There were many knits weaved in together, and each of the colored strings was telling a different story without the end or beginning. It was impossible to say there this carpet started. It looked more like a net, actually. She worked very fast, picking a loose end from here and there, pulling strings apart and binding them together again, adding a new one. I was staying there for a long time, watching her work and reading the carpet.
In front of her were there laying many different strings, short and long ones of different colors. Suddenly she asked me: give me yours.
I said: I don’t have any. She answered: everybody has. Give me the one you like.
I picked one from the floor and gave it to her. She told me, pointing with her hand: your home is that way. And I left.
When I woke up, I thought about this dream and what it could mean. I knew it was a special one. I thought I have met Fate. The strings were that some people call lives, and some call dreams. But what was it about? I felt like I learnt a lot by reading those shapes and following strings, but when I tried to remember anything of it, there was nothing. Nil.
Abraxus
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I have read somewhere a while ago about cells constituting a human body. Their life span lasts mostly from few seconds to months, depending on the kind. The longest ones live for around 7 years. It means that every 7 years we are completely regenerated: there is nothing left on physical plane from me living in 1999; not a single cell. I wonder how do we record our memories and how cells do pass recorded information from generation to generation… It looks like I already used to be 4 times, and about to finish my fifth cycle. Writing here is a sure way to back up myself in a case if something will go wrong, say, in a case of memory loss. So I decided to be honest, as ultimate memory loss anyway is just no more than 7 or 8 cycles away (keeping in mind what I’m a smoker, probably a half of that).
I spent most of my life trying to break out frames of convenience and certainty. My life was a constant escape. As I tried to live faster then my memories, I tried to run away from myself; cut off everything that hold ego together. To accept anything for given meant for me to accept self defeat. As I didn’t want to have compromises, I didn’t want to have anything in common with myself even a day ago. Head on I tried to hack into the future; no matter smash my head or break through I wanted to go as far as I could. I shed empty shells of my identity in process as a tree sheds leaves in the wind. Wind is a great allegory of time.
I didn’t see or rather didn’t care about danger of living like that then. Changing lives, names, places, occupations, friends, interests… you name it.
I lost myself. I don’t know anymore who I am, or who I was meant to be. It’s like a simultaneous chess game. Once I had an experience of it, playing with a chess grandmaster. He played 30 games the same time; walking up and down the lane of chess tables. I was just a somebody behind one of the boards. Now imagine yourself in his place, with no opponents on another side. You play this game on 30 boards with yourself; and these are different games with different sets of rules, sometimes rules you are not aware of. Some of them I managed to finish, some barely started.
Continue reading ‘Stockholm syndrome’
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Many times I was about to sit and write a very personal memory: about my father; but every time something stopped me from doing that.
Death underlines life. If life is the sum of our memories and experiencies, where should be total. My first teacher taught me how to do it in primary school. Write numbers you want to add right under each other. When you put them all, draw a line and add numbers in each column. Under the line there will be one number, “total”. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do when it comes to a life of somebody you know well. It’s amazing, actually, how scarce my memories are. He was a very kind and simple man. What I remember is just little things: my father caught just in his underwear on his way to toilet late in the night; his shaking hands when he hold my newborn son for the first time; he is sleeping on a sofa in living room, covering his face with a newspaper. Little, random and unsignificant memories. I remember him reading me his poems impromptu, or running around our house in a search for a pen. He would write his poems on anything: old receipts, shits of paper, newspaper clippings… he would leave them anywhere: you could find them in the kitchen, in the toilet, under the bed, on TV, on the floor, between book pages… He was a hardworking man, killing himself with a hell of a job (that was my first impression of it, when he took me there: hell, as he worked on a metal plant. Fumes, dirt, unbearable heat and red liquid metall running under the overpass he had to stay on long shifts). But he would always say: I’m a poet. Indeed, he was. I never was fond of his poems and everybody in my family annoyed by them, though. He, probably, didn’t have a talent, but there was no shortage of enthusiasm and commitment. He stuffed with his poems a pillow case, and then few shoeboxes, and then plastic shopping bags when he ran out of boxes. Nobody wanted to listen to him. Continue reading ‘Father’
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There are people like me, who just want to walk away and never look back. To forget everything. To become nothing but an individual in the here and the now. A person without a past. A person with nothing to bring them down, except for the absence of that past and the questions left by it. “Who am I?” “Where did I come from?” “Why am I here?”
And then there are people like her that are just that- a past. A memory. Something someone like me would spend years trying to forget.
I remember the first time I met her. The first time I was lost in those damn blue eyes. It was on the city bus one fall afternoon. I was on my way out of town, looking forward to starting my new life.
“Is this seat taken?” She asked politely in her sweet, young voice. Four words that would forever change me. I didn’t argue as I caught her scent. Every now and then I think I catch it on the breeze, and it still makes me light headed.
We rode that damn bus around the city for the rest of the day, until it ended at the station. We’d get to my stop and I’d ask “Are you getting off?”
“No,” she’d smile and reply.
“Neither am I.”
We’d hit it off immediately. We held hands as I walked her home. We were falling in love. Continue reading ‘Buses and One Night Stands’
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