July 28, 2011

            “What a cool fellow,” the park thought.

            A child was going down a slide. It was in the left side of the park, if you were looking in the direction of the main street. The child sat in the bottom part of the slide. He had on a pair of bright green shorts. Reaching into his bright green pocket, he took out a bright green apple and held it at eye level in front of his face. It was a beautiful apple, his eyes concluded. He rubbed it against his cheek and purred like a cat.

            The child saw Wilfred James, but Wilfred James had already seen the child. As they had both seen each other, it was customary that they would speak. Wilfred James, as the older man, uttered a comment:

            “There should have been a storm today,” he said, making his voice deeper than usual, “but it seems that little drizzle is all we’re getting.”

            “The park doesn’t seem to mind,” the child replied.

Wilhelm James attempted to sit on a swing, but his thighs didn’t fit. Not that he was overweight, no, he was quite the sportsman according to his own criteria, but the width of his thighs was simply greater than the width of the swing. He kept standing and walking around the playground as though he hadn’t attempted to sit down at all. 

July 27, 2011

            The heavy smell of lime trees and rain squished his lungs, as though the heat wasn’t enough. He had been walking around the park in circles. The town was small, so the park was also small even though it was the biggest one around. He had walked around it as a kid too, but it had appeared wider and wilder then. Now, though, it made time warp along its boundaries, it all went circularly around and around within the boundaries of the park, unable to escape, as though the park was a black hole. James looked up and saw the sky and the streets and sidewalks outside the park, but he still couldn’t leave. The park had gripped him in its damned circle, and James had to keep walking along round borders. 

July 26, 2011

            He is a musician, but at the moment he is driving home with a few bags of groceries on the back seat. He worked on his piece today, alright, some average progress. Average days aren’t too bad once in a while, they keep the balance in place. He needs to switch to the other lane, but a car passes him by, and another one follows. He checks more carefully in the left mirror. A long line of cars wait to pass him by. I can’t move faster yet, he thinks.

            A song comes on on the radio which he doesn’t want to hear. A fast forward button would have been nice, he thinks. He wants to dash past that too. He revs the engine and moves into the left lane. A car behind him blows its wild-sounding horn, but he is already climbing up the road.

            In such a fast lane, one has the responsibility to constantly check for newly coming cars in the rear mirrors but also not to miss anything happening in front of his front window. He concentrates on all moving objects. Their movements are each entirely different from each other (individual differences must be acknowledged) and similar because they all belong to humans.

            An idea downs upon him. It’s a terrific idea for his piece, it’s an idea he can’t allow to leave. He only has his bags of groceries, though, no pencils and pieces of paper. He is terrified that the idea might leave. That would make him a waster of ideas, and that’s something a self-respecting musician could never be. He hates depending on someone or something else, and admitting a muse or inspiration exist would ruin him. But he also needs to get calmer, much calmer than now. So he lifts his eyes from the road to the car roof and asks, while exhaling slowly:

“Excuse me, can’t you see I’m driving?”

July 20, 2011: Draft 1 of Essay (this should be the most interesting one because it would be the most unpolished)

Learning to Find Connections Where There Were None

            The first thing a first-year student has to do is take a look around when she arrives at the college which will be her home for the next four years. She has to walk up and down the stairs in her dorm; she has to walk around her dorm room and take in the unfamiliar smell which will blend with her own; she has to walk the paths sprawled all around campus. She has to create in her mind a network connecting everything with everything new. The crucial change that occurs in one’s first year in college is the absorption of everything new, building connections between those things, and learning to stand up on them and use them to create.

            Entering a new college, state, or country requires a wondrous and tormenting period of adaptation. On my first night at Bates, also my first night in the United States, I woke up about six times and looked around each time to remember where I was. I also hardly understood my roommate’s accent and forgot the names of most people I met. As I was adapting, just like everyone else in our freshman class, I got used to my various new friends and to all the new activities. I did this by getting to know my friends and activities, finding similarities and differences between them, and building a network of connections between them. This allowed me to feel calm and think about how to push further.

            As I learned later in Neuroscience class, neurons let us learn, think, and create by changing their shape, talking to neurons they have never talked to before, and building new connections. The similarity of what my brain does and what I did throughout my freshman year is striking. It makes me think that our fear of change is unnatural and man-made. A new beginning is usually met with excitement as well as anxiety, while it seems to me our neurons don’t tremble with terror when we plunge into a new experience: they simply keep on making new connections. Freshman year made me adopt this attitude, at least to the extent that my constantly thinking and doubting mind can let me. Making connections between various things helped me find my way of thinking about them, which gave me some certainty that even new things can fit together if one only rotates them freely enough in her mind and looks at them from different angles.

            Once I had built those new connections and felt comfortable with most of them and most of myself, it turned out I, as well as my classmates, had made the first swing from a long swim across a wide sea: many more new experiences and changes awaited us. Surprising and opportunistic as this was, it was quite annoying to know my poor neurons had gone through so much trouble only to go through ten thousand times more. But it all started to fit. In a conversation with some friends, we were debating something, when my breathing quickened and I forgot to finish the sentence I had started. Little bits of my psychology, economics, philosophy, and dance classes had come together. Add several pinches from sports, books, and simple everyday interactions, and there was my bright, still vague, and breath-taking idea. I was afraid that it was an accident and that such an idea would never show mercy and down upon me again, but my neurons did not give me up. They allowed me to find similarities and differences between things and continuously form ideas by making their new connections. And so, I keep on making my connections because this is what my neurons and my freshman year have taught me. 

July 17, 2011

            The sea has a lot of seaweed sometimes. When I swim in its waters, seaweed greet my hands and my face, they caress my legs, and I am disgusted. The water sways the tiny, seaweed hairs sideways, and they feel like gross little animals creeping down my skin. It stops the air in my lungs when I meet big, fluffy seaweed with my hands or, even worse, my face, and any swimming rhythm is broken. But after a few hours of that, seaweed no longer call for that gut reaction. They are the hair of the sea, and there’s nothing more to that. The sea sometimes shaves, and sometimes it doesn’t. When its hairs grow long, they reach out to all the weird shapes swimming about it and keep on reaching until the sea shaves them all of with a nice, hectic storm. As the sun begins to go down on hotel buildings and trees, I swim in my hairy sea, through its soft hairs, and let them engulf me in their green, 100% natural tenderness.

            The wet sand, the one at the boundary of the sea and the beach, welcomes all waves and tides and still keeps its territory. I sit there with my legs crossed, so that my back is kept straight, and bury my fingers in the sand, as its wetness withdraws. I listen to the sound of approaching waves and make bets with myself about whether those waves are going to reach my fingers. Sometimes they stop a little before my fingertips, but most of the time I’m right. I close my eyes to make everything except sound disappear. In meditation, you are always supposed to listen to your own breathing. I am tired of my own breathing, though, I don’t want to have to listen to myself talk and think and breathe all the time. So, for a change, I listen to the sea breathe.

July 15, 2011

            She makes lines in the wet sand with her feet. Her toes run across the dark brown sand, and teardrops of sand splash sideways. The sea send out a wave that makes the lines and teardrops in the sand disappear. She makes those same lines and teardrops, they are erased again, and she’s childishly angry. It’s fun to be angry at something so futile. The sea is almost entirely green tonight, but when it meets the sky, it carries a deep blue that then fuses with the night sky. The moon, a large, orange caretaker, makes her way down the sea.

            People walk by and take pictures. A narrow river becomes one with the sea right here, but it’s such a shallow river that kids walk across it with no difficulty whatsoever. It must be a happy, little river, though, with all these unknown people digging their heels in its waters. 

July 12, 2011

Here’s his prophetic speech: “Pieces of inspiration are like flies or maybe even like bees. They travel great distances to gather bits which, when put together, form an idea, a light bulb going off. When our bees gather enough bits and pieces, they land on us, their flowers, and deliver their honey on our lips.”

He is kind of right, isn’t he, I do deliver inspiration to him, although, due to the culture he grew up in, he thinks it comes from within him. I bring it to him gradually, I put the steps in an ascending order, so to him they seem like a string of associations, a perfectly logical thought process. I didn’t leave the smallest hint of my existence, but came up with the idea somehow. Not that he believes it, though.

He’s got one thing very, very wrong: he calls those things that bring him inspiration bees. This cunning metaphor made my entire body hurt with laughter! I don’t have wings, I’m not black and yellow, in fact, I look nothing like a bee! I don’t even like honey, but that’s because I’m a worm.

There are advantages to being a worm when your job and vocation are bringing inspiration to humans. One has no problem sneaking in rooms, and he has a great variety of routes he can take to get there. A classical one is through the narrow gap between the door and the floor, but that’s boring even for rookies. He can get in through small gaps between the tiles, through holes in the wall left by a nail, or through a badly shut window. I am ashamed to admit it, but on a few occasions, it so happened that I ran out of options, and I had to resort to the grossest of all: the pipes. They are moist and rusty and smell truly disgusting. Generally, humans consider us, worms, repelling, but that’s only due to the fact that our bodies move in a fashion so different from theirs. In reality, a worm’s body is about 3.2 times cleaner than a human’s mouth. Draw your conclusions.

My client (this is how we refer to the humans we deliver inspiration to, although technically we don’t get anything from them in return for the favor) is about to perform his bedtime procedure now, which means it’s time for me to leave. I know his home well, so I slide into a hole in the wall on the right of his desk and then down a metal rope reaching down to the ground. A full day’s work has tired me enough to drain my mind from thoughts while I leave his home and. It’s becoming obnoxious to visit the same apartment every evening and then leave. My client sits down to write more or less at the same time every day and puts in the same effort. This means that I do the same amount of work every day gathering him just the right amount of bits and pieces to serve as inspiration. In the evening, the page or two he produces are neither extraordinary, nor bad. It seems to me that in his opinion, all he needs to do to be a good writer is to sit down every evening and write a page or two, and somehow it will all work out. I am glad I got such a meticulous man for a client, many of my colleagues complain about the crazy schedules they have to keep up with. But too much predictability doesn’t serve one well either. I sometimes surprise my client at work or when he is driving home (which requires some planning on my side, as you can tell, because I can’t just jump in a moving car, I’m not too fond of the probability of being squished to death by car tires), I try to show him that inspiration sometimes cannot be held back or planned. When I told my boss about this, he kept his eyes on his screen and grunted something about no need to change our clients, just do as much as is required. I liked my client better when he was going out with this woman. For a month and a half, they spent together every Friday evening and the entire Sunday. I had to run around all day long to gather things, bring them to him, gather more things, and bring them again, because he was constantly thinking about her and through her about other things. I was angry that I had to do so much work, but now that it’s over, I miss it, and I’ve missed it for the two years that have passed since then. I still think it ended rather awkwardly. They rarely went to his or her apartment, and when they did, they drank tea and talked. But on the last Friday night they spent together, they came back to his apartment laughing and blushing, went in the bedroom, and did some things to each other naked in bed. At first, I was worried because the sounds they made, especially she, sounded as though they were in pain, but when they didn’t stop, I concluded it must be some painful ritual that was required when two humans lie in bed. A little later, they stopped shouting, and I dozed off. I woke up because the woman shouted at my client something about never wanting to see him again and left. I never saw her again, and nor did my client. It was all unclear to me, but it must be some human thing worms just can’t get. Maybe my client’s performance of the ritual didn’t please the woman, but is that a good enough reason to shout at him like that? I’m sure he felt quite bad. Anyway, I still don’t know what to make of that episode. All I knew afterwards was that for another month or so I kept on gathering grim pieces of inspiration for my client: he looked so pale that anything else would have been out of place. I thought that a month was enough suffering, so I made an effort and gradually started introducing positive ideas too. This might sound a little immodest, but I like to think that I helped him to get less pale again. 

July 10, 2011

            Sometimes I have nothing to say, and I only ask questions. I only ask questions about everything, but I don’t know if that helps me much.

            There is an obligation to talk to people. I might want to be alone, to spend time by myself, but I know I need to call some people and talk to them, chat or message them, sometimes go out with them. It’s because I need to keep in touch with people because I might need to talk to them sometime. And also, if I don’t talk to anyone, I’ll feel lonely. But it’s exhausting to keep one’s entire network of friends.

            This makes me sound like a bitch, so I’ll stop talking. I love my friends, don’t get me wrong. I miss them, I think about them, I want them to be alright. I often need to be with other people, and I often need to be alone. Finding the balance is hard, so I need to try harder. I don't want to be some egocentric bitch who only tries to get what she wants, but I might be getting there.

            I want to make delicious new meals, but I don’t know whether I want to make them to make my family happy, or for my own satisfaction. It must be both, but I don’t know which one is stronger. I don’t like not knowing, and because I think about it, in the end all I do is ask questions.

            Yesterday, I devised a list of twenty-something things that I need to do. Some of them I wanted to do, so I did them or at least got started. Other things keep waiting for me. I start listening to a documentary or reading something, and I space out. I try it again, and I space out again. Maybe it’s too much to stay at home for an entire day. I make plans about everything, I try to squeeze everything in, and when it comes to actually doing the thing, I don’t feel like it. What the fuck?! Why do I try to make everything so damn awesome and exciting and bring myself to the brink of human enthusiasm? Can’t I just enjoy and float? Fuck, stop calculating every single minute, fuck!

            I need to take a shower now, and then I’ll look into these cooking books I have. Or maybe I should look into the books first, and then take a shower. Sitting in the chair, with my legs spread out, I can smell the odor of my pussy gently flowing up towards my nose. It’s not very flowery, it’s a pussy. Why the fuck did I even write all this?

July 9, 2011

            Okay, so I get up at 9am, she thought to herself, do my morning stretches, eat breakfast while watching anime. Then I play some chill out music and do exercises in German for an hour and a half. Then I clean the kitchen and hang the laundry to dry out. By this time it’s about 1pm, so I eat lunch and watch anime again, and then I have some free time to read a book and some articles and look into whatever. Sometime here I might lie down in bed and space out. I have tennis practice in the late afternoon, and afterwards I take a shower to take off all the sweat and feel fresh and ready for anything. I have a light dinner sometime before 7. Then I go out with a friend for a walk and some juice. It’s nice to walk down streets as the summer day burns out. I get home around 9 or 10 and talk to my family about what their day was like. Then I spend one hour writing about something I have to say and try to make it sound good. Then I might read a little more or watch something. I go to bed around 1, so that I can wake up at 9am the following morning.

            She did enjoy her schedule, although small things always sneaked in and screwed up a part of it. But as a whole, it worked well, and she felt light and reaching out to so much.

            She traveled: sometimes with one friend, sometimes with more, sometimes with her family, and other times with a bunch of people she hardly knew. New places made her feel uncomfortable because of how unfamiliar they were, but they were also beautiful and weird. New towns could be red and brown or yellow or greenish. They could smell funny, or they could smell as though they were sterile. One common thing was the smell of summer trees: they were everywhere. Even when she traveled, she kept some parts of her schedule: the strong breakfast, the physical exercises, the fresh showers, the readings, the anime. She still reached out to as much as possible at once.

            She went to rock and metal clubs or to electronic music clubs. Music filled her ears and her body, lights opened her eyes wider and took her on a different platform of seeing. Her hips and arms moved about freely, although, sadly, still conscious of the way they looked. One night she met a funny guy who was way taller than her, but they found a common tongue. They joked and smiled and danced until they got tired. She lived far away, so the logical decision was to sleep at his place. She warned him that she wouldn’t have sex with him, but they agreed that they would sleep in the same bed. So they got completely naked and snuggled under the blanket. It was a hot, humid night, but they kept holding onto each other under the blanket. He had a stubborn erection, but he didn’t push it onto her. They stroked each other’s faces and kissed as softly and slowly as they possibly could. He caressed her entire body, ending at her heels and then her toes. Once they had welcomed a new morning with the warmth they kindled under that blanket, they fell asleep, although they didn’t want to.

            They woke up after noon. They kissed and stroked each other again, he got hard again, and she got wet again. They decided that meeting each other last night had given them enough time, so now they could have sex. And they did. It was a long session of hot, wet, sweaty sex. Sweat dripped from their bodies and watered the bed, but they didn’t mind. They held onto a tight embrace, moved their thighs in a beautiful rhythm, and kissed each other’s sweat. When they got tired, they lay next to each other, and he put his fingers inside her. She touched herself, but it took her a long time to come because her hands and legs were trembling. After that, she wrapped her hand tight around his penis, moved it up and down, and sucked on it. He flexed his feet and toes as the pleasure became unbearable. His hands stroked her head but surprisingly didn’t push it down. He told her to stop sucking because he was coming and he didn’t want to come in her mouth. But she wanted to feel his penis pulsate and empty itself in her mouth, so she didn’t let go. His head drove back deep in the pillow as he came. He delivered such a tremendous amount of sperm in her mouth that it spilled on his stomach; she swallowed, half-laughing. He stroked her head and pressed her to his chest. They lay talking for several more hours. It was so warm that they lay naked, her fingers lazily strolled over his beard, and his fingers lazily strolled over her shoulders and back and what not. After a while, they took a shower and went out to find something to eat. They bought some crap from a supermarket and ate it on a bench with some cold yogurt.

            They both had plans for the day. They got on the same street-car and talked a little more in the stifling, immobile air. Because he was so much taller than she, he easily patted her head and messed up her hair. His fingers and her fingers still touched from time to time, but they knew they would leave soon. They kissed once, on the lips, no tongue, before they went on with their separate plans for the day. They shared a crazy smile too.

            She went on a walk with some friends, they listened to calm, hypnotic music, and talked. It all felt as light as a feather. In the evening, she took a shower and rubbed soap on her skin. So, she thought, tomorrow I’m getting up at 9.

July 6, 2011

            He drove with his mother by his side. The night was a clear one, and they had just gotten on the highway. There was a blue car some 20 meters in front of them, the lights at its back red. The white lights of their car were softly reflected in the blue shine of the front one.

            They had some nighttime music playing. The mom sat up with her back as regularly straight as a ruler. Her hands were quiet in her lap, the right palm on top of the left one. She was looking at a point so far in the distance that it seemed immobile. The son kept on driving. The highway was boringly straight: every curve was so gradual and lazy that it posed no challenge even to an absolutely lousy driver. The son had his left arm resting horizontally on the wheel up to his elbow, and he had leaned forward, his back hunched over like a turtle’s. Keep on driving.

            “I did get on this new diet, you know.” The mom turned her head to the son very slightly, although her gaze did not abandon the carefully chosen distant spot. “I mostly eat cheese, low fat, of course, and vegetables. I am allowed to eat fruit once a day if I am certain it has not been artificially sweetened. I can also eat meat once every two days, but it needs to pass several criteria.” She brushed her short, white hair behind her left ear with a clean movement requiring the minimal amount of energy. “I am not allowed to eat any sweets, naturally, but I feel strangely relieved by not eating anything sweet. It makes me feel lighter, my stomach sticks to my back more firmly, and I don’t feel the guilt of eating anything that would cause my body to deteriorate.” This would usually be considered impossible, but her back straightened even more. A smile snaked upon her face: this is how happy she was with herself.

            The soft, nighttime music kept playing. The son grabbed on the wheel.

            “It truly allows me to feel I am pouring life into myself,” the mom added.

            “Did you catch that?” the camerawoman asked.

            “Of course I did, who the fuck do you think you are talking to? I might have transferred to your department three weeks ago, but I’ve had a camera in my hands all my damn life,” the cameraman replied. They stand in midair several steps away from the car, which, as any professional camera user could tell, is the perfect distance for a clear shot and a smooth video.

            “She’s sixty-four, so we might have to take her in soon.” The camerawoman thought out loud. “These last few years need to be backed up by clear, solid recordings because her memories will still be quite clear and unaffected by time. I don’t want to have to create scenes, jam them in her recordings, and then convince her that they are her own memories only because you screwed up and missed moments of her last years.”

            “I’ve made you create scenes exactly once. After that, you explained the exact same thing to me in the same fucking tone. I haven’t made you make up scenes after that. What makes you think, then, that I need a reminder?”

            The camera kept on recording.

July 5, 2011

            I had a baby then. It must have just been born, but it was bigger, heavier, and more grown up-looking. During the day, I went to work, then went to my parents’ house in the evening, and when it got dark, I drove back home on the shiny, nighttime road. Then I remembered I hadn’t changed my baby’s diaper! I actually had no recollection of ever changing a baby’s diaper. I walked in the baby’s room and saw it lying on the bed flat on its back. The diaper made its butt look huge. I thought the baby would be crying and screaming, but it was simply lying there, not protesting against anything. When I realized I had to change the diaper, I got scared.

           Some time later, I realized I hadn’t fed my baby in quite a long time. How the fuck was that baby so calm?! So I took it (it’s an it because I didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl) upstairs to my room and climbed on the double bed facing the wide wall and the door. I sat up straight, my back resting against a fat pillow, and the baby lay softly on my lap. My body and its body melted and warmed each other, and my breasts were suddenly naked. I wasn’t surprised, I knew right away they were my own breasts, only rounder and full with milk. My baby’s mouth instinctively found my right nipple and took it in its tiny, warm mouth. It was almost too natural. I thought I saw the milk flow from the inside of my breast through the dark skin of my nipple into the tiny pink baby mouth.

            My memory of breast feeding ends here. The next thing I remember is doing some weekly shopping and driving around town. I thought about going back to college after summer, about the multi-colored life I had there. I didn't’ want to give it up for one baby, but there was no doubt the baby was mine. I never once wondered who the father was—it didn’t cross my mind, which seems utterly inexplicably to me now. But all that mattered was that it was my baby, hence, my responsibility. I was only twenty, I knew that too as clearly as I knew a bright-blue sky, and I thought that was way too early to raise a kid. I didn’t ask myself why I hadn’t done anything about that while I had been pregnant. All that mattered now was how to deal with the baby. I couldn’t take it with me in college, and I couldn’t bring it on my travels. My chest grew cold with the weight of responsibility and limitations. I decided that I had to put it up for adoption.

            That automatically made me a terrible mother, of course. I felt guilty for giving life to a human being which I didn’t want, when it had no fault in that. But I wouldn’t be happy if I kept my baby, so I knew I had to leave it behind.

            Suddenly, I felt there had to be another way. I walked night streets again, looking at dark sidewalks, and searched for a way that this could all be a sham. I thought it might be a dream, so I inspected the reality of the story I believed. It was all cut up in fragments, and logic often failed to explain much. I had my clues—I was dreaming. The dilemma would resolve itself soon enough.

            I returned home to my baby. This time it was sitting up on a bed with its back to a window, which now looked out to a bright day and tall, green trees. I hugged my baby, who was now almost certainly a boy. I reminded myself this was the last time I saw my baby, the dream was coming to an end, and it would all be over soon. That made me so sad that I started caressing my baby’s plump face, his shoulders, his tummy, his thin, black hair. Now that I knew I had no choice but to leave him, I didn’t want to, it hurt, he was my baby. He raised his eyebrows much too wisely that he could have really and asked:

            “Why do you make it so hard on yourself? You always have to want what you can’t have.”

            I kept on caressing his hair, his forehead, his baby nose. I started crying in front of my baby, in front of those tall trees and that bright day. I woke up crying and twirling in my bed, still thinking of my baby and the way he sucked on my nipple with his eyes closed.

            As I was writing on my laptop in a narrow, blue seat on a plane, a loud two-year-old passed by me. She stopped by me, pointed to something on my screen with her chubby finger, and said some foreign words. My heart skipped a beat—something is growing inside me. 

July 2, 2011

            People look at each other even if they don’t want to. In the subway, they look at each others’ arms holding on to bars and handles. When climbing stairs, they look at the backs of other people’s heads, some climbing faster and some slower than their own heads. They compare clothes with each other. Most people’s clothes are things one would never wear, she thinks, some people’s bodies are weird or too fat or too skinny, some people’s hairstyles are funny and distant. And then there are some people she likes, even envies for the way they appear. She likes their shirts or their noses, but she can’t use them to make herself pretty because she doesn’t have them. She has to deal with the fact that she’s a different person. Pants that look good on her ass would look awful on someone else’s ass, but sometimes that’s not enough.

            People look at each other when they are walking in the streets. When it’s raining, some carry black and yellow and pink umbrellas, some have their hoods up, so they look like tall, eager dementors, and some have nothing to brace themselves with and move more quickly than anyone else. People don’t want to look at each other at that moment, but they still do. Their retinas do register little bits of light coming in, and the mind does decipher and systemize all those shapes, colors, and whatever, so people do see other people. Her mind stores an unknown man’s wrinkles and grumbly eyebrows. She sees the man drop his keys on the sidewalk ten centimeters from a pigeon, the pigeon shoots up in the air, frightened, and the man bends over on one leg to pick up his keys. She wishes she could have taken a photo of this duet across species.

            Animals observe people too. Octopi, penguins, polar bears, ostriches, they all observe themselves as well as people. I don’t know what they see, but they too can’t help seeing us. Even if they close their eyes, light still penetrates their eyelids just like it penetrates ours. I guess, though, they are much better at accepting that they can’t stop looking at us. 

July 1, 2011

            I would like to write my city. First my city, then this city, then this street, and then this table with the bowl of yogurt sitting on it. For now, I sit on the couch in front of the table in question, and I start to write, hoping I won’t fall asleep. Here I go.

            My city is called Sofia. It is the capital of Bulgaria. It is situated in the west part of the country, and it is a weird, beautiful, and controversial city at the same time.

            A blue icon on the taskbar lights up to tell me I have just received a new email, and a little, white window slides in the lower, right side of the screen showing me a sentence from the email. In a few seconds, it slides out of the screen, leaving a dark afterimage in my eyes. I click on the email client and open the email to find that it’s the weekly newsletter from a blog I am supposed to be following. I yawn. I don’t cover my mouth with my hand because I’m alone, and with myself I try to have no secrets. I read the beginning of the newsletter but soon drop it: it compares buprenorphine to methadone and their effects in treating addiction. I am not concentrated enough to read all the charts, so I mark this article as a “read later” one. I move to another one about understanding and treating depression, but it is too intuitively obvious to keep me interested.

            I yawn and look at the clock in the bottom right corner. I still have 47 minutes to write. That’s because I’ve made a rule of writing for one hour every day. 13 minutes have passed from today’s hour, and there are 47 minutes left. I will work hard for what is left of them in order to produce a truly quality piece about my city and everything that swelled up from it to come to fill my life. But in this specific moment, I feel just slightly hungry, which, I know, will keep me from concentrating on my work. I sit up on the couch and lengthen my back. As all my dance teachers, it seems, used to say, long backs, long backs. As a response to that command we would all stretch our shoulders and send our chests far out until our spines didn’t have their natural curves anymore, lumbar and what not, but took on a single artificial, sexy curve. Thank God I took lessons from this woman who kept on telling me to drop the artificial curve till the point that she was annoying. That didn’t mean to slouch—I still kept my shoulders open and stretched, but my back was relaxed and calm. Sitting on the couch with my back nice and relaxed, I reach for the yogurt on the table. It is plain yogurt. I don’t have a spoon, so I get up and bring a spoon. I sit back down and eat spoonful of the yogurt when I realize I want jam with it. I am annoyed about having to get up again, but I leave the spoon on the table with a sigh and walk to the fridge (which is less than two meters away from the couch). My search for jam within the fridge yields two solutions: a half-full jar of strawberry jam and an almost finished jar of cherry jam. Had my only consideration been the taste, I would have chosen the cherry jam, it is simply what my taste would dictate, no rational justifications about it. But now I also have the amount of jam available to consider. The question is whether I want to eat a lot of jam or a little bit of jam. Thinking about being fit all the time, my intuitive answer points to the cherry jam. But after exploring the depths of my feelings at the time, I conclude that I want to eat more jam. To the devils with the cherry jam, I will eat it on another occasion when my ‘stay fit’ side prevails. But for now let’s enjoy all the strawberry jam trapped in that jar with a its narrow opening on the top. I yawned, then bent over the table and ate the plain yogurt and all the strawberry jam. 

June 27, 2011

            “I received the academy award for landing Boeing 384 in Hamburg on March 5, 1994. It was a heavily rainy day, but the conditions were expected to allow a safe flight.” He scratched the back of his neck absentmindedly. “According to schedule, the flight should have lasted two hours and fifteen minutes.” His neck was almost the width of his head, which gave him an adorable double, on occasions triple, chin. “At one hour and fifty-two minutes, the apparatus informed me that there was a sudden increase in air pressure approximately ten kilometers in front of us. Such signs often correspond to areas of clouds pushed close to each other, which would only cause discomfort for the passengers, which is why I tried to avoid this area of increased pressure by passing it on the right.” His fifty-something-year-old head was balding in a perfectly regular pattern. “It, however, was not formed by several clouds pressed together, although there is no way I could have known at that moment.” He delivered a scratch to his lost-in-thought neck.

“The atmospheric object in front of Boeing 384 at that moment was not a cluster of air masses of different density but was simply a tornado. When I searched for information why the tornado with such force had appeared without anyone managing to offer me a satisfactory explanation.” His eyes acquired a coldness that added a dramatic emphasis to his indignation with someone’s incompetence. “The Boeing 384 I was operating entered the tornado at a speed of 692 kilometers per hour. I did not have a clear, rationale-based solution to the situation, but I followed the instinct to dart right ahead and end this as quickly as possible. Therefore, I increased the Boeing 384’s speed till it reached the maximum and the screen issued a warning.” The scratch upon his neck this time was anxious. “An unexpected result followed. We were caught up in the eye of the tornado—the area in the center where no movement of atmospheric masses occurs.” His sparse eyebrows rose impossibly high on his forehead, and he looked funny. “The entire speed of the aircraft seemed to have been taken away by some outer power, but I still consider the impression of the aircraft’s immobility an illusion.” The certainty on the man’s face was removed and a monstrous confusion drowned out his facial features.

“A short distance from the tip of the aircraft, a lady stood and greeted me in a robe that continued well beyond her feet. Her dark hair and white cloth were motionless, as though violent winds were not whirring anywhere close to her. The dark skin stretched all over her body glistened with warmth and thunder. Her face changed as her lips parted to issue a command: Go. The next thing I knew was that the aircraft was landing on the Hamburg airport!” He laughed and applauded in disbelief.

June 25, 2011

            Today he was in a hurry. John called him about a client who asked for the ice cream cones to be delivered five days early. If they did that, he would pay add 30% more than the original price. Mark refused to move a finger to make those 450,000 ice cream cones come to life earlier before he saw the edited contract. Once he looked it over on his phone, he called several people, shouted a little bit at each one, and made them feel some inexplicable guilt because they hadn’t telepathically realized that the deal had been changed five minutes ago. Now they would work, even if it meant making the cones with their own fingers, but they knew that would result in squished ice cream cones—maybe art pieces someday but worth even less than regular, machine-made ice cream cones today.

            Mark would spend thirty more minutes in traffic before his day formally began. To help it get there, he drove through the drive-through (?) of Costa Coffee for a large cappuccino. Actually, he was about to ask to have it topped with cinnamon, but he forgot his preferences when he saw the face of the drive through worker. He did regain his memories and thoughts a little while later and soberly realized that the worker was a friend from his high school years.  Mark tried to strike up a friendly conversation, but the guy didn’t notice and kept on looking at his hands as they tidied and cleaned. 

June 23, 2011

Do It Yourself

            She woke up thirty minutes before the alarm went off. She contemplated getting up and going to work early, but in the end dismissed the opportunity. Instead, she lay on her belly and hugged the pillow. One hand sneaked underneath her body and inspected one breast, then the other. She was quite fond of her breasts. She hugged the pillow again and pretended to kiss it, acting upon the fantasy that another wet, soft mouth was massaging her tongue and lips with its tongue and lips. Her thighs moved forward into the mattress, and then back, then forward, and then back, her whole body rocked in harmony with her thighs, her breasts rubbed against the pillow, and her nipples became hard and happy from all the rubbing. She imagined a dick sliding in and out of her pussy, asking her pussy to widen when it was so tight and constricted around the hard dick head. As a result blood flowed in an emergency towards the pussy to make it pulsating and red instead of the obedient pink.

            She shifted positions and lay on her back. Her legs spread themselves and gave her access to everything that was down there. Conveniently, she was wet already. At first she touched her clitoris only. Then she put a finger in her anus, and a short while later two more fingers entered her pussy. Orgasms followed. The first one was a relief. The second one was pretty damn good. Her pussy was very sensitive now, the inside responding to every little scratch her fingers gave her. The images of one, two, or three guys fucking a girl floated around her mind, their dicks getting as deep as they could in her holes, their sperm sticking to her skin or lazily flowing out of her anus. Everything was crazy, shaking, ready to burst, craving a huge explosion followed by a black out. But the third orgasm was weird. It was good but not exactly right. She rarely went over three orgasms, but this time she wanted more. Also, it would be silly to let this overwhelming wetness go to waste. Because everything was wet now—her pussy, but also her clitoris, her anus, her hands, even the sides of her legs. She went on rubbing. The images were a little fleeting now. All of her pussy was still very responsive but desensitized. She felt herself about to come a few times but couldn’t. In the end she did, but it almost didn’t feel like an orgasm. Her chest sank back inside her. But she wouldn’t let it end with this disappointment, so she kept on laboring. Her left hand, with two fingers in her pussy and one in her anus, hurt now, so she had to take breaks. She had so many images in her mind that turned her on, but her whole body was simply exhausted. Wetness covered her pussy and its surrounding, and sweat was coming out in little drops everywhere else. She was a little scared of what she had done to herself, but she wanted that final orgasm. In that sea of wetness, her hands labored, searched, and found those most sensitive spots that screamed with pleasure and anxiety once touched. They all required a release. Her body about to give out, she touched and touched and imagined guys fucking a girl in all possible ways until they all reached a dirty, perverted, heavenly blindness. She reached it too together with all of them. Now utter exhaustion entered her. When she opened her eyes to realize she could see again, she saw her body twisted, wet, sweaty, her hands voraciously trying to dig out something at its very core.

            She took a shower, and her mouth gaped in a kind of smile. In the end, she was fifteen minutes late for work.

June 22, 2011

            He stared at the last page. He stared at the last sentence specifically. He was about to close the book, but he decided that this last sentence deserved a little more attention, so he stared at it a little more. When it seemed like he had given it enough attention, he closed the book with a sigh.

            Now he stared at the back cover. He could stare at the front one too, but he had done that way too often—every time he opened the book to read a little bit, and it was a long book. But he had never looked at the back cover with a sense of finality. Now he had finished the book and looking at its back cover meant putting all the impressions it had left in one, creating a gut feeling that would correspond to the book. So every time someone said, oh, do you remember that book, that specifically molded gut feeling would rise up to his throat, he would swallow, and it would hurt.

            He knew he would miss the book even while he was still reading it. That’s something he never liked about himself, the ease with which he got attached to people even if they were characters of someone’s imagination bathed in the perfect sunlight to make them suitable for sale. He ran a hand through his hair, which had noticeably grown sparse over the years with a tiny bald spot like a sun being born into the universe. He knew he was ugly just like the main guy in the book had been. The guy in the book had managed to be with his dream girl, but it only lasted for half a year, so who cares—he should have never been with her at all.

            He put some butter on a loaf of bread and stuck it in the microwave. He stared at it go round through the tiny, purposefully blurred window and imagined the last sentence of the book, the one he had stared at right before he had slammed the back cover shut. The microwave let out three shy beeps to tell him it was done. He set it for one more minute—more time for him to watch his loaf of bread go around (the butter had melted already). When that minute was over, he set the microwave to one more minute, and he did that several times. He was intrigued by the smell of burned bread that filled his nostrils and his entire kitchen. After a little bit, he concluded he didn’t want to set his microwave on fire. This time when he heard the shy beeps, he opened the little door with the tiny window, took the loaf with his thumb and index finger and threw it in the trash. It burned the soft skin on his desperate fingers.

            After walking back to the couch, he found the book still looking at him with its back cover. Tears came to his eyes because the book, fallen on its belly, knew it was read, finished, done for. He wasn’t sad for the book—it was a wise book, sufficient in itself, not needing anyone else. He was sad for all those people who didn’t know they were read, finished, and done for, who still thought they had a chance to be themselves and yet be with someone else. When he tried to apply that to himself, tears came to his eyes.

            His sadness was not one of loneliness but one of doubt. He asked, Book, how can you be so comfortable with yourself? How do you not ask yourself if you are right or wrong, book? The book kept looking at him, now with one eyebrow raised, a suspicious look, on its back cover. He dropped the subject. I think I should make myself another toast, he slowly thought out loud, then got up, pressing his hands against his knees for support. His back was hunched over, still asking itself whether it needed that toast or not, and his knees screeched. The book mocked him from the couch: are you sure?

June 15, 2011

            “I’d like to talk to you about something,” he said.

            “Go ahead, because I want to ask you something too,” he said.

            “Do you have any ideas about our next exhibition?” he asked.

            “Why do you care enough to come up and ask me about my ideas about our next exhibition?” he asked.

            “Well, because I have a suggestion, maybe only a suggestion about a direction we could go in or a suggestion about a specific artist, depending on what you are looking for to fit in the puzzle of your thoughts this time,” he said and held his breath.

            “I guess I could hear a suggestion about whatever it turns out to be,” he said and held his breath.

            “You do remember the painting that had orchids in its top half appearing as though they were in the rear of the visual field and the detailed, almost photographic, details of the slope that were positioned in the front? The artist, Bella Kuadramov, is quite talented and only two days ago released a new collection of works,” he repeatedly slid one nail under the other to remove any dirt that might have positioned itself in such a hiding place.

            “I’m not sure I’ve heard of her. I mean, I might have, I am not completely denying it because there’s no way to know if I didn’t meet her at one of Darryl’s parties, and if I say I don’t know her, people who’ve seen us talk will start calling me a liar, which is partially true but not entirely because I simply wouldn’t remember meeting her. But that never proves I don’t know her, so I can’t be sure, is what I was trying to say,” he repeatedly slid one nail under the other to remove any dirt that might have positioned itself in such a hiding place.

            “So would you please consider offering a hearing?” he asked, his eyebrows high up on his forehead.

            “Myself? Why would I spend time on her myself?” he asked, his eyebrows high up on his forehead.

            “As you wish, of course, I simply thought that that was the custom, as you have offered hearings to all the artists I’ve seen featured in our exhibitions. But it is entirely your choice how you believe this will go most efficiently,” he said, his voice growing quieter.

            “I’ve been much busier than usual recently, I expected you to notice! Well, that doesn’t matter, Matt can hear her through and decide what to do. I don’t have to do it, and it makes no difference whether I know her or not,” he said, his voice growing quieter.

            “Thank you, sir! I will set up the hearing right away!” He was beaming.

            “Of course. I wish the girl luck,” he was beaming. “Although it is unlikely that I know her.”

            And I talked to Matt already, so Bella’s got her stuff in the exhibition this time. This went so well, he smirked with his moustache.

            I didn’t even have to say I know her to get her stuff in the exhibition, he smirked with his moustache.

June 12, 2011

            We all change, but I hope we’re all in it together.

            I’m driving to my high school for our ten-year reunion. We are the Class of 2010, and I haven’t seen most of my ex-classmates for almost the full ten years. I didn’t like my class very much—there were some cool people, and that was it. It was supposed to be a great high school offering amazing possibilities to stretch your mind and make you gape in amazement. It did that occasionally. Most of the time it gave us so much work that we couldn’t lift our head up and look around without feeling like we are wasting precious seconds that could instead be used to do intriguing chemistry homework or commit crucial history dates to memory. We, or at least I, studied from Sunday morning till Thursday night, couldn’t wait for classes to end on Friday at 3 pm, so we could get drunk. And that lasted until Saturday night slowly grows lighter and turns out to be Sunday morning while we were still drinking, singing, dancing. Then we went to bed unwillingly and woke up three hours later to go home and start memorizing shit again.

            I had dinner alone as soon as I got home, but I also sat with my family as they were having dinner. I counted the minutes I spent with them. As soon as they went over thirty, the guilt in my stomach made me mumble something about how much work I had, and I walked up the stairs to my room with a sinking heart. Cleaning the kitchen took at least forty-five minutes, and I hated it because I could have written one more page for my paper had I not cleaned the kitchen. The guilt, or stress, or whatever, gnawed at my stomach, and nothing was good enough.

            Fuck that, I think while turning left at a small traffic light. Ahead of me I have a ten minute drive on the road surrounding the city, so I can enjoy the trees on both sides of it and the holes in the road, although I need to admit they are in a better condition than usual. It’s 6 pm, and the roadside ladies are swaying their hips, looking at drivers, hoping to make some of them happy after they have sat on their asses in the office all day long. I always look at the roadside ladies. I drive up and down this road ever since we moved in our house, but I still stare at the ladies’ colorful but austere clothes as I’m driving to go out or come back home. I wonder what it’s like to get fucked so many times per day, to give so many blowjobs, and to see so many dicks. I know condoms are obligatory, but giving a blowjob to a dick wearing a hat is disgusting. Don’t their mouths go dry? Don’t their pussies hurt? Do they shave completely? Do guys fuck them like pieces of meat on the backseats of their cars? Do angry, bored men treat them badly, or do they not care at all? I wonder what they are thinking while they are looking for the next client. I know some hookers are elite, but these are not. Still, they look like they know what they are doing.

            In a little while, the trees on both sides of the road grow fewer, and a construction site greets me on each side of the road. I press a button under the radio in my car to stop the air conditioner from taking any air from outside: the air my car is splitting in two is so dusty. I stop at a traffic light, and I pull up slowly because there’s a heavy-looking truck in front of me as dusty as the air. It’s marked with a foreign register number (?), but my eyes aren’t strong enough to let me read the small print of which country it is. Green light switches to yellow while I’m driving slowly, but it’s not my fault I didn’t stop: if I had tried to be a perfectly conscientious citizen, I should have stopped in the middle of the crossroad, which is also illegal. The car behind me, though, decided to play cool and cross too, although he could have stopped perfectly well. To his bad fortune, there is a policeman waiting for guys like that right after the crossroad. He waves to the car behind me to pull over. Poor driver, they are also trying to fight corruption, so I would not try to give him ten bucks to fight it off. He would have to listen to a criticizing lecture pour out of the policeman’s mouth and then pay his fine. Too bad, I hope you’re not in a hurry, poor guy.

            In ten minutes, I park my car in front of my old school gate. I leave the car under a tree that’s blooming, and I know from experience that it drops some thick, sweet liquid that forms sticky drops on the windows. It’s like permanent rain on my windows, so I don’t move the car.

            It’s 4.47 pm, and Anna said she’d be here by 4.45. She pointed out that she was punctual now. That’s impressive, I thought, remembering the times when the other girls and I told her we were meeting at 6 when the meeting was actually at 6.30. I sit on the front hood of my car and waited for Anna—she hasn’t changed that much, it seems. 

June 8, 2011

I am driving behind this jeep, and I watch the guy driving it stick one hand out of the window to tap his cigarette. Ash falls from it, and my car, moving forward, reaches up to meet it. We, all the drivers in the vicinity and I, stop at a red light just a little further. It’s not an intersection, there’s simply a crosswalk from a school to some apartment buildings whose paint is peeling off. They put a light here several years ago kind of out of nowhere: who spends money on traffic lights these days? The roads are so bumpy that drivers need to keep their eyes on the road at all times, which means that if you spend precious milliseconds looking at a traffic light, you risk your car going into some bump or hole and breaking down right there, all this because you decided to be a good driver and look at the light.

This is why the guy in the jeep tapped his cigarette without looking at it. The sun was just rising, so it shone abundantly on the bald back of his head. Actually, his whole head was shaved, so it’s not fair to call the back of his head bald, but anyway this is where the sun shone. The white-pink skin pulled over his skull reflected the light, so it shone back at me. The guy lit another cigarette. In this traffic, I often found myself wishing I smoked, but that never sufficed as a motivation.