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.
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