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.