airstream obstructed

The evening sky, when you can see a shimmer of pink on muted blue, is really the only thing that grounds you anymore. You don’t have an explanation as to why it should move you that tremendously more often than not, but staring upwards feels like learning what it’s like to have that rock that weighs down on your existence, lifted for the briefest of moments. Even more so, if your vision is clouded by treacherous moisture. The evening sky allows for a cinematographic framing of things. It makes you feel poetic, like you don’t have to worry where all this is headed; and the fact that you recognise the ease with which you breathe in to be a fleeting side effect of the benevolent appearance of the stratosphere, makes your indulgence in it twice as bitter. Yesterday, you went shopping and all was swell until you had to squish yourself past two other customers of the shop, who wouldn’t move - one was engrossed in reading the label of a prepackaged loaf of bread, and the other was just an asshole - and you felt a surge of disgust for all solid matter, a disdain for existence itself. The chase for food. The obligations. Your acquaintances’ questions about your life, although you don’t feel like answering but you do anyway. It would be silly to attribute this negativity to inconveniences within your grocery shopping experience - no, this is your essence, lying dormant beneath an innocent, unassuming face, until a scratch on the surface unleashes it for you to deal with yet again. As you think about all these things, the sun is quietly setting which means that the pink disappears from the blue, everything sinks into dim twilight and there’s nothing to hold on to anymore. The feelings of heaviness, the desperate longing for something more, are gone. Not pacified, not replaced, just dulled down until the next accidentally pretty sunset. You don’t feel sad, or on edge, or serene - just empty. It’s time to go to bed. You’re bracing yourself for the next day’s little eternity. You feel like you’ve got absolutely nothing to say.

untitled #25

She had no idea why she'd let him click on her YouTube watch history. "Jesus, why the hell are you even watching this shit," he said, scrolling past pastel-coloured, luminous video thumbnails with smiling girls. "How to organise your mornings. How to be more productive. What a waste of fucking time, man." They were sitting on her bed, her battlefield during the last few weeks, or was it months? No, probably years. She sighed theatrically, knowing full well he was right. She didn't see the point, either. If it helped someone to get their life together by meticulously protocolling the times they took out the trash, then by all means, they should steer the course. It could never, ever become her cup of tea, though - she could barely bring herself to write something on a life-saving post-it note every once in a while. "Yeah, I know. All those minutes I won't ever get back, nothing of this ever works for normal people, etc. I know. I suppose it's just some meditative way of judging people while trying to actually figure out your shit, at the same time. Something along those lines. Or just a waste of time. I don't know." He glanced at her with a half-smile and a furrowed brow, and proceeded to check out the other tabs in her opened browser: several videos opened and paused on YouTube - a video essay, two songs, a photoshop tutorial and a Sailor Moon episode - a fanfiction site, WhatsApp. Nothing spectacular.

"So that's it then?" he asked her, leaning back against the wall and letting his gaze wander across the accumulation of pens, post-its, paperclips, stacks of essays on formerly pristine white paper, crumpled notes and chocolate bar wrappers. Her gaze followed, regarding the mess through a haze of continuous sleep deprivation and dust particles dancing in the air. "Yeah," she said, "that's it." Both sat in silence for a while, pondering the meaning of that short sentence. Of course, nothing was "it". The ship was still in the middle of the ocean, and would continue to be for potentially many years to come. "I was waiting for euphoria to kick in," she said after a while, sounding far less bitter than she felt, "it didn't." In retrospect, she didn't understand how she could be so naive, thinking that overcoming one obstacle could impact the hollow feeling inside. "I'm in limbo." His gaze was still fixed on a point on the opposite wall. "How so?" She sighed, shuffling a little bit on the blanket - her legs had grown numb under her weight - and taking her time to compose a reply. "I feel like I'm standing beside myself? Like, whatever I do, it's not me who does it, but some projection that does her best to keep up the appearance. And I'm like, sorry for her but I also want her to stop. And I'm reaching out to link back to it, you know? Because I need to go on, and I need that to be me again. But I'm grasping at nothing. I don't look forward to absolutely anything. You know?" Her voice wavered a little. He was regarding the blanket now. "Do go on." She punched him weakly. "I don't even know why I'm talking to you." He chuckled at that. "Because I asked you, and you can’t wait to tell someone. And also, I was trying to figure out if it's wine I should fetch from the kitchen, or something significantly stronger. By the sound of it, I'll have to make a shop run for some Captain Morgan." She couldn't help grinning. "Yeah, probably."

Most people, she mused, would have been bewildered by their exchange. There was no sympathy, no words of comfort or encouragement. He just listened, and she just talked, and she was sure it didn’t affect him. He never talked about himself - in fact, they barely ever talked, he'd just dropped by to collect two books she had borrowed for her work - but she suspected that he felt the same, or at least out of place, as well, and there was a little space for quiet feelings of camaraderie in their alienation, and their shared, pronounced disdain for niceties, false sympathy, and false hopes. However, he was holding up way better than she was, which is why he the one asking, and she was the one explaining. She doubted that he could stop being enigmatic even before himself, and she didn’t know if there was someone he talked to when all these feelings threatened to spill out in the least convenient way possible. Actually, she didn’t know absolutely anything about him, except his name and that they shared some friends and were getting the same degree. Sometimes she wondered whether she didn't just make him up in her mind.

"It's just so exhausting to feel so detached from everything,” she said. “You know, the other day I actually tried listening to one of those premade Spotify playlists, like those for different moods or whatever, or for coffee shops. The stuff that most people just listen to, apparently." He raised his eyebrows in amusement. "And, did you enjoy it?" She met his eyes for a few seconds, and both snorted out in laughter. "It was a fucking nightmare. There were some songs on one of them, the sunny day one, I think, you could murder me with. Like, the absolute worst type of standard techno beat, and some woman squeaking her lines...Or even worse, these awful singer-songwriter dudes who just whisper their stupid lyrics to the exact same guitar chords all over, to the point where you wanna smack them across the head and tell them to just keep it together, you know?” He chuckled. “I sat through most of it. I thought it might shift my perspective, or something. I was just so tired from feeling so fucking disconnected all the time, you know." His silence was, again a welcome one. He knew the playlist hadn't helped, as did she, and both knew the remedy to whatever was haunting them was still far out of reach, if it existed at all. Out of sudden, he reached out for something tangled in the blanket, and when he pulled it out, she recognised her paperback copy of a Kafka compendium. "Giving old Franz a try?" he asked, flipping the pages. She smiled at the book. "It's really strange, I don't even see very much in a lot of what he writes, like, it doesn't always speak to me, or stir something in me the way some other authors do, but I have a really, really intense feeling that if we had known each other, we'd be the best of friends. I don't know, it's probably weird, and probably hella transgressive. I mean, poor Franz. He doesn't even get a say in this, and I declare him my pal." She was tearing up, she realised, so she stopped talking. He paused on some pages, reading a couple of stray paragraphs. Then he turned to her. "How long since you bleached your hair?"

The question came out of nowhere, but after a tiny pause, she just pointed to her roots that were doing their best to grow out in their usual dark colour as fast as possible. "As you can see, it's been a while." "Going from black to almost white, and no selfies on Instagram? Impressive," he commented, studying her hair. It dawned on her that he hadn't seen her with the new colour before, and she was wondering why he was only bringing it up now. She refrained from asking. "I'm over selfies at the moment. Remember? It's someone else, not me. I just can't. I really wish I could.” She did wish it. She wasn’t in the camp of people who judged others for posting pictures of themselves on social media, because there was something liberating in being at ease with your own shell. “It's so stupid. I just wish I could enjoy something, express something, just being me. God, that sounds awful. But I can't. Like I can't move, metaphorically. I don't know." She broke off. There were no words in her brain to say what she had wanted to. He watched her from the side, and she felt herself shrinking into the pillow her back was leaning again. Then he pulled out his phone, and her eyes widened. "No, oh my god, stop, I don't want people taking pictures, I didn’t mean that..." She buried her face in her hands, shutting her eyes, and ducked her head like a tortoise. There was no sound of a picture being taken, but she reckoned it was just because everyone had their phones on silent all the time. She stayed in her frankly quite embarrassing position through the noises of him sliding off the bed, tucking his two books into his backpack and taking a few steps towards the door. The she took a peek through her fingers. "Are you done?" "Yeah," he replied. He sounded amused, but she wasn’t sure. He probably was. She’d never know. "See ya." Then he left.

She stretched out on the bed after the click of the lock on her flat’s door, and exhaled, staring at the ceiling. Her phone vibrated. He had tagged her in an Instagram story. Slowly, she unlocked her phone and opened the app. There it was, the picture he’d taken - unfocused, just the wall above her head, and about a third of her actual head, including her outgrowing roots and the tips of the fingers she was pressing to her face. The space above her head said: “franz wasnt home but i found his pal paul scavenging his fridge for pizza leftovers”. She couldn’t stop laughing until breathing became difficult and tears rolled down her cheeks. This was absurd, but it brought relief and she wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone why to save her life. She reacted with a laughing face. Soon, the little grey “Seen” popped up beneath it, but no typing followed. She hadn’t expected it anyway, though, and proceeded to google “franz kafka friend paul”.

float by

As the sky outside his window darkened with clouds in the late afternoon somewhen in November, Ezra sat at his desk with his eyes closed, holding his face straight into the lightbulb of the lamp sitting on the smooth, black surface. The tip of his nose almost touched the glass, no heat radiating from the brand new LED lamp. He had started this practise as a child, when he longed for spring during the winter months, pretending that the blinding, white light was rays of sunshine meeting his eyes through closed eyelids. He would pretend to hear ocean waves, bird chatter, or the sound of a swiftly thawing brook, but as he got older, he found himself more and more yearning for complete silence and blankness of the mind accompanying this somewhat helplessly orchestrated blankness of sight.

He tried his best not to think, but his head felt like bursting. Life, whether lived successfully or not, always retained an air of wading through deteriorating debris. There simply were no moments of immobility, everything was adrift at the mercy of circumstance and the consequences of mediocre to bad decisions. Things were inevitably getting lost in the stream as you struggled forward. As far as consequences were concerned, he couldn't help feeling like both him and all the people he cared about had made mostly quite frankly terrible choices. Some had profoundly overestimated their powers, others had retreated into a superficial farce of normalcy that ate away at the ground they stood on, and yet others were gambling away past achievements for pipe dreams that they had elevated to life goal material for reasons beyond Ezra's understanding. He was scared that sooner or later, they would slip from his grasp, maybe even out of his sight. All of that, of course, on a scale that allowed to pretend that everything was ok, sort of. And while that happened, what exactly was he doing, a passenger on this apocalyptic merry-go-round? He honestly had no idea. Everything in life seemed ok, if you didn't pay attention, but boy - you didn't wanna see what you saw when you did. And, of course, there was nothing you could do about it on a scale where it would seriously matter.

He could only allow himself to react to everything every once in a while, to get it off his shoulders. So that's what he did, holding his face into the lamp and processing all these human defeats that sometimes concerned him, sometimes didn't, all the chaos and the unnecessary sacrifices. A drop of salty water made its way across the curve of his cheek - one tear for what could've been, if it weren't for. Another followed - for what could never have been, because things were what they were. One for all the losses that he'd already had to swallow. One for the losses he had to brace himself for. One for the hits he'd had to take, and one for those he'd handed out. He opened his eyes briefly and gazed at his reflection in the chrome-plated shade of the lamp, noticing a droplet caught up in his eyelashes. Sometimes, he mused, you probably even fail at crying. He actually hadn't intended to cry. He'd just had to mourn everyone and everything for a little while, because it was November again.

untitled #24

You're leaning against the crash barrier in a street you've known and romanticised since you were six years old. The air is cool but not cold with a light breeze, the scent of a chimney having been lit a couple of houses away filling it and you're acutely aware of the fact that summer is over. This is the first time in months you're wearing a jumper during the day. You look down at your battered trainers and the whole situation - the street, the cold metal of the barrier, your shoes, the fact that it's autumn once again - makes you feel like it's 2002 and none of the things that scarred you have happened yet. Every now and then you remember a theory of temporality that you think you've heard of, that says everything in time happens at the same time, in different dimensions, and instead of time progressing, the dimensions progress. Something like that.

You remember it fondly whenever you miss being a child, thinking that somewhere, you're still running home from school with your Batman backpack. Right now, at the crash barrier, you feel like a glitch put you back into the universe at the beginning of the new millenium, and you dare not move, scared the feeling will go away. Thought by thought, everything seeps out of your head. You don't think, you don't hurt. You're completely still, drinking in the view of your shoes and your knitted jumper and the cobblestones at your feet, and the street winding down between pretty houses, as long as the universe still lets you use your seven year old self's eyes. The chimney scent smells so divine in the newborn September air. Then your phone vibrates and the magic is gone.

untitled #23

She was rummaging through her drawers, not looking for anything in particular, just looking. Jesus, how much stuff had accumulated over the years. Memorabilia from school years: her journals that were supposed to contain homework and school-related notes but ended up full of stickers and scribbles and doodles and the occasional funny teacher quote; the really good tests, or the weird tests that she had wanted to keep to remember the heated discussions afterwards ("Did you know what the hell was up with that poem? What did you write? We never did that kind of stuff in class before, why would she give us this weird shit for a test??"); favourite pens and pencils that reminded her of a time when she loved glittery pink Hello Kitty items; photos she had taken with her old film camera of a class trip to a disused coal mine.

She sighed. Here, in this room, was most of the evidence of one particular human having been around on this planet for quite a while now. Her eyes were on the book shelf. Wasn't it curious that you could trace a persons entire life back to their deepest childhood if they kept a tidy book shelf? There were all the books with huge letters and short stories and poems and lots of pictures that her five, six, seven year old self had learned to read with, the childrens books her eight, nine, ten year old self had devoured countless times, back when her schedule had allowed for finishing a book and starting it over again, and again if it was really good. There was "Robinson Crusoe" that she had read a million times at thirteen years, fascinated and disturbed by the idea of building a life all alone on an island scavenging from ship wrecks.

There were Goethe, Schiller, Fontane, and the most terrible book by Musil, "The confusions of young Törless", that she had to read for class. There was "Homo Faber" by Max Frisch, a novel she had never had to read but had found it in her sisters school book shelf when she was way too young for it but bored, so she had read it nevertheless, remaining moderately appalled that writing something like that was, apparently, ok in western civilisation. There were books that bore the "remaindered" stamp, great books for just a few bucks because of a random scratch or stain on the cover. Finally, her university books, mostly novels, some that she had read thoroughly for a term paper or exam, some that she had skimmed through only to know what was up for a class. Several books that she had bought years ago but never even opened because there hadn't been time for them. Soon she would have the time, she thought.

Her hands had changed. Slightly bonier, more visible veins, no more bitten fingernails. She would never pick up her beloved "The Thief Lord" with soft, small, rosy hands ever again. Her gaze wandered on and paused in the mirror. She knew that for most people, she still passed for a teenager, with her round face and big eyes, but she knew better. Her skin had become patchy, with prominent dark circles around the eyes, and slight creases on her forehead from raising her eyebrows too much. She stared herself in the eyes, trying to remember if that was how they looked when she was eight years old. "Jesus," she said to herself after a while, "you're gonna stare at the face of a tired, bitter adult in the mirror for the rest of your life."

roofing

"I hate talking about myself, and I hate when people ask. Gives away too much. I don't know."
"Really? I thought everyone loves people to be attentive, to care about getting to know you and stuff."
"Not me. I'm happy to be a supporting actor in the public eye. I want to be the person at the party everybody only knows the first name of, nothing else."
"Edgy."

The view from the rooftop was breathtaking. There was something magical about electric light shining warmly from countless windows against the backdrop of the cool colours of shadows on the concrete towers. They had brought two beverage crates from the party to sit on, she had sunk into someone's giant borrowed hoodie and he'd draped his own sweater over his shoulders. The breeze was not unwelcome, though, after sharing the air in their friend's appartment several stories lower with at least 40 other people. An array of cigarette butts around them indicated they weren't the only ones taking advantage of the buildings sloppy caretaker who had a tendency to forget to lock the door after checking on the gas units on the roof.

"Where'd you wanna go from here?"
"Like, here, exactly?"
"Silly. Just, life-wise. What's your plan?"
"Good question. I don't really have one."
"None at all?"
"I don't know."
"Well I wanna pitch some of my animation stuff to a couple studios. I live for it, I swear. I've got no backup plan, in fact."
"Aren't you scared?"
"Sort of. I try not to think about it, though. What about you, don't you have that one thing you wanna do?"
"Sort of. But I'm not much of a self-marketer. I don't really believe in success, anymore. So far, I feel like I'm doomed to be average in anything. Jeez, that sounds miserable. I don't want to sound miserable. I'm just through with over-excitement and expectations that life won't meet."
"You don't seem like average to me."
"That's what everyone says. Facts speak for themselves though."
"What facts, may I ask?"
"I don't know. I can't seem to find an audience for what I do. And no employer, it seems."
"You're only just starting out."
"Come on. I'm not. There's people half my age who do better. I always end up giving these comparisons, which I shouldn't, I know, but it's true. There's not always happy ends to stories. Sometimes people just live a bland life searching for what they can't have, and just quietly fade away sans pomp and drama. I'm starting to think that I'm one of those."
"I don't want you to think that. Even if that is the case, it's nicer to live your life hoping for something."
"I know."

They sat in silence, only faint beats from the party and the noise of cars occasionally driving past in the street down below creating ambient noise for their tiny private function. The wind grew stronger, clouds moved faster. Timelessness had cradled both of them in her hands, slowly wiping thoughts of the future off their minds. The feeling would be fleeting, though. Soon Greg and Vanessa and Chavi would come up there with cigarettes and drinks, and the sun would set, and darkness would make the window look even more homely, and a feeling of comradery with all of humankind would quietly bloom in their minds upon the sight, but time will have returned. Life would be a riddle again.

"But holy shit, it's difficult," he said.

26 hectopascal pt. 4

Ben 13:44
yo, ronnie and i are out tonight, theres a kind of beach style rooftop party

Ben 13:45
simon is hosting it, idk if you remember him but anyways would be fun if you were down too

Ben 13:45
semester's over soon, etc

Ezra looked out of the window. The sky was an impeccable blue, not a single cloud and indeed, he did feel like a long drink or two. Things were happening. Outside his house, cars were stopping at red traffic lights. A plane was slowly gliding along the line of the far horizon, and high above the stratosphere, satellites were making their rounds around planet Earth. Ezra sighed. He sure could do with some weight being lifted off his shoulders by the mix of music and chatter, and alcohol's Gaussian blur.

Ezra 13:50
sure, im coming. when and where?

_____

"Good to see you outside the cave," Ben said, slapping his friend's back. Ezra smirked. "Yeah, I got sick of watching shadows of pots so I thought I check out the outside world." Veronica snorted into her cocktail. The festivities in honour of one Simon Trent's access to parental credit cards took place in an open-air rooftop bar right across the beach, with the obligatory tiki torches and several sunshades of straw placed among occasional benches and chairs. Thankfully, the place wasn't too crowded yet, so the three of them could claim a bench closest to the balcony, overviewing the ocean. "Boy, I wouldn't mind Simon's parents adopting me," Veronica said as they admired the location. "He literally doesn't even have an occasion to splurge this hard." "Yeah," Ben nodded, "I think his dad is a lawyer with some tycoon types in real estate, or something." Ezra wrinkled his nose. "How exactly did you two get invited, or where should I remember him from..? I don't recall this guy, like, at all." "Urm, he was in two of our media psychology classes, and we kinda hung out after uni one time, back at Vance's...he was the guy who was ranting about this club closing, Flamingos, or what's the name again..." Ezra's brain still refused to spit out an image, so he just gave a helpless little nod. Ben chuckled. "He doesn't remember, Veronnie. Honestly, do you ever even look at people?" Ezra started rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt, feeling caught red-handed. He tended to skim faces like pages of books, on a quest for whoever would catch his eye. Most people didn't.

Veronica stood up. "Boys, I'll get some more drinks. I feel like after surviving my marketing exam today I can totally drink half this bar and still be standing. I am invincible - I AM HE-MAN!" Ben and Ezra looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Veronica was anything, but not a skilled drinker. Her feet got unsteady after a beer or two. "I'll look after her," Ben said, sighing, as she pranced away. The surface of the ocean was calm, just steady ripples softly splashing on sand. "How are you?" he asked. Ezra shrugged. "Fine. As fine as I can be, I guess. I passed all my assignments. I'm slightly behind on applications. I'm tired. But I am quite content sitting here, staring at the landscape." Ben smiled. "That sounds pretty good, coming from you." "Don't be so ironic. How about you?" "I'm dope. Honestly." Ezra watched Ben cautiously from the side, but he seemed sincere. "Are you sure?" "Yeah. Uni is almost over, Vronkers and I are almost done with the appartment, painting walls and shit - we're doing pretty fucking well, really, the two of us - and I'm interning at my uncle Fred's agency in two months - I haven't told you yet, have I?" Ezra shook his head. "I only got the email today in the morning, he talked to people and showed them my CV and stuff - well, you know what he's like." Ben chuckled, lighting a cigarette. Ben's uncle Fred could talk people into selling their last pair of shoes in the pouring rain. Ezra smiled at his knees. "I'm lowkey relieved I haven't missed out on you being upset, or in trouble or anything, to be honest. I was wondering, the other day. I barely have my mind together for my own bullshit, usually." Ben looked at him, sarcastically wide-eyed. "You don't? I wouldn't have guessed, pal." Ezra punched his arm, but grinned. "Shut up." Veronica was back, gleefully carrying three tall glasses with pretty-coloured beverages. "I forgot what the hell this is called, but it tastes great," she said, placing each glass carefully on the railing beside their rattan bench.

The place was filling up quickly. Ezra glanced around lazily - it was mostly students he found he was vaguely familiar with from his classes, as well as some men and women clearly in their late thirties that he'd never seen before. A group of girls enthusiastically waved at Veronica, who waved back. Ezra recognised the red-haired girl from several weeks before, who had approached him at the wrongest moment possible, and flinched. A quick glance at Ben told him that he'd recognised her, too. "Isn't that your almost-date? The one you told to study some law before harrassing you?" He could barely contain his laughter. Ezra rolled his eyes. "Sure looks like it is." Ben was just about to retort something witty when he spotted the host. "Oh, there's Simon! Simon, hey!" he called and waved his hand. A boy, who Ezra now recognised, was grinning at Ben and walking over. His short, blonde hair that was previously held in place with gel was surprisingly dishevelled for the time being only half past eight. "Hi," he greeted them, "so glad you made it! Ezra, I'm glad they took you along, I didn't have your number saved..." "Yeah, I know, thankfully we've got Benny for that..." Ezra replied, having a vague premonition of impending smalltalk. However, the conversation didn't spiral into a circular exchange of pleasantries - Simon seemed to be in highest spirits. "I actually asked a friend to DJ tonight but he dropped out last minute, so a few playlists I threw together will have to do," he continued, "I was actually really tempted to just have a Phoenix-themed party and blast their last LP all night - I love it! In fact, all I'm gonna do tonight is corner everyone at the bar and have them sit and stand and dance through 'Tutti Frutti' at least twice." Veronica nodded enthusiastically. "It's ear candy, literally - I've been looping it for days!" Ezra did share the sentiment, which he was surprised to realise. "I wouldn't mind," he said, "It's swoony as fuck."

Simon almost stayed true to his promise. Phoenix were interspersed with some alibi jazzhop tunes, enough to please the crowd, but mostly it was the sugary, dizzy sounds of the french bands latest opus. Ezra didn't mind, at all. Everyone was getting increasingly drunk, conveniently decreasing their talkativity. No one would come up to him and talk him into depression about their search for apartments, campus gossip and how the cinematography in the latest Marvel universe installment was actually really something (it usually wasn't.) Several drinks had taken their toll on him,too - his vision ever so slighly blurred, movements of people around him appearing smooth and flowing, not clumsy as they probably were in reality. Several metres away, Ben and Veronica were swaying to the music, holding on to each other, Veronica obviously for stability. She kept stumbling and giggling into Bens neck. Ezra looked out at the ocean. It wasn't bad, losing yourself in the moment every now and then. When everything - people, music, waves crashing - melted into one single bed of white noise he would sink in it. He loved it. It was people with their individual troubles that overwhelmed him, but when an abundance of impressions came crashing down on him, he relished the feeling - it blended out his own persistent, nagging thoughts. It was almost like postmodern meditation: make it too much of everything, so it can equal nothing.

At the bar, several bottles of wine stood untouched. Apparently, the student clientele wasn't very much into alcoholic classics, but Ezra studied the logos on the bottles for a bit. Beaujolais. He'd heard that before, but couldn't assign a taste to it or even remember whether he ever tried that wine. Perhaps today would be the day. Suddenly, he realised that someone was tugging his sleeve - the girl, again. Ezra looked down at her in confusion - didn't he put her off once and for all last time? Maybe, having stomached a decent number of cocktails, she had come for revenge. "Dude, I actually said 'Hi' like three times, are you dreaming?" She was smiling, like they were pals and not actual strangers with a more than just awkward encounter in the past. He was slightly perplexed. "Er, I don't know, haven't heard you - music's loud, etc. Hi." The girl - Tess, he remembered - leaned against the bar, seemingly pleased to have his attention. "So," she said. He felt cornered, like a wild animal behind a trash can in the suburbs, the local wine mom coming for him with a stick and shouting things like "I'll teach you to ruin my front yard...".

Ezra took a deep breath and ran his hand through his fringe. "So, what." "Well, last time was kind of unfortunate, if you remember... let's have a drink, maybe? You looked quite bored, so I thought I'd say hi," she said, playing with the straw in her glass. "That's very considerate of you, but I was just checking out the wine bottles, actually, so..." "Wine it is," she beamed, "which one do you suggest?" Ezra was suddenly very protective of his Beaujolais. "Er, I'm not much of a connoisseur. I don't know. Maybe the Riesling, or something. I don't feel like it though. How about you find someone to dance?" It wasn't that she was particularly annoying or anything - she wasn't. She was just like any other person, and he didn't see why he should follow protocol and engage in chatting and flirting that wouldn't lead to any place he felt any desire to investigate closer. The general public of his environment was often confused by his backing off of people whenever they approached him, but the truth was that, as bewildering as that reaction was to most people seeking acquaintances and company, he couldn't stand it: the walls of empty words moved around for what seemed like ages, all the uninspiring characters who triggered absolutely nothing in him. He wasn't arrogant about it, in fact, he was certain that most people were as uninterested in him as vice versa. He just took the freedom to act upon his feelings - he considered it a progress on his side that he refrained from physically shaking his counterpart, asking them what the hell they were doing with their time.

"How about a dance, then? This song is quite nice," the girl said, kneading her straw and looking him straight in the eyes. It was Fior Di Latte playing, seductively and terribly on point, had this been a movie scene. Ezra sighed. To hell with the niceties. "Pal, you really could do better than waste your time here, ok? I'm trying not to be rude, but it's not happening," he said, locking his fingers firmly around the bottleneck of his newly-found french mystery. She frowned, half embarrassed, half agitated. "But why? Literally, why won't you just give it a try? I don't usually clinge to people, you know, and just really wanted to get to know you a bit - that's it! Why are you so stuck up?" she protested. Some people nearby turned their heads, sniffing the delicious scent of drama. To this, Ezra would't cater for certain. "I am not stuck up. I wouldn't see why anyone should be entitled to anyone else's attention, I'm sure you'd agree if I was the girl," he said in a tone as neutral as possible. Tess crossed her arms in front of her chest. "You don't even know me, don't you think you could change your mind? Why can't we just hang out for a bit?" "Because I don't want to." "That's not a reason!" "It's a perfect reason, now will you please let me through. I've got plans." With the bottle in his hand, he slipped past her and made his way down the stairs, across the ground floor and out the doors, to the beach.

The promenade was a bit of a night club cluster, so even right at the shore, distant chatter and fragments of music were audible against the soft swish of the water. The night air was fresh, the sea a beautiful purple-tinged blue and Ezra was beaming. The almost starless night, the coolness of the wind, stray seagulls - he just let the sensations wash over him, basked in almost-silence and air, and realised he truly wasn't thinking anything. He wasn't analysing. He wasn't considering what to reply to anyone. He wasn't listening. He wasn't rearranging schedules, wasn't worrying about the next day - nothing. His mind was at peace. He opened a few buttons of his shirt, took off his sneakers and sat in the sand for what seemed like moments to him, but in reality was almost an hour. He only moved when the flood made the waves lap at his feet. Grabbing his shoes and the bottle of wine, he obediently retreated a few metres up, sat down again and uncorked the bottle. Beaujolais. It was too dark to properly judge the colour of the beverage, but it was definitely a red wine, though it seemed paler than he expected. A mouthful proved it was also fruitier, and less intense than it could've been. For that night, it was perfect. A breeze ruffled his hair. Soft white noise, the vastness before him, being close to something as pure and primal, and unbothered as the ocean was his oxygen mask in an existence that tended to suffocate him more often than not. He didn't harbour any hopes of being saved or healed by it, he was still doomed to be human, after all. But for now, he savoured the feeling. Slowly he sank into the soft, sun-dried sand that immediately gave in to his weight, and laughed quietly to himself, the sound of it drifting out into the night.

26 hectopascal pt. 3

When he woke up from his fever-induced slumber, the sky had already darkened over San Francisco, but the clouds had dissolved. He groaned, shuffled a little in his messy sheets and realised he felt completely dehydrated. The phone was silent. Ezra reached for the plastic bottle at his feet with a faint hope it would contain anything liquid, but the bottle turned out to be empty and he had no choice other than to drag himself to the bathroom and the kitchen. The thought that he, the Universally Ungrateful Beast, probably deserved to develop a full-on head cold, lurked in the back of his head. That'd get his mind off his pretentious existentialism. He sighed.

When your bones feel like they're splintered and your skin is on fire, moving and walking isn't fun. Hanging over the sink, he threw a clouded glance at the mirror. His face was almost always unusually pale, but today a sickly yellow-ish tinge and rosy cheeks ruined the marble white of his skin. Not that he could care less.

The item that saved his kitchen - to use the attribute 'tiny' would already be very well-meant - was a plant with luscious green leaves in a yellow pot that hung from the ceiling. Against the background of little blue tiles and dirty dishes loosing their patience next to the sink, it saved the room from undirected chaos and made it seem like everything, mutinous as it may be, was still under the inhabitants control. It wasn't, though. Ezra rummaged through the cupboards feebly hoping to find anything of nutritional value, but apart from an expired bottle of ketchup - who even bought it, and when? Certainly not him - and a bag of letter soup he found absolutely nothing. He mustered the letter soup. This one he didn't buy either. Veronica did, after she and Ben had played around with his fridge poetry magnets. Currently, they spelled "no carps in this diem pond". He crinkled his nose at this fairly dadaist nonsense but didn't move the letters.

A cold shiver ran over his back. This was a terrible moment to get so sick. He had work to do and papers to write. He boiled water for both soup and a cup of herbal tea, determined to at least uphold the illusion of functioning, and wasn't soup magical when it came to colds, anyway? His kitchen didn't have a table, but it had a stool and about 15 free square inches of space, where he settled with a small bowl. Letter soup. My life is a letter soup, he thought to himself, a mess of signs that mean nothing, the possibility of a good stir ruining absolutely everything and, as a finish, the entire mess growing colder by the second. A sudden buzz almost gave him a heart attack. It was Ben again.

Ben 20:37
you alive? hopefully not out of aspirin again? junkie

Ezra ignored the message, staring out of the window. In terms of his appartment's view, he was very lucky - on the 4th floor of an old town house located right between two streets, he had the classical San Francisco panorama right before him whenever he glanced through either of the two small windows: two roads hurrying downhill, pastel colours, cafés, the beach somewhere always near, if you walked long enough. The sky was beautiful. An intense indigo bleeding into a wishful yellow tone. If he just weren't so miserable all the time, he could be happy here. He loved this place. "I can sort everything out," he said to himself aloud. Ezra's voice was hoarse. He pushed around letters in his bowl. Hello. Ezra. Help. Pls why. You're ridiculous, he thought. People would kill to be in your position. Eating a few spoons of soup, he picked up his phone and answered Ben.

Ezra 20:44
im good. well kinda

Ezra 20:44
will probably skip work tho

Ben 20:46
dang man but better get some rest than turn up there tomorrow and get everyone to hate you because you share your flu or whatever it is youre dying from

Ezra 20:46
haha

Ezra's laptop made a bubbly noise. It was sitting on the fridge from when he was watching a film earlier, and the Skype window was blinking. Ezra sighed and clicked to take the call. "Whassup, Benny." Ben's face popped up on the screen. He had curly, brown hair and an abundance of freckles all over his nose and cheeks. "Yo! Nothing, just wanted to check up on you, Hamlet. Have you got some food left? Veronnie and I could drop off some takeout, if you're interested. We're off to the cinema in a minute." Ezra shook his head. "Thanks, you guys got me sorted with a bag of letter soup the other day, so I'm well-fed and on my way to recovery. 'N stuff." "My bag of letter soup?" Veronica's voice off screen startled Ezra for a second, then she appeared right next to Ben. "Hi Ezra!". He just waved his hand briefly. "I'm fine, kind of, I'll better get some more sleep I guess. Today was stressful as hell, I was gonna get some shit done but I ended up almost passing out, it's probably a fever but it'll pass, I just need to sleep." Ben raised an eyebrow. "You sure? You look like shit, to be honest." Ezra nodded, winked at the pair and clicked the red button.

He wasn't doing too bad. He was close to waving university goodbye for good and, in the meantime, working freelance at an up and coming PR agency where people certainly did realise they were up to something with him. He should be thanking the universe. Something, however, was always nagging him. Even though opportunities came to Ezra every once in a while, they never seemed to be more than that: brief encounters with luck. He pulled a grimace at his own thoughts. When did he become so biedermeier? That's just the way things are in the 21st century, he thought to himself, you should've become a gardener or a baker, if you wanted a contract job and a schedule cast in stone. Or was that really what he wanted? He wouldn't bet on it. There were only two ways: come to terms with constant worrying, or just stop. Just ignore the toothache, it's here to stay. Was stability really the nonpareil gold standard for a happy life? Debatable, and how he detested himself for craving just a tiny bit of this meditative, elusive, magical stability in his existence. The unexpected email, assignment, appointment always came round. Things broke. Things didn't work out. Things that worked out didn't always have the best timing. His bank account wept silently more often than not. His folks at home had their own micro- and macro-disasters to take care of, that sometimes involved him, and sometimes didn't. All the people he was close with were tired more often than not, and by God, he was, too.

Ezra 21:16
i feel like 40 years ago you just had to float along The Great Stream to live your life, and now the world swims in the opposite direction and if your arms are weak its your problem

Ezra 21:17
people 40 years ago probably said the exact same thing about people from 40 years before that

Ezra 21:17
or probably they didn't because world wars I and II

Ezra 21:18
i hate everything
                                                                                                   
Ben 21:21
bruuh.

Ezra 21:21
i know

Ezra 21:21
i'll shut up

Ben 21:22
you're delirious. everything is glittery and fairy-sparkly and beautiful. cant you see

Ezra 21:22
SORRY i said i'll shut up. there. im silent. im sleeping now

He knew that Ben knew what bothered him, and he knew that neither of them had a solution. Somewhere someone might have found some psychoanalytic way to change people's perceptions of their experiences on planet Earth, but not him. Not today. He guzzled down the rest of his letter soup before it had a chance to turn completely cold, picked up his laptop and made his way to the bed. He wasn't intending to sleep, however, not yet. The room was just a few square metres, but Ezra didn't mind. He didn't own anything too much to clog up the place, and he was far from claustrophobic. If he propped up his pillows against the wall at his bedside, he could lean back and watch the city, and the sky. Before covering his pale shoulders with a blanket - he was shaking, and he could feel blood rushing to his cheeks - he pressed 'Play' on his laptop. Only recently, he'd made a playlist that Ben had described as an "acoustic hurricane of wistfulness in the evening sun", and Veronica had subscribed to it and shared it on Facebook, where it, absurdly so, gathered a large following. The varying progressions of major, then minor, then major chords again in the songs he picked did something to him, and apparently to other people, too. He savoured the sounds that tended to all his grazes, reassured him it's fine to feel the way he felt, and that he wouldn't necessarily be stuck with that feeling forever, and he didn't notice how he slowly drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep.

the point(illism)

They had put quite some effort into claiming their sunny spots in one of the few gazebos overlooking the little lake in the middle of Quinnsbury Park. For an hour they had been lurking around it, waiting for an elderly couple to leave together with their slightly obese dachshund, to run inside and sprinkle as much of their belongings around the place as possible to avoid the invasion of exhausted park runners, pensioners and school classes on trips with their overly eager biology teachers. They did so giggling and breathless like two primary schoolers who just snuck out of class a heroic half an hour early. A group of middle aged nordic walkers graced them with long, disgruntled looks before moving on to find an empty gazebo, or at least a bench without someone already feeding pigeons on it.

His contribution to the artifical chaos was an old, brown leather bag, two enormous bottles of soda and a stack of library paperbacks that was rather impressive considering the fact that he'd carried them outside his bag, balancing a tower of old, stained paper beings around crowded park walkways. She had brought several large sheets of thick cardboard, acrylic paints, water, a set of brushes and a museum guide of a Monet exhibition that was almost a decade old. She leaned on the rail figuring out a good spot in the park landscape to turn into a painting, while he picked up one of the book, only to place it in his lap and let the fading autumn sunlight wash over his features with his eyes closed. She was enthusiastically skimming the guide.

"I really can't wait to get started, even though I have a premonition that I will fail spectacularly," she said, propping up a cardboard sheet against a pillar and laying out her colours and whatnots. His mouth twitched into something akin to a half-smile. "You're like a preschooler right now, all buzzing and eager, and in an hour you'll cry noisily about how it turned out completely different from what you expected." She ignored his teasing, knowing he'd probably turn out to be right - again - and started painting. "I gotta start some day, I mean I wanted to try impressionism for ages now, and I think that's one type of painting I could actually master. It's more mellow than, say, expressionism and it's oddly satisfying to keep dotting the paper. My goal is to forge van Gogh's sunflowers one day."

He chuckled. "Keep that criminal energy coming, it suits you." She threw him a dismissive, albeit still good-humoured look and started painting, but he didn't see it - his eyes were still closed, and he was so completely still in the sun that if the breeze didn't move his hair a little he'd resemble a wax figure. The book in his lap remained untouched for at least an hour, and she only looked up from her cardboard and the landscape every now and then as if checking whether he was still there. She wondered whether his back didn't hurt as he seemed to arch against a pillar of their shared gazebo in a rather unnatural fashion, and whether he was actually asleep, even though she didn't think he was. This was of enormous interest as she kept allowing herself to indulge in the contrast of jet black hair and porcelain skin he happened to display on himself, and she wanted to avoid him catching her staring at all costs.

The painting was turning out weird. She placed careful brushstrokes side by side trying to create texture, but if at all, the trees and the lake looked like an awkward, sloppy kind of pointillism, rather than the swirling dynamic of an early impressionist she was trying so desperately to go for. Her annoyance started to show on the cardboard, resulting in even more misplaced strokes, until she angrily put the brush aside and let out an exasperated little noise. "Well, I definitely see something happen there. The artist started their work conscientiously, carefully, until their temper got the better of them," she heard him say. "Not quite what the goal was, but true art nevertheless." The irony wasn't appreciated. "Oh, you're impossible! Seriously, sometimes I wish someone would punch you for your self-righteousness, and I hope to God it won't have to be me, with my tiny bicepses," she almost hissed. But he only smirked at that, because just as he took the freedom to be cruelly insensitive, he didn't mind people being insensitive to him. "I sense outright aggression! Don't restrain yourself, the cardboard is your playground!" he exclaimed theatrically, moving out of the way of leg aimed at kicking him in the shin. "You suck," she grumbled, turning away from him.

He watched  her back with a grin. "I'll buy you ice cream," he suggested amiably. There was no response. He took on more comfortable position to sit and watch her trying to save what could be saved. "You know," he said after half an hour of silence, "that's what people are," nodding at the painting. "What, passive aggressive failures?" she asked, still slightly peeved. "Nah," he replied, looking at the little dots and smears of colour, "impressionist paintings. You don't ever get what you see, if you start looking closer. It's just dots, and dots, and between the dots, there's nothing." They sat in grave silence for a minute, the only noise being the swoosh of the brush. "Aren't you the optimist," she said finally. He sighed. "Come on," said, running his hand through his hair and standing up. "Pack up your stuff. Let's have De Daumier-Smith have his blue period and give it a rest for today. I'll buy you ice cream." She crinkled her nose. "Who's De Daumier-Smith?" she asked. He didn't reply.

its late

She knew by the first bite of baked sweetcorn and the shiver she woke up with in the morning after sleeping with an open window. When clouds had quietly changed their shapes from cotton balls to feathers, and when the scent of the air at dusk had begun to tug at something in her chest - that's when she knew that summer was over, and even if it hadn't brought her particular cheer she would be missing, a mellow sadness crept into every inch of her as soon as the sky changed its promise of bright and harsh sunlight to that of sparse, apologetic and farewell-bidding rays. As she did some modifications to her wardrobe, getting out a few sweaters, she figured it wasn't so much the summer fun she'd be missing - she didn't harbour any romantisised notion of a Summer Dream as teen culture and western capitalism had established it firmly over the course of decades - but the distinct taste of passing time that suddenly became more palpable and alarming. However quietly this feeling dispersed, breathing became more difficult nevertheless and as ever so often, just sinking into the ground, crumbling after an unnoticed petrification, seemed so much more convenient and sweet that coming to terms with the fact that yes, time has passed again.

ficus no. 2

He looked around the room with a sigh, as if to assess the situation. She was sitting on her bed wrapped in a tartan blanket and side-eyeing him like a dog who chewed up a carpet when their human hasn't been watching. It was a sunny day, and the pastel colours of her place could suggest serenity if it hadn't been for the shadows around her eyes and a puffiness he was already familiar with from previous encounters. There were children's books scattered on her bed, her laptop rested right next to them displaying several tabs of football match moments on YouTube and "Mrs. Robinson" was blaring out of small speakers in a corner. Apparently, the player was put on loop because the song ended and began again right away. Dust particles were dancing in the air to the music.

He drew a deep breath and she watched him with the same guilty expression. "So?" he finally said with a huff, crossing his arms and leaning against a shelf. She shuffled in her tartan. "I'm fine," she replied and it sounded very much like a threatened porcupine raising its quills. His mouth twitched a little to almost show a half-smile, almost. "Yeah, sure you are. Determined, working on your life, focused on all the great things to come, aren't you." He knew he sounded harsh, but he also knew that it was exactly what she needed - anything more pitiful and compassionate would have her throw a fit, probably, or worse - burst into several minutes of crying she'd be utterly embarrassed by at the end of the day.

"I am." she said, almost offended. "Well, I'm getting there." He did not bother to keep a straight face anymore, raising his eyebrows and grinning widely. "Interesting, I'm just at a loss a little here - what could anyone possibly be up to with a bunch of kid's books, football and late 60s folk rock..? Is that film script inspo, or performance art..." She rolled her eyes, and he mentally ticked the situation as a point past any imminent moments of hysteria. He was a master of his art. Any art actually, and he knew that she knew. "It's therapeutic," she said. "I'm having a bit of a... I'm... You know. Life, and shit." He picked up one of the books, and turned it to read the summary. "You're blanking everything out again, aren't you." She looked out the window.

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.

"Yeah. I need it. It's getting too much again. I need a break. I've felt out of place again, and so alone. I need it." He nodded absently. She watched him. The otherworldliness would never leave him, whatever exactly it was. He put the book back where it was.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

"What's up with the football videos?" He sat down on the bed, too, and cautiously picked up her slim, small laptop, clicking through the tabs. "I had no idea you were into that?" She shrugged. "I'm not. Not really, at least. I like some aspects of it. These people dedicate their entire lives to it. It's a physical thing, and this physical thing extends to a mental thing. They're so upset when they lose. They're literally children. It's like watching children react to something, and they're so happy when they win. Just look at that." On the screen, the national team just scored the first goal three minutes before the final match would be over. The boys were beaming already - exhausted, sweating, barely able to run, but so, so happy. "It's so untainted. Primal, almost, because they're too drained to pretend, too weary, and too emotionally invested. So I'm borrowing some of that happiness." Their eyes met briefly and she felt a dizziness return, as always when that happened. She gave up on trying to understand why. "And the books are a time travel, aren't they." A sad nod from her. He looked at her for a minute or two, like someone conducting an experiment, waiting for two chemicals to react. They didn't.

Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes.

"And the song?" he asked finally, playing around with the hem of the tartan blanket. Her reaction was a barely noticable shrug. "Though there's a funny story to it," she said, "years ago my sister bought a CD from some buskers in Italy, and they had covered that song. I was only 12 or so, and I absolutely loved it. I had no idea it wasn't theirs, and the most hilarious thing is that it said 'amplification prohibited' on the disc, and I didn't know English well enough back then to understand what it means, so I had absolutely no doubts that it was the band's name. I literally only realised why they wrote it on there years later, when I stumbled across that CD again." He beamed at the thought, and she at the memory. "You can file that under time travel, too, I guess." Her features hardened.

Look around you all you see are sympathetic eyes, stroll around the grounds until you feel at home.

He didn't say anything, still looking ahead pensively and now she looked him up and down. Quite the sight, frankly. "You know," she nudged him in the shoulder, "I wish I could paint. You'd make a superb subject." He looked her right in the eyes, and there it was again, the vertigo. "A friend of mine is a painter, I think I will pay him to track you down and follow you around for a week, and make a series of portraits without you noticing." He smiled. "So much effort." "So worth it," she replied. The song went into the chorus for a billionth time that day. He got up, took her hand and almost dragged her off the bed, so unexpectedly that she lost her blanket and almost fell over her slippers on the ground. "Come on," he said, swirling her around, dancing a few steps. In her vision, the room started swirling too, again.

Koo-koo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.

God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson. Heaven holds a place for those who pray.

Hey, hey, hey

Hey, hey, hey

pep talk

~Me to myself~

1. Okay, okay, I get it - life is hard. It's a goddamn bloody chaotic mess most of the time but 7 billion people around the planet are somehow coping and you should, too.

2. Remember how shitty things were some time ago? See, you made it past it, so why not get to grips with life in its harmless stage?

3. You had the opportunity to intern at a magnificent place, the people were wonderful, they didn't hate you and you have actual WRITTEN WORK published in an actual PRINT MAGAZINE, you gathered experience, you realised it's exactly what you had always hoped it would be. And of course it's a tough job area, it's not easy to actually get employed and not work your skin off as a poorly paid freelancer, but you MADE A START and that's something big enough for now.

4. There's not much uni work left. 1 1/2 term papers, an exam and your master thesis. That's doable. Go kick some academic ass, gurrrl.

5. You bought new running shoes, you're gonna enjoy going out for a workout once in a while. You can do this, you fat piece of lazy ass. (just kidding. you couch potato)

6. The quicker you get all of your uni work done, the faster you can go and actually do what you found out you like. Right? RIGHT?

7. WRITE THIS FUCKING BOOK. You've got the characters. You've got the story. You made seven zillion notes about random ideas and side characters and quirky shit to incorporate, you've got this. YOU CAN DO IT.

8. Your cat likes you.

future present past

Future: I gotta pace up my uni game, do some things and finish post-grad lyf. I'm also quietly brooding over a zine. I really am.

Present: My art needs some recalibration, I feel horrible about the amount of short-haired girls I've produced during the last couple months.

Past: There is a stack of To-Do-lists from pre-internship times flying around that eagerly await treatment.

cosmic screw up

There is a place for everyone in the universe who's here, because you're already here and so your place is exactly where you are. Hence, the question is not "Where do I belong?" but "How the f-ing hell do I deal with where I am?"

deskology

A clean desk. Light wood, birch, presumably. Matte varnish, not a scratch. The only items are a bonsai tree in an dark green earthenware pot, a Mac, a notebook, a stack of clean post-it notes and a Montblanc pen that looks like you could easily swap it for a small car. A hand places a plain white cup with the remains of a formerly hot espresso on the immaculate surface of the desk - hand and desk both belong to Harrison. Harrison is man in his thirties, works on Wall Street, sports glasses and a 24/7 poker face. Sometime today he will have achieve an important career goal by arranging a deal between two rapidly growing companies in the sportswear sector.

A cluttered desk. Not the good sort of cluttered. Tissues, food crumbs and the occasional cigarette butt. A book about the mesozoic period. Broken pencils galore. Graph paper, a small plastic jar of glitter spilled over a burger that, for this obvious reason, has not been finished, and library books bound in cloth filthy from too many casually dirty, greasy fingers. Paper, paper, more paper. A small picture of Galileo Galilei in a seashell frame. Several dead bugs. This desk belongs to Rufus. Rufus is an archeology student with dark and very curly hair, and a loud laugh. He loves the subject but not the academic means. Today he will fail an exam for the third and last time.

A dark, heavy desk. Several tax office letters. Letters from someone called Gwendoline Rutgers. Neat stacks of notepads, a little china vase with pens, a yawning cat on a burgundy leather desk pad. A tiny bit of dust and last weeks' Financial Times. A hardcover copy of a Sherlock Holmes collection, and three zoo tickets. This desk belongs to Arthur. Arthur is a retired stock broker, a serious man who replaced taking care of national finances with managing the desperately unstable financial situation of his daughter and her husband, two entrepreneurs, which oscillates from 'okay' to 'absolute catastrophe'.

And then there's my desk. It's plain and black with pseudo victorian legs, slightly scratched and fairly empty - objects with decorative purposes have failed to stand their ground with my cat as their opponent, who throws around everything he can reach when he feels like waking me up at night. A clay pot that used to contain some fancy mustard and now holds pens, several tin boxes that carried chocolates and biscuits now filled with pencils, brushes, nibs, inks and colour tubes. A notebook, a sketchbook. A box of Kleenex. That's it.

And then there's your desk. And you probably don't see adventure behind it, either.

Why? Because the first three desks were storytelling. They can be desks in movies, or desks in books. Books and movies have a beginning and an end. Everything they let you see is found within a framework of events, visuals, music and characters - characters you grow to love, characters you loathe, characters who are nothing like the people you know and those who are just exactly like them. You see Rufus' desk and you know that this desk is going to tell you something. Rufus is going to do something, to make decisions, to feel certain ways, to move ahead, to be part of a somewhat rounded story. 

You  and me? We don't know if our stories are rounded. For us, our desks are just desks. Plain desk, practical desks, aesthetisized desks, beautiful and alluring even, but always only just desks. They are not part of a narrative. We know that we have approximately one and a half hours to get to know Harrison and watch him develop, but we don't know if tomorrow something exciting will happen to us and change our lives, or how many bland hours, days and years we've got ahead before we will die in a freak accident, unexpectedly and unglamourously. Or if neither happens, and we will live normal, balanced lives, sometimes happy and sometimes not. Cinematography seeps into our consciousness. We see a skyline, streets lights, and we're excited for life, excited for what lies ahead and humbled by the presence of millions of fellow humans who all live their little stories. We feel like part of something big. Almost like we're in a movie. And why? Because we recognise the establishing shot - the first frame of innumerable scenes throughout the history of cinema: city lights, the eternal promise of the 20th century.

I sometimes catch myself feeling a bit sad about the fact that my own experience of life will never reach movie life level, simply because I am no work of fiction and therefore subject to a boring kind of chaos. It seems like life has long ago started imitating art. But plenty of these people in movies are just living the lives of normal people. Only the fact that we watch them on a screen makes their walk to school, their job interview, their neighbourhood, their desks seem special, different from me and what I am surrounded by. Rufus could be any archaeology student at my university. Harrison could be absolutely any accountant. Shouldn't I take it from there and decide that, yes, life is, in fact, just like a movie? And my life is, too?

[check this out, it's just in the spirit of what I'm talking about: click.]

haze III

There are several reasons why neuroscience was never a career option for me, but one I can name without elaborating on my incompatibility with logic and science is that I don't even want to know what happens in my brain.

Sometimes I can grow stupidly happy. Out of sudden, regardless of the fact that there is absolutely nothing to be acutely happy about right now if you're me. I have become so good at being happy about fantasies that it sometimes washes over reality like a wave of sunlight and long, golden strands of hair.

I am built in a way that allows fiction to completely consume me, and recently I have decided to stop considering it fiction in the classical, slightly derogatory sense - something unreal, detached from fact - because the emotions that a beautiful piece of someone's imagination sparks in me are real, chemical, and make no sense, yet exist. I watch movies and live them for weeks, if I love them. I see those movies before my inner eye non-stop, I hear lines, I see stills, I hear the music. I carry the feeling of said movies wherever I go, whatever I do. I become that feeling for a while. I don't remember when the last time was I had a crush, but I crush on books, films and songs all the time. If you look at yourself as a jigsaw in construction, the movies you see and love in an instant turn out to be pieces that you really, really needed when they came to you. They're my favourite ingredient in the life cocktail.

I am pretty sure I'd make a horrible neuroscientist. I am not sure what non-horrible I'd make. I am a fantasiser and an escapist. My sails of film strips - full of vast, far away horizons and dreamscapes and hazy takes on the real world - are bright and glistening, and volatile, and the real wind blows right through them, and I sort of un-become.

PS: I don't even know why I wrote this. It's banal and unhelpful, but I probably just wanted it said.

haze I

Everything was in a haze. The other day he had gone out with some people he knew and had sat quiet through a lengthy conversation about appartments and landlords and rents before leaving early. All the exclamatory remarks and compliments on low prices and great numbers of square metres, together with exaggerated approval and encouragement in one issue or another across shiny woodboards holding numerous glasses of mediocre beer- it choked him in boredom and loneliness, and reeked of pretense. "This is it- youth," he thought walking down a dark and narrow street, past brick walls and shady entrances, hoping there'd be a train station somewhere in a few dozen metres. The whole world suddenly had a tilt-shift effect to it, everything was so small and unimportant and disgusting. He shuddered. Young people came together and had nothing better to discuss than issues of housing, in the most biedermeier way possible. He found it slightly difficult to breathe and that feeling didn't pass when he entered a train, avoiding everyone's eyes in the neon light, and ducking away into the corner of an almost empty compartment. He wasn't any better though- he was a goddamn coward. He had sat there and stared at his coffee. He hadn't asked anyone to tell about the last book they read and thought was significant, or special. He hadn't suggested to change the topic to what everyone's biggest dream was. He hadn't suggested to change the topic at all, even though he could have. He had just smiled politely when he'd felt addressed and answered a few question. He had practised invisibility and then disappeared completely.

ficus no. 1

"Really, I cannot see this goddamn bleak, puffy face of yours anymore."

                                       ***

There are days when an overall asshole vibe takes over the world, as if my mindset wasn't fragile enough already, and makes me either walk around aimlessly, just away from everyone, or stick to my bed like a mosquito to a flypaper strip. These aren't cosy days in bed, these are silent battles. It's like having a panic attack in complete silence and inertia.

                                       ***

I walked down a road, watching the sunset rather than where I go. I felt like The Gnossienne No. 1 kept breaking my bones, one by one as I listened, and I couldn't understand why. I kept playing it until I became a factotum made from splinters of myself. The sun had disappeared above the rooftops. I thought I was seeping through the asphalt.

                                       ***

"Are you going to pull yourself together or not?" He was looking splendid, she looked like a half drowned sewer rat. The setting was a small bathroom with a yellow sink and a neat little ficus in patterned pot next to it. He mustered her briefly and heaved a long sigh, ran a hand through his jet black hair. "I guess that's a no." Tears were streaming down her face. "What do you want to do? Kill yourself?" She shook her head, still crying noisily. "Ok, do you want to address your goddamn problems, or whatever there is that stops you from functioning, and act?" There was a pause filled with occasional sniffling and other very pitiful noises, then she shook her head again. The look on his face could well be described as weary. "What do you want then? Wallow in self-pity forever?" She started sobbing. He sighed again. "Ok, crying until dehydration it is." She leaned her face against his white shirt and continued her muffled sobs. He leaned against the sink and crossed his legs with his hands in his pockets, staring ahead. "I don't want to do anything," she wailed after an endless six minutes. "I just don't. I don't know how to do things. I don't know how to be profoundly happy. Nothing seems worth doing it, working for it. I dream big, but dreaming is all that ever happens, I have no clue how to get anywhere near those dreams. I don't want to. No matter how colourful and bright and massive they are, I can't bring myself to see how they're worth all the long way there. I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do." Then her face was pressed against his collar again and he looked down on his jeans, feeling like a premonition of quicksand. "There are no reasons to keep going," he said. "There is only a reason not to pause. Going out of the way of madness is just easier when you're friends with pipe dreams."

move along, there's nothing free to get here

I've been persistent in my struggle to draw a really julianny Julian and knowing my skills and limits I think this is probably as good as gets. This is both satisfiying and boring. I'm not sure if I will not look at this a few months later and think "ugh, gross". Maybe my next target/victim will be amazing Alexa - again. I'm so tired.
Or maybe I get more original in my artworks, or maybe I get a life. Because actually, instead of creating output, I feel more like pausing, taking a good close look at what I am and what I want to be, put those two in a pot, stir, add some spice, let it simmer and surprise everyone, including myself. That's super difficult tho, and it takes time I'm not sure I have. Let's just say I feel the urge to, metaphorically speaking, change the wallpaper at my place a tad too often, and tend to forget that wallpaper is just superficial decoration. I kinda wanna change, but I don't know how.

But I'm not always sad, I swear by mine honour! I will prove you some day soon.

untitled #21

The other day - it was raining and things were falling apart, as usual - I was standing in an express drugstore at the central train station to remorselessly buy every chocolate cookie pack I could grab and carry home, and potentially eat on my way back because everything is shit and life sucks, when a complete aisle full of protein shakes and bars and powders and pills caught my eye. As far as I know, express drugstores are for people who've been forgetting to buy soap all week and realise that on Saturday at 10 pm, or people who kinda lost control of their life and decide to get to grips with normal human existence by buying shampoo in a nearby express drugstore and showering for the first time in a month. Or young mums who are out of formula yet again. Or elderly people who don't want to walk all the way to an actual drugstore and don't care if their detergents are 50 cent more expensive than they could be. Or people like me, who need comfort food, like, right now and from wherever. 

But what the hell - that entire aisle full of fitness supplies? I was trying to imagine the kind of people to walk into an express drugstore aiming for that aisle. 

"Oh, dang, mate- I'm actually outta muscle shake, I think," said Martin, and Patrick smirked. "I'm outta muscle shake, sounds like pretty bad rap slang for 'I don't wanna dance anymore'. How about normal dinner then? Let's go for a McDonalds." "McDonalds, are ya mad? Nah mate, ain't eating that crap. Ya know what, let's go in there, they've got these cheap ass no brand protein shakes but they will do for tonight. Tomorrow's leg day, I need that shit."  Uuuum. 

Clarissa was standing sadly in front of rows and rows of all sorts of Haribo bags, and cookies, and chocolate, and lactosefreeglutenfreesugarfreesomethingselsefreepseudochocolate. She has always been a little chubby, but ever since Steve left her she became Fatwoman - she just ate, and ate, and ate. She was also a firm believer in tumblr and weheartit truths - there were a lot of cute, colourful pictures of sweets that said stuff like "Cupcakes make my world go round" or "Eating brownies like there's no tomorrow. justgirlythings". And she was a girl, so, what the hell. The aisle next to her gastronomic life refugee camp was one with 50/50 pastel (for all the cute #fitspo gals) and electric (for all the badass #jacked lads) coloured bottles and boxes that screamed FITNESS and HEALTH and LOW CARB DIET. Clarissa remembered all the tumblr and instagram posts with the hashtags "#fit #fitness #diet #summer #happy #healthy #health #cleaneating #girl #fitspo", and all the tanned, smiling girls in cute galaxy coloured nike roshes that Steve would never have dumped because they wouldn't give him a second look in the first place, and grabbed a pastel pink jar that contained some weird, potentially undrinkable protein drink, and, determined like a space ship commander in Star Wars, ran to the checkout. This was going change her life.

I am not sure which ill-connected synapses are responsible for these, but I am confident that smartass Patrick would make a wonderful protagonist for a coming of age hip hop film, and that my brain bore the struggling, late twentysomething Clarissa to be the protagonist of - duh!- a mediocre, slightly critical, woman's novel that hopefully no one is ever going to write. Me pondering on the purpose of an aisle full of dietary supplements in an express drugstore in a critical (crappy) life situation makes me the perfect protagonist for - for what?