the dead

I sit on the floor, my head in hands. I accidentally pull the curtains open with a jolt of a hand. But really I want to see the street better. The window spits its outside into the yellow of my kitchen. Outside makes me colder. It makes me remember of the hat I had to wear because my grandfather made me. He died many years ago. I should have just disposed of the hat back then. But I didn’t. I still have it on. I pull on a pair of muddy boots and drag myself outside into the storm and into the scream of nature. I hire a taxi and want to keep it for a day. The driver says he can’t, he has a funeral to service. Ah the dead… He looks at me through the rear view mirror above his head without turning as if afraid to let on that he acknowledges me. He narrows his eyes at my hat, worrying. I can see he is distressed, looking now around his cab in disbelief. A person like me on the back seat can make his cab seem not his cab, not a cab at all.

I should just mind my own head, but I can’t. I am lonely. “do you miss anybody ever?” I say.

It is Thursday night and the bars are packed with economy supporters. If everybody goes out three nights a week, the financial crisis can be averted in no time.

I close the lid too fast and a slice of my skin stays shut between the glass and the aluminum. My fault. I make my own life slices stuck in inadequacies.

Somewhere behind the road signs, somebody is flying a sarcastic grin through unattending skies.

“this is all I can do really,” my own grin says. I am ineffectual, spineless, and lifeless. The wind picks up my hat for me and carries it off. If the cab driver didn’t have the dead to drive around, I would have still been inside his car, with my hat on. I wonder whose funeral it was. I think of my grandfather.

It’s like I don’t deserve most things. It’s like I am too strange.

A fact of the suitcase

Beatrice gets to negotiate immense heaps of snow at every intersection 8 months every year. Every car, pedestrian, and carriage spit course language throughout the day all around trying to do the same thing. This time the whole country has reached a true integration of consensus. They hate where they live. Did they know, when last winter ended, that this winter was going to be the same? Or did they block the memory of the last winter and decided that surely winters never actually happen in this part of the world? They are all insane. Beatrice has spent the last year deciding where she would move. Staying was not an option.

She had a fact of the suitcase to hold on to.

If and when (if OR when) princessly wealth, however modest, is entrusted to me, I will be a good custodian and increase it with use.

Once you have given up, everything follows with dead certainty.

I want to expect the most magical thing to happen and to relieve me from my debts, my lack of university degrees, my guilt in front of the ones who love me, my insufficient affection for available men, my life path that doesn’t want to follow any rational maps, my miserable talent, my inevitable health decay and ageing. I do not wish to be in control any longer, Mother.

In everything I quickly see the opposite, the contradiction, the attack.

Nothing can be altered, except by a change of heart. I can change a heart.

I feel envy for some, and pity for the ones I don’t envy.

I want everything too badly. I take blind leaps into the dark systematically. Everything has to happen as soon as I want it.

He had stolen something and he knew it. The world was a nerve-jangling carnival where grotesqueries might swing out on springs and cackle at you.

all my friends are clowns

"I like clowns," the clown said, "All my friends are clowns."
I looked around, there was nothing but the desert and the sky. Nothing but dark orange and gloomy navy. There is a reason in everything, and so there was a reason for a bus stop to have been placed right there, in the middle of the dry cracked flatness. A girl-clown and two boy-clowns were at the bus stop waiting. Every now and then the sound of applause came pouring forth out of the air, and the three clowns cordially thanked the surroundings. One of the boys always yelled "Thanks for coming late!" in a half-bitter and half-sweet tone of voice.

...

They never came without a circus.

"Yeah, I like clowns too," I lied, for the reason that there is always a potential.

It is easy to flick the switch of preferences, when by default they are all classical.

There is a reason in everything, and so there was a reason for the bus stop with the clowns to emerge out of nowhere in the middle of Mojave. They will always be waiting for the bus, and the boy-clown will always yell "Thanks for coming late!" I will always say, "I like clowns too," and there will always be a confusion as to what my relationship with clowns really is.



In contrast, what has not happened yet possesses tremendous power to be changed, to be modified, and to reemerge in your dreamscape in as many different disguises as you have time for. and all the various optional ways and complications...

It’s simple: you have to really want it. No more overbearing ego, only the present moment telling us both: we are happy.

The clock stroke two and I heavily walked out of the house and onto a scandalously lit path of dewed grass. I walked steadily for many hours. I walked South.

I feel so close to all the time that we lost. We never have to lose it again.

everything we'll ever have

It was evening just like it usually was with them. Every evening has a morning, and a day, and a night. Beatrice was there, snuggling in content after the exhaustion of her day. She just arrived from the outside where the winds and the Celcius whizzed up a sensational ice waltz of minus 35. The day she left behind was pregnant with mind games, her resistance to the mind games, her mind’s resistance to her feelings, her decisions mutating one into another at alarming speeds and, also, various pragmatic issues, like what to eat. Her mind and her ego finally shook their fleshy heads at her in a pain of a disappointment and retired each to their own lonely cave. She then picked up a phone and rang Belacqua. He didn’t pick up. Her loner mind pulled its enormous head out of the cave to say, “I told you so!” But then her phone rang. Belacqua was calling back. They talked casually as if nothing was affecting them, which was always the case with them, and she finally said yes to coming over for dinner.

“I had no idea you would actually agree to coming over!” said Belacqua, pierced in the face by the evening lamp light of his busy kitchen, “I changed the whole plan of dinner!”

He did.

“Initially, there was going to be a fish and rice little number! But now I am making a Guinness stew with all the stuff that you don’t eat!” “I can’t eat anyway. I have a show next morning,” Beatrice said, truthfully, “I will just hang out.”

Blissful Beatrice was there, snuggling after the exhaustion of her day spent inside her mind. The mind was so bogged just hours earlier, it wouldn’t let her move neither backward nor forward. Belacqua was on the phone every few minutes asking her to come for dinner. Beatrice was on the phone every few minutes wanting him to do more for her, not just make a dinner, but come and pick her up at the other end of town. Habitually Belacqua resisted. He brought up the ‘broken muffler’ puzzle, which sounded more like a euphemism. Her mind burst into tearful laughter and her ego said, “He’ll never go out of his way for you…” interrupted by Belacqua’s “At the liquor store now. Red or white?”

Damaged by socialization, like we all are, Beatrice was there, snuggling after the exhaustion of her day, having just gone temporarily crazy hours earlier from all the fighting with her mind.

She was there, and Belaqua was there. He was making the stew and playing his good country songs on the sad guitar that was there too. Every now and then he would come up and peck her on the cheek or give her a quick careful kiss. Neither time nor pain exist as soon as we allow each other to just be.

Sometimes all we had to do was let our minds subside and the itch of this mean quodlibet die down. But there was always something that one had to do next. And so off our minds went in the deathless pursuit of goals, taking us further and further away from the present moment, not allowing us to ever fill up with the bliss of everything that we already had, which is, coincidentally, everything we will ever have anyway because there is nothing else to have other than the present moment.

brings you here

“It seems very pretty,” I walk around a theatre lobby looking at various bouquet arrangements left after an opening night, “but it’s rather hard to understand.” Every card inside each bouquet has been signed by one hand. There is only one fan behind this. However, the cards bear no signature. Instead, they each list a film title. One says, “My Own Private Idaho”, another, “Drugstore Cowboy”, yet another, “Elephant”, and another yet, “Serry”. “Hmmm..”, think I, taking a sip of espresso and turning around.

At the opposite end of the lobby stands Stanley, short hair and mystery eyes.

I take another sip, exaggerating the slowness of my reaction. I lower my eyes, to bring them up again. I empty my hands of the smallness of the cup and… what else?.. oh yeah… open my arms widely for the hug of a honey-like “ahhhh…!” As if nothing ever hurt us, Stanley and I are talking freely now, laughing and not remembering.

“What brings you here?” I say, knowing the answer. “A Russian play,” he says too seriously and too loudly to out-yell the wires of the street lamps outside. “I was a part of it tonight,” I say with dignity, “I still am and so are you now.” “I recognize that,” he smiles with relief. He stays nervous for ten minutes. I am not nervous any more. I just spent my own first ten minutes in the distance, looking at his profile and mostly at his back, having noticed him before he saw me. Time passes, the crowd around us melts, he is not nervous anymore, just close and familiar. We laugh like maniacs at each other’s jokes because we have always in the time before shared a sense of humor. The theatre is empty now and, as if there was never any pain, we are still talking in the middle of the hall. Nothing has changed.

I get into his car. Even the car’s color hasn’t changed. “I still have the video of you cleaning the snow off this four-wheeler,” he shows me the video he shot with his phone and we almost get hit by some van because he is also driving at the same time. As if nothing ever broke those hearts, we laugh. I feel like I have never left this very passenger seat. “I’m really a cowboy,” he said back then about the Volkswagen, “And this is my trusted horse, my VeeDub…”

The wires are now going, “BZZZZZ” and we are approaching the new residence of Sir Don Stanoite which he had acquired so recently that I have not been to it yet.

It’s both familiar and unfamiliar, to be here in this moment.This place is all him. Not like his last home with a transient mattress on the floor in the corner and a closet empty of any clothes. I was never invited to stay in that home. When I insisted not to be at my place for a change, he took me to his parents' house instead or, even, up North to his cottage. During that time of his recovery process, Mr. Stanley was reflecting, hurting, and taking a break. I met him while on this break. Eventually his break was over and life sprung back into those smirky eyes and cheeky cheeks. But he never took me with him into his life.

I am finally in a place where he lives his life. Busy kitchen cupboards. An espresso maker. Antique furniture. Story board covered with notes on paper squares. A big luscious bed. Curtains. Stanley.

We hug again and this time this tall, solid person of a man looks like a baby, far removed from our broken story and its histrionic passages. Everything disappears: time, pain. It’s only us now, floating. I let out little moans. I kiss all the little creases of his skin. I used to be too good to notice the creases of his skin. I want to let all between us go. It is not about keeping a face, it is about helping each other heal. Little creases of his skin… I am tiny, wrapped up in his huge body. I call him ‘baby’ and hear him pant in this word. There is no time. There is no pain.

I escape breakfast the next day. My mind takes me over as it does. I now know why we hurt so much as we did back then. In reality it was not painful at all, but our minds were cluttered. We did not quite make it out. The day has come for me to see that these ideas were just ideas, never reality.

You and I are no longer statues on the frozen pond. We are moving pictures, me and you, Cowboy. My Jewish Cowboy.

house

I gasped and sat down. The rapid journey through the air had quite taken away my breath, and for a minute or two I could do nothing but hug the little lily in my hands in silence.




When people let me down, I cry. Stale food makes me cry. Unrealized potential, in general, makes me miserable. “It’s all just glimpses,” I said to him, paralyzed by the idea. Moments earlier he climbed closer and resumed explaining to me, so much younger and so much more confident, how he is looking for a full-size happiness in life, and not just for its little poorly unbuilt glimpses.

Would I choose to build my happiness slowly, start from afar, and bring myself closer day after day, spending, investing?

Or would I choose to make love here and now to little explosions, passionate and berserk, lasting only for a beat and then dissolving?

“It’s all just glimpses,” I repeat on my own now. I settle into the fog, sleepwalking through envelopes of thick air. I come upon an abandoned skeleton of an unfinished house. In someone’s forgotten past, building of the basement was partially completed, but no floor was ever put over it. It is a lonely pocket of things unhappened. I now look at the naked torn brick walls forming narrow uneven steps up and down. I throw shoes off and jump inside the unvisited room. The ceilings above me are the unchattered skies.

The deserted floor is covered with tiny pieces of broken mirrors. Under my feet they are like little lost hearts. “Hello Hearts!” I say melodramatically, “It’s all just glimpses!” “Maybe you have already found out,” he said to me then, trusting my seniority. He was too beautiful and ageless to give away. Yet I am facing instead this unbuilt house with mirrors covering the floor. “I want you to know that it is nothing you did,” I said to him, disappearing. “I hope not,” his voice was heard.

I remember my own voice sheets of time ago fading away like this. “Just juice please,” I said then, and the words came out as coarse whisper. Have I heard myself since?

I am now in the unbuilt house, listening.

Dust of unmade plans blankets the disarray of the mirrors. I pace back and forth, naked, in fever, undecided. This house, unfinished in a rush, reminds me of a shipwreck down by the Icelandic rocky shores. That ship, like the dreams of this house, was on its way someplace no doubt. Until it was over with, as it happens.

I pick up one of the little broken mirrors and dust it a little. I see my face reflected. It is a ridicule of an expression. I almost drop the mirror as I see another face showing through the features of my own, the face of my mother. I resist the fear and remain holding the mirror. After all, our fears come from insecurities. I will not run away, I have decided not to sleepwalk any longer, I say to my mother in the mirror. I am still holding a lily in my other hand. I offer it to my mom. She used to love lilies.

I will turn cold to the very end of my whiskers (if I have any at the time), but I will not turn away.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre gimble in the wabe.

I am going to not run away one day. And for that to happen, I am going to move into my basement and try and finish building the whole house. There will be lots of big opened windows and pots with living lilies all over. My Mom and Dad will come to stay here as soon as I am done.

Forgiving. As soon as I live in a house.




“people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” Carl Jung

“But it’s not a show… It’s my life… It’s my [stands and thrusts his arms up in victory] HOUSE!”
“House” by Daniel MacIvor

“I’d rather not go
back to the old house
there are too many
bad memories”
The Smiths

“Little solace comes

to those who grieve

when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves

Moments before the wind.”

“House Of Leaves” by Danielevski