Between two suns

Episode 1

***
The hot summer air makes my eyesight fuzzy, Lisbon city center floats a bit, blurring outlines of vivid and colorful buildings surrounding me. Still through the yellow heat I spot the tiny bakery at the corner with flashy sign and blinding variety of sweets on display. Would I ever be able to go past indifferently? Getting closer I press my nose to the glass like a curious child, and examine the pastry. Pasteis de nata, a childhood friend said. Try it, it is good and very local, you will get the feel of how the Portuguese dessert tastes. The bakery offers a deal:  6 for 5 euros, but I buy only a single one. My mind quickly runs the habitual test question: is there anyone around you need to share it with?
 - Wanna share? - Oana shakes her head in a negative answer and I bite into the crunchy crust. It willingly melts on my tongue into a mildly sweet liquid remotely reminding of lost childhood memory...

***
- So?
The young woman with soft oriental features talked in a calm tired voice. She seemed to be concentrated on opening the apricots freshly picked from the tree and removing the stones. They were sitting in a small terrace in front of the old village house with grey crumbling walls. It was late evening, with the sky breathing the bluemarine into purple red. The mountains were silent.
The girl was about nine years old, with a braid below the waist, button nose and big almond eyes full of life and expectation. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring in an open worn-out book in her skinny hands.
 - So, - repeated the woman. - Imagine a situation, where I am no longer there and there is only you and your younger sister left together. Imagine you have a single piece of bread and that is all for several days. How will you share it?
The girl blinked for half a second and blurted out the fairest answer she could think of. - Half and half, - she said in a first-benchers' tone and instantly got a funnily proud face.The woman paused and sighed.
 - You have not grown up yet, she murmured with the same tired voice. The verdict transformed into a painful sting and landed on the fragile 9-year-old perception: the girl felt hurt and disappointed. She causiously looked up from under her eyelashes into her mother's tanned face and waited. For the right answer.
- You should take the smaller piece and give her the bigger one. As you are the elder and you can bear hunger, while she is younger and it would be much harder for her...

Episode 2

***
Evening covers Lisbon with the poles of its long velvet skirt. The sun gets swallowed by the ocean somewhere behind the white sketchy buildings. The Portuguese guitar and the street buzz intertwine into a background canvas, a decoration for my live theater. We walk into that light show accidentally, without knowing. It is happening in one of the old squares and it is vibrant: the light effects projected on the buildings tell about magnificent past, careless present and rational promising future. At a certain moment psychedelic imagination pierces a tunnel to the very center of the subconsciousness and I simply let the light into my inner universe - where the dark matter is still the main construction material. I absorb the light. I greedily consume it as this time it is the symbol of life and hope. This time.

***
The mountains hanging over the village had coarse outlines and reminded a group of old wrinkled men. Mornings started with the sun hitting their rocky peaks, evenings softly evolved into nights when the rocky texture molded into uniform black. One could see the solid outlines on the background of the dark blue sky with scattered stars... That day it was different though. There were no stars, but the night village was filled with light spilling from the sky, illuminating mountain peaks. The light show was magnificent, except it wasn't a show. The village nearby was bombed several hours earlier and the only road back to the capital was cut.
There were three adults and six kids in the yard of the grey village house. The adults were carrying basic survival objects to the basement: water, food, clothing, candles and wood. The two younger kids were noisily busy with a very happy something of their own.
The girl with the braid below waist was scared. The feeling pierced her in the chest and settled itself right in the center of it. The chest felt heavy and ice-cold. She never talked, but was silently watching her mother. There was another explosion that echoed in the mountains and the sky bloomed with another swarm of sparkling fireflies. The younger sister raised her curly head to the sky, cried out with joy and pointed it to the young woman:
- It is fireworks, - stated the woman half-smiling.
The braided girl felt her stomach fall. The realization of the lie, that she heard from her mother first time in her short life pulsed with anxiety. The ice-stone in the chest grew to pump the first and strongest fear she would be exposed to in the next 25 years of her life...

***  
TBC

Colour

Cool Saturday mornings materialise at the end of the tunnel that leads back to reality from the noplace called Dreamland. Rare appearances of the sun put their elusive, but warm marks on the milky curtain outlining the blurred shadows of the maple leaves on it, here and there. 

It was always one of the best ways to slide back into the Saturday morning - watch the maple leaf shadows projected by the sun on the curtains. The curtains seem to be the changing variable, from light white material with fairly tale characters to vibrant teenage orange, then calm grown-up green, and finally, forward-looking and anticipating dark chocolate. The latter never became the part of the morning routine, mostly remaining a decoration in the place that was being made gezellig but never happened to become home.

There is a new temporary home now, with milky curtains with no pretension, as if a blank canvas on the easel in the corner of the painter’s studio. They only reflect the shadows of maple leaves today and now, hinting it is all I have and at the same time it is there to be painted again into whichever colour I would want to take me over. Maybe, the colour of strawberry juice next to my bed filling me with reddish freshness of Strawberry Fields Forever, or the Tender Blue of mellifluous and slightly cheesy music line from the speakers - "…I always hold a place for you in my heart…”, or the indiscreet colour that is implied within the magnetic smell of my morning pillow on this Saturday morning (it tends to be more attractive in the mornings, isn’t it?)... 

“First the colours.

Then the humans.

That’s usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try”. 

(Prologue of Death from "Book Thief”)

Those Saturday mornings, full of light, scents, bliss and colour :)

Late Night Blah

At a certain point it is impossible to distinguish the dream from the reality...
In the end, there is no real proof we are not just a hologram in someone's stupid experiment.

Current life flow of rapid events, extreme decisions, abandoned hopes and new unexplored opportunities come together in an entangled story, that would beat quite some books I have read myself. Everything is so momentary, that the realisation of the change is as vague as morning blurry sensation of something you can't remember, but definitely saw in a full-colour dream just a few minutes ago. Changing the whole value system, broadening the limitations of what was never accepted is always weird, yet now liberating. And I happily embrace that, accepting deep down inside the possibility of never-ending new beginnings. Each time with a few more grey hair, hidden under the soft reddish witchy hair-dye. I do not have another choice but to leave with an only suitcase and no memories: compromising on perfection tends to make my life far from the fairytale I am after. Just that.

And to relieve the overwhelming confusion with all the happenings that I have difficulties to sort out to set my life rolling again... I get Rotterdam skies, as a reward, painted in colours of my heart. I get cherry blossom right beside the place I now call "home", I get people I love, people that inspire me and people that I missed for a very long time. I get the harbour at dawn, shrieking seagulls, shiny city lights in the night, evening trains sliding through polychrome tulip fields...

The void opens up, letting in the Dutch wind and sparkling stardust of freedom. I lean back tiredly to the station wall, surrendering myself to the evening sunshine. And suddenly remember, I have to tap for a train supplement ticket.
 - Mevrouw, - he calls softly when I am almost there, - wait, Mevrouw, I have a spare ticket.
He is holding out the supplement to me. I cautiously look into his blue eyes behind the glasses.
 - And why would you give it to me?
 - Because I don't need it, I have one more.
His smile is genuine. He is probably as old as my dad would be now and he lives on in his own dream, where he just gave away a spare ticket to this strange tired smiling girl. She is probably the age of his daughter...

At a certain point it is impossible to distinguish the dream from the reality. You just have to float on...

London Notes

When travelling to London and back I made a few notes, which are mainly my feelings on the paper - as unpolished as they are in my mind. I decided I want to keep them, unlike many more that I later lost, deleted or simply never wrote down.

The first time was like in a dream, so intense that I missed the plane and had to stay overnight in the airport, napping on the uncomfortable benches. 

The second time was well-prepared, with polished admiration and smoothly increasing frequency of heartbeats along with the landing airplane. Only the insane blooming of the city with the colourful wings on the both side of the river could match the extent of the skyrocketing emotional fireworks in my whole human being, as if I was a child at my first Christmas. 

This time it was different, as if both the city and me grew up and needed to find the dolce vita in details. I sank into the deeper layers of the reality in search of clear molecular emotions. The ones I am taking with me like flashcards pinned on memory.

The comfort

I am still half asleep and feel slightly weightless in the morning, a bit in the air, wrapped in the soft and calmingly tender blanket. The latter seems to demonstrate the names of all the cities I would want to visit in an interesting calligraphic font. The poster of Woody Allen’s Manhattan musical is right above my head: I did not know Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton cast in that one, accompanied by Gershwin's music. I am alone in the bedroom, yet I can distinctly feel his warmth next to me and his odour on the pillow. I can hear him typing something next door, in the living-room and drinking English breakfast tea. Without milk. 

It is going to rain in London today...

Angry Randomness

There is a severe icy gap inside, which, now you are certain will never be fulfilled, no matter where you are, what you do and who you are surrounded with. It’s fate, disguised in your character to be as close to you as possible, to smirk when you live through hardships and to be proud when you are somewhere upper your limits.

Yet, you feel like a 16-year-old again, full of mistrust, resentment and hopeless transparency, not even angry, but furious as you refuse to take the fact that what you strive for never exists in this one of the worlds. It is medieval mummer’s farce, where to keep your individuality you need to be faceless and locked inside yourself, and “to be happy” is an expression from childhood fantasy book. It means to experience joy and feel content for a lengthy period of time. That is - almost always.

The system closes on you, blurring your perception of the time waves, and one day you just open your eyes and feel as if half of your life has passed and what you have done is naught: a couple of degrees, some fixed assets, nice family and friends, a beloved one if you are lucky. Yet in an instance people come and go, and the summer rain washes off all the bad memories, like pale milky spots from the window glass. Is this all what you wanted? The molecular dreams and aspirations, fed on stereotypes and common values, which are not to be questioned… ? And even those, who dare break it, are they better, calmer or maybe madder, than you are?

What if all the standard mindset is a madman’s raving? Artificial, skillful and with steady roots deadly embracing your brain? Its grasp is so firm, that you will never doubt it’s the one and only righteousness, you will never detour.

There is something missing in there, something  that makes you feel as if you live in a dream, which goes on from a fairy tale to a nightmare and the vice versa. You just cannot wake up, while the life passes by. The restlessness grows overwhelmingly, and what you stubbornly fight for  (in your dreams?) turns into worthless trifle the second after its yours.

And then what you want is to crawl out of your routine like a cat, turn your face to the sun and absorb its motherly warmth. You want to burn all the worldly mundane from your skin, color your eyelashes with the unbearable lightness of being and drown yourself in peace.

Cuz nothing else is left to make you feel sincerely alive. Nothing else, except for the day’s crimson anger.

The rest is duty.

Welcome back.

New Era

Only now, when I am sitting in a small studio apartment, which was hosting me for the last two months, and waiting for a car to move my luggage I clearly realize that this is the end. The end of something and the beginning of another, probably, the one called a mature life when you are totally exposed to the elements somewhere very far from home, when all your friends leave the place one by one and the beloved ones keep on being associated with green button on the left bottom side of the Facebook screen. Green buttons that keep you going when you want to break into 10000 pieces, be defeated and live in peace. The green buttons that chase me all my life...

My best friend says I always get what I want, it is just a matter of time. Looking back at my path of the last 3 years I can say he has a point. I wanted a good education, wanted to live and travel in Europe, wanted an interesting and decently paid job, wanted love.I have all of that now. Even more, I have and I have always had people around me who care about me and whom I care about FRANKLY, not just on words and smiles. There were even times when I was feeling absolutely happy, a precious feeling probably because of its short glimpses.

They say, the more you want in life the less you will be happy. When you get all you want, you keep on raising expectations, you get addicted to testing yourself and asking for more, you lose the realization that the peak is no longer reachable, because it is simply fake. You become a gambler, playing with life, something you will never defeat simply because you are temporary and it is not.

And I am right in the middle of this road now, moving forward with the maximum amount of uncertainty and insecurity in life, with a huge missing feeling inside me called KAROT in my mother tongue. And I am simply interested to count my steps, to see how far I can get in this game, as I know I will never win all the stages of it. And I will never stop until I reach a deadend...

The higher you fly the more dangerous it is to fall down. Am I scared?
Fear thou not; for I am with thee...

I am not religious, not at all, but I know there is something very powerful up there. I can't understand it, and probably I do not even want to. But I can feel it wants me to get a lesson, which is very soon to come. Very soon, because my next objectives in life are a bit contradicting each other, so there will be choice, probably the most important one to determine the next detour of my way. And there will be a real sacrifice, a one to live with for the rest of the life.

I do believe, I never change, I simply become more myself. Someone wise said it. And I hope I will not lose or betray my principles of staying humane. It is just a new era for me, where I would need to survive.
Once again.

Time to move on. Happy Easter!

Unfreeze

I lost my only file with the typically naive poetry, which I used to write in my teens. Nothing significant, just another part of childish me is gone. Most probably, it got deleted with other useless items that, I had supposed, were overcrowding my laptop. It is beyond retrieve.

We are used to crumbling the bricks of past to be able to move forward. I never do this on purpose, but it miraculously happens to me quite often. As a consequence, only academic files about business and management live on my hard disk now. They are smartly structured into family-folders, which never get messed up, as before. They are ruled by hierarchy and perfect order. Very similar to my consciousness.

I am crystal clear about what I am doing and for whom: it helps me fight the pressure out of my emotional system and survive. The clock is ticking, the progress is being made. There is an endless race between me and time, because I have no patience and because, among other things, I lost the ability to enjoy the everyday trifles. Those used to be the essence of my routine, as if drinking a very precious wine in the smallest possible sips so that one can admire the bouquet as long as possible. Sophisticated? Not really. 

The days flow through me, as if they are made of a pure liquid and I am a ghost from the indefinite future. 

But every morning I am getting on the yellow train, which takes me from Schiedam Centrum to Den Haag through the milky vapor floating on sleepy fields. It so happens that while I am pressing my cheek against the frozen window glass, the perfect circle of the glim emerges from the horizon, and I catch myself smiling. Slightly, not as a madman, but very much like a naive teen writing poetry at nights. A teen, that learnt a bit of Dutch and can understand some French, but, what is more important, still possesses the secret of translating enormously rich feelings' palette into simple words or melody.

.  

I need my euphoria back.