Before the flight

  Illuminated by the street lights, perched on his bar stool, Konstantin Konstantinos the Third looked out of an open window. He was pensive. Nearby, Night Owl wiped empty tables, looking in his direction with anticipation. He had just asked him a question and he awaited an answer.

'Name three greatest military commanders of all times', the question went, and now Konstantin Konstantinos the Third absentmindedly studied graffitis opposite the road, buried in his thoughts. 

'Napoleon will be one', volunteered Night Owl encouragingly. 

'Oh yes, said Konstantin Konstantinos the Third, 'and Alexander the Great just after that.'

Night Owl stopped in his tracks. 

'I thought you were going to name Hannibal' he raised his evebrows. 

'Hannibal was mostly about potential', said Kontantin Konstantinos the Third and took a sip of his beer. Soon, the window would need to be shut. It was getting late and we were the only people in the pub. It was also getting cold. I could feel my ears aching from the wind. 

 Luciano had only just arrived. But soon we were going to have to leave, as Night Owl said, the rules are very strict like that- his own wife had to wait for him outside. But Luciano remained enthusiastic as the next morning they were planning a trip to Lanzarote. There was going to be four of them, one of them absent but badmouthed by the other three. The fourth one, Ivan, had become a Lindsay Lohan of the four, after he had dared to book a separate train ticket to the airport. That was also one of the reasons why he wasn't joining, but it didn't surprise me. I had never met anybody called Ivan before, so it was only fitting I wasn't going to meet them that night. 

 Konstantin Konstantinos the Third was a bit disappointed about the window. He got accustomed to changing weather and cold winds. But Night Owl assured him it was indeed too cold. He was going to close the window long before we arrived. 

 But we had the last toast to drink, the one to celebrate Konstantin Konstantinos the Third receiving a research grant. 

'Hire me as your assistant', said Luciano who's, conveniently, his colleague. 

'Seventy percent of that is supposed to go towards assistant's salary', muttered Konstantin Konstantinos the Third grimly.

'I'd make a splendid salaried assistant', Luciano gulped his beer. 

'You'd have to call people'. 

'Okay, better no then.'

 After that, we were heading to a gyros place. Gyros that Konstantin Konstantinos the Third was frustrated that we couldn't pronounce. It's a very particular type of 'h'. Not everybody is familiar with this one. It's a throatal, quiet sound, that makes you want to drink tea in the sun and forget the world. A sound like no other. 

 Night Owl had started to lock up. The basement space where we celebrated a birthday not so long ago was now empty and deserted, our traces erased. The buffed tables shone with gloss. The board listed special offers for the day, beetrot, yorky and crushed swede. The new moon had already shone. Outside, the street went quiet. 

 And maybe I should tell this to Mr Frank, or a real therapist, or my dad when he calls tomorrow, that pubs on Monday evening are liminal spaces. You come from somewhere and you will walk away, to the airport, to the comfort of your bed, or into the unknown of the night. Meanwhile, Night Owl turned off the lights, and the city went to sleep. 

Mr Frank, elle panique! and the anguish of creating bucket lists

  It was a strange feeling to sit in front Mr Frank again. I had abandoned him so long ago I nearly had a problem to find my way through deceiving alleyways of my memory. And yet then he was, untouched by time, with his nailfile in his hand. Frozen in time, or rather, in this instance, frozen in my mind. 

 I could no longer recall the exact moment when my thoughts drifted away from Mr Frank. People say that the reason why it's so easy to do is that we don't appreciate those who are always available. And Mr Frank, living in my head, has been the most accessible person of them all. Still, knocking on his door after such a long time, I didn't expect his main complaint to be having been replaced by a real therapist. For years Mr Frank had provided the only therapy he believed I needed: just as all imaginary therapists, he simply always told me what I wanted to hear. Hence he liked to describe himself as an 'affirmative voice' that we all desperately need in our life. I never contemplated whether I needed Mr Frank anymore than any other parts of my psyche. The role of imaginary creatures, as I imagined, was to just be there, in the same way you furnish your flat with items that are known to be too bulky to easily remove. And yet, it was in a middle of my grief therapy when my thoughts carried me back to Mr Frank's office. Maybe the old, antipathetic figment of my imagination still held some sentimental value. Or maybe because I had finally appreciated the one-of-a-kind offering of an imaginary therapist: in the world that becomes more brutal by day, sugarcoating appears as almost a revolutionary act. 

 Whatever my reason was, soon I found myself in front of Mr Frank, and it quickly felt like coming home. He was drawn as usually, with a sharp, dark line of a soft pencil. He leant casually back in his armchair, operating his nailfile with utmost precision. Pencil drawings don't age. Not even the sharp ones. He didn't even look up when he uttered 'so what brings you back', not without a certain indignation. I explained it to him that holding onto an imaginary therapist, while undergoing real therapy for a very real grief, wouldn't be a good idea at least from mental health standpoint. He shrugged, as he usually does when he disagrees, and he disagrees only if he knows I will agree with him afterwards. 

'You are not qualified to offer grief therapy,' said I, 'you need diplomas for that, experience, online reviews.'

 The last example was bad and I knew it. Imaginary creatures live only inside a mind that created them, and naturally no one else could ever write a review for them. Still, Frank seemed unmoved. 

'What do they make you do, these real therapists in the real world?', he asked the nailfile. 

'A lot of exercies have to take life step by step and feel better.'

'What about a bucket list?, Mr Frank shot back, and I paused for a moment. 

'That's what people do while they're in crisis', he began to explain, and I felt I had missed his patient voice. 'They create a bucket list to have something to look forward to, and to treat different achievements as pit stops to fuller life.'

I wasn't sure how to explain that I had, in fact, failed profoundly on creating a bucket list, multiple times. Every time I jotted down a few things, immediately other emerged, that were just like the previous ones until I could no longer distinguish one goal from another. And then I concluded I really want to to everything, while simultaneously do nothing at all. But I guess that's everybody, at least to some extend. 

'There must be something you really want to do. Something you feel like you have to do', nudged me Mr Frank. 

'I have to go to IKEA', I muttered. It was true on two counts. I needed a lampshade and, speaking of bucket lists, that was where my only clearly articulated bucket list item lived. 

'I never had IKEA meatballs', I finally said, and Mr Frank jumped in his armchair out of joy. 

'You see, how easy it is! Bucket list item one, and now you have a true goal to keep moving forward towards.'

 What he was saying actually made a lot of sense. But what if, just what if, it remains my only bucket list item? And when you fulfill your only one goal, who will you become? How changed of a creature would I become if I finally ate IKEA meatballs?

 Just as back in the days, visiting Mr Frank left me with more questions than answers. And just as back then, I left knowing I would see him again. 

The End of the World on a Sunday afternoon- a pandemics story

  

 It was the End of the World waiting at my bedside as I slowly woke up. It didn’t even look at me, its eyes fixed on a faraway point in space. I looked out of the window and noticed that the sky was just as grey as when I last saw it, before sleep. The rooftops on the opposite side of the garden formed the same dusty image of an old postcard patterned with flickering lights as if in desperate attempt to escape oblivion. It wasn’t even that late, but yet I felt as if I had slept through the entire day and whatever miracle was supposed to happen had already been missed. It was time to go out. It was my going out day, since it was Sunday and Sunday was indeed the day when I went out. This time always made me remember the now unfamiliar names that I used to give to different days of the week. I reached inside my memory to get them out and say them out loud, repeating a few times until the sounds rounded in my ears and uncovered the layout of my old habitual existence. I didn’t know what I was doing it for. There was no more place for the words I so badly tried to remember. In the world that I woke up on that fateful Sunday, mornings no longer existed. Time was only ever measured in afternoons, each single measure blinding me with its bright grey robes.

 The going-out-day was a day of a fight. It was the risk that I had to take, fearfully reaching out to my shopping bag for comfort, but on that fateful day I was surprisingly willing to do so. There was nothing waiting for me at home, since the miracle was already gone and all that was left for me would be staring blankly at The End of the World, who wouldn’t look back at me. I knew all the dangers waiting for me outside. I knew well enough all the dangers of the day. Especially once being out I could see the day up close. I knew my way through it by heart.

 Standing outside my front porch, I thought of the End of the World, whom I so rudely left behind without as much as a word. I abandoned it to simply run some errands. But then it still wouldn’t look at me as I packed one of my reusable bags into the other and folded my shopping list, so I could safely assume it was going to do its job whether I stayed behind to watch or not. Afterall I had my own walk to make, not looking down at my boots, not paying attention to anything on my way as it could move then and who knows what would it do to me if it caught me staring. I was a point on a map, moving through the day. The route ran till the end of the street and then to the left, passing a fruit stall, a repair shop and an abandoned restaurant. Then it continued to the crossroad, where I didn’t have to look either left or right as I always knew when to cross, and when to wait. After that I strolled through an empty bus station, like I did thousands of times and into a dark little alley, that was once planted with blossoming trees to provide sweet shelter for couples in love. But these days it was only me there, with my two reusable shopping bags and a distressed shopping list. The alley opened into a square with two large buildings looming over my head, one of an old library, the other one of a heavily lit supermarket embellished with a red bricked pattern. The drugstore was squeezed in between two dark holes of permanently closed shops without names or purpose. I took a  basket and automatically packed a toothpaste, a bar of soap, a cheap book from the clearance shelf, a pack of dried toasts. As I exited in a hurry, I saw an elderly man, leaning on his stick and clutching a sizeable colouring book in his spare hand. I asked politely whether he needed any help, although he was clearly fine. He smiled with his eyes and thanked me and proceeded to walk away, as I felt a sudden longing to talk to him, to receive his thanks once again and fill my hunger with his sincere smile, his warm eyes. I stopped outside and watched him go as he moved along the cobblestones with his stick. I stayed so focused on him that I almost missed it.

 When I raised my eyes it had already started and there was nothing I could do. But deep inside I knew I wouldn’t have stopped it anyway. I was only there on errands, and there was The End of The World waiting for me back home. Meanwhile, the sky turned bloody orange. It cast its bloody light on the contours of the buildings and I felt a wave of heat rubbing against my skin, until I noticed the flames closing up on the cobblestoned street. I could no longer see the sky. Instead, emerging from the flames, I saw the shadow of the elderly man. I wanted to run to him, save him. But I stopped as if a wall stopped me. Through the glass wall, I saw the flames stand still. They were made of cupboard. Flickering on the sky, there were two large sheets of cupboard, painted bloody orange and moving back and forth, like clockwork or puppets. No one else stopped. No one else saw it. These were my own props of my own show, for my eyes only. I stared and stared at the clockwork flames, until the shadow of the older man disappeared consumed by the phantom fire.

 On my return, as I moved down the once enchanted alley, I realized it was finally getting dark. The newly arrived darkness soon soothed me and brought me calm. I turned back towards the square and saw that the cardboard fire was gone, now replaced by the familiar coolness of the night. The madness of the day was gone. I walked by a grocery store and collected a tin of sweetcorn to pack into my reusable bag. I was no longer in a hurry. Outside, the night reigned. The darkness emptied the streets and the air brought back the cold. Tiny stars shined above my head, few tiny faraway sorrows. I felt a sudden desire for white chocolate candies. I shouldn’t be having candies. But then I remembered The End of The World waiting for me at my bedside, still and abandoned with its eyes fixed on imaginary point beyond my bedroom wall. And so I ran my fingers through a bowl of candies, and I picked and picked and picked until both my bags were full. The friendly darkness screened my fears and desires as it always did without fail. My best friend darkness that never left my side, and now loyally followed me to meet my End of the World.

 It still didn’t look at me when I got back home. But this time, it was dark. And that’s how, on one Sunday, the world has ended. Not burning in cardboard flames, but with two cups of tea, the sweetness of the night and white chocolate candies.

You, yourself and yours. Why your boundaries might be crushing someone's heart.

 We have all seen it on TV- one of the characters is injured in an accident and all the ensemble, family, friends, coworkers, are rushing to the hospital through the midnight traffic. But have you ever seen it happening in real life? Don't worry- neither have I.

 I thought about it today after in the abyss of the Internet I stumbled upon a post of somebody who never visits their good friends or family members in hospital as a rule- because they don't like hospitals and they need to put their own needs first. At first I took it for sarcasm. Boy, I was wrong.

 Recently I seem to hear one thing from people way too often- 'You should take better care of yourself'. There are many reasons why it sets me off. Mostly, because me and myself are actually doing quite fine. I spend a lot of time with myself, so I can tell. I dedicate a lot of energy to myself, and sometimes I feel like I am somewhat spoiled with all this attention: long showers, testing new make up, treating myself to good food and sweet solitary evenings in the garden. I am being way too good to myself. Which is why I don't see the need to half-up twist myself and stretch myself over a mile for myself. Myself is just a one happy bunny.

 But just like all of you, I am attacked with daily self-centrism checklists coming from various advertisers. They tell me I must love myself. They tell me I must date myself. I must feed myself, cherish myself, and groom both my physical and emotional surface with care and thoroughness. I like hearing that, don't you?

 At the times of extreme popularity of online therapy offers, what startled me the most is a success of sites like 7 Cups of Tea. It offers a free service providing an anonymous person with a 'listener'- usually a regular geezer who, that's all they're allowed to do, listens to them. People who use these sites often don't require professional help- they are looking for a friend. That constitutes an entire army of people who have no one in real life who would listen to them. Perhaps people in their lives follow one of simple 'wellness rules' out there, like the one I found, to my terror, re-posted by some of my friends on social media. It advised that each time you contact your friend in the hour of need, you ask them first if they have 'mental space' to talk about it. I do not mean to be brutal, but if you are genuinely running out of mental space, then you might have a clutter in there. Tidy up. I took a note to never call these friends again, under any circumstances, Armageddon included.

Let's talk. My complicated relationship with food and nutrition.

 It's been a while as I have been pondering on writing this article. I have done a lot of thinking on the subject quite recently and some of the demons hiding in the shadow of my past have re-emerged. No longer able to scare me, instead they made me believe that I have something important to say. So let's talk about something I had tried to forget for years, and what is still extremely difficult for me to talk about: my eating disorders.

 When I look back, I think it started when I was around seven. The first thing I came to hate about my body were my knees. You see, my knees somehow always had a completely round shape, while other girls had those beautiful narrow ones with a small, pointed bone. Regardless of my weight, my knees always stayed like this. The more I contemplated it, the less of a solution I saw. Now I see how this disliking of my knees in childhood influenced my life for another decades, and maybe forever.

 After I moved apart from my parents, I spent a couple of months living only on two rolls and a green tea per day. I was an introvert, living according to the conviction that life is hard and difficult and any self-indulgence is pointless and in longer term unsatisfactory. My rigorous eating routine reflected those views and soon became a part of my life philosophy. I thought I was being pragmatic, now I wonder if I wasn't depressed.

 My surroundings seemed entirely supportive towards my lifestyle. I trained at dance school and everyday I heard praises regarding my super slim body, so 'healthy' and allegedly resulting from my active lifestyle. In reality it was a result of so-called 'Victoria Beckham diet', one of the pro-ana favourite and allowing you to eat only one meal a day. Until my mother became eventually concerned, no one had ever expressed a single thought of worry, no one had ever wondered why they had never seen me eating, no one had ever absorbed a single thought that maybe this was not right.

 And I was not alone. I had a strong support network of other girls living according to the same principles. There was Cleo who drunk only Coke Light for three weeks and Sue, an aspiring dancer who mastered the craft of vomiting after every meal. And Izzie, who knew all 'miracle diets' by heart. There was a shop across the road that sold only jeans up to size 8, down to even four times extra small. There was always an urban legend of a bullied fat girl who tried to kill herself and though no one knew her everybody felt for her and understood her decision.

 But first of all: life was all about how much you weigh. In the world we lived in it was the main factor to determine who you are and how you are going to end up. And, it was all wrong.

 I guess I could say that I grew out of pro-ana. Eventually, I started liking food like every other human being and at some point even got fat- which I later lost due to healthy eating habits and exercising. And I could just end this story with a happy ending, but if you are expecting it to conclude like that, you will be disappointed. Because my story is not over.

 Everyday, right now, there is another girl somewhere in college living on two rolls per day. There is another aspiring dancer Sue vomiting after meals, and another Cleo whose only nutrition are carbohydrate drinks. Day by day, right next to us grows another generation of women in complicated and toxic relationship with their eating habits.

Because as I am writing this I still live in a world that obsesses over food and nutrition. We have clean eating and other eating trends and thousand of definitions of the word 'healthy'. We are just as obsessed about our weight as we used to be. Body positive movements didn't change the thing. Because it is still all about weight. We celebrate weight or we despise it but yet we assign a lot of importance to it. We compliment people if they lose weight and scold them if they gain it, and the majority of population still believes that a person heavier than 50 kilos has been 'overindulging'.

 There is a brilliant moment in 'Boston Public' series, when a thirty-something teacher, a healed anorexic, gets casually asked whether she'd like to lose weight. That sets her off on a dark journey, and her mind starts falling again, all the way down the rabbit hole.

 Words are harmful. Words about weight are harmful and dangerous and can be life-threatening to survivors.

There is a more recent movement that I like, that tells us a lot of what we need. It's Jameela Jamil and her 'I weigh', which emphasizes the need to stop talking about weight altogether, and focus attention elsewhere. You weigh what you are, and you are not what you weigh. I hope that in the future we will finally stop talking about weight. That there won't be any new Cleos and Sues, and that no one will feel the need to write an article like the one I am writing right now.

But today, my story is not over. It is not over because we still live in a body-shaped wonderland. Because it's a story of all women in this world- forced inside a frame of weight, like nothing else mattered.

Listening to the radio- part 2.5

 Over the years as my life has drifted apart from the lives of my college friends, I always felt that one of the things that had set us apart was the radio. Living in a relatively large country with a notoriously terrible infrastructure, everyday they were driving miles in their Skodas and Coupes, stopping at their flagship gas stations to grab a take-away coffee. And, during these long hours on the road, they listened to the radio. Few popular radio channels were a soundtrack of their lives. They were telling them what's trending,  what's new, and what's just happened, picking the most important pieces of information to help them live entertaining but orderly lives. I had no idea what was happening in there, on air, with these voices filling people's cars every morning. The less often I heard it, the more it came across to me like a message of an alien broadcasting from planet Zogg somewhere in fifteenth galaxy in order to save their now nearly extinct culture from oblivion. 

 It took something else for me to embrace the radio as my own: the newly updated evolution of online radio. But let me tell you that from the beginning.

 Back in the days we had a dream with Alonso to have our own studio somewhere in the attic, necessarily overlooking a busy crossroads with red buses passing on a daily basis. We would have had a small side table next to the window, so we could look at the traffic outside everyday at breakfast. And now and then we would have stopped the time with a glass of wine in hand. Four seasons will all merge into a postcard of our time, and life would have been changing colours according to jazz. Before I met Alonso, I had always associated jazz with clearing out old paperwork. Probably because somewhat sophisticated nature of jazz made this job a little less dull, and being busy such a mundane activity didn't allow much of jazz-related thinking, that life is now three times faster and that vintage record shops had now become a stamp of hipster fueled gentrification. 

 It all happened years before 'La La Land', and years before regular couples' dream about an attic studio have become a cliche and stopped having any meaning. Until one time I received an unexpected reminder from my time and it, surprisingly, came through radio. It was no ordinary radio to begin with, but a livestream YouTube radio called by a sublime name of 'Rainy Jazz'. It was nothing of a typical radiostation I knew from my friends' cars. As the description said, it played jazz and gentle bossa nova, and it was giving off a vibe of a quiet cafe next to some train station, enchanted in time. Oh, and it's raining. All the time. 

 There are no words in this world for me to describe the soothing power of rain. The rain sound heals souls and mends broken hearts, patches us up until we're back in one piece and can walk. There are records of the rain sound of up to twenty four hours length, and long ago they became my own adult-life lullaby. This is how life has come full circle, and now I am having my own soundtrack- the one that brings me back into the studio in the attic that never existed.

What is it about- writing advice that no one needs

 Recently I have been given quite a few (unsolicited) chunks of advice in connection to my (limping) writing career. One of them (from a friend of mine who read maybe one of my works in the past five years) was to have an 'idea'. Because you see, a good idea is everything. You can be a great wizard of words but if there is no story, it just falls flat. Another advice though, given to me on the same day, completely trumped the previous one: anyone can have an idea, it's your style, it's the way it flows that captures the reader, otherwise, even the best story simply falls flat. Both of them came from people who didn't even write their own bachelor dissertations on their own. 

 To add to the above, none of them was actually a keen reader. I could probably go on forever listing all the bad advice I received from people who don't do what I do and who are not even a potential audience for my work. However, I am in many ways grateful to them, for an invaluable lesson: what advice not to listen to. 

 I used to be one of these people who valued everybody's opinion just because it is an opinion. And as social creatures we should value the opinion of others, as other people are recipients of our work. However, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who truly supported me over the years: those who congratulate me on my good result in a short story competition, came to see my play, read more than a few lines of my articles. That is of course, due to busy lives we are all running an nothing bad about it, if it wasn't for continuous advice I receive from people who have no idea what I'm doing. All this advice has mostly one and only result: immediate demotivation. 

 The human talent to demotivate others is nothing new, but has probably become particularly visible in social-media-driven culture of effortless success. Some people call it 'hating', I call it new, interactive ways of morning coffee-moaning. Back in time, people used to complain during breakfast over a newspaper. Nowadays, they google things- and then, all of a sudden their morning moaning can go viral, overwhelming us with crowds of DIY experts in different fields. 

 So unless you have a valid point, or you are specifically asked, or you have a genuine interest in exploring other people's capacities, if all you want to do is to fuel my lack of self-worth in forever-beginning authors world, your advice will just fall flat. And to those of you, who are losing their energy and passion over constant attacks of morning moaners, get a pair of ear plugs, and keep going. That should do the trick.