December nostalgy or meeting by the well

 There was a popular song around ten years ago going like: 'One day we'll meet by the well, maybe in the better world, our wives will be pretty and vodka won't harm us anymore'. The more the time goes by, the more beautiful the well, gathering your memories and dreams that never came true. And the more the time goes by, the more blurry is the image of the well: the more puzzling is the question what to say. 

 Some other day I was walking around the streets I used to pass every day, the same streets and the same noise of random talks, the same smell of Russian gasoline. I passed an old shop on the main street (if you can call it any) which used to be our shop in the distant jokes, mine and Silvia's. Couple of days ago it was Silvia's Birthday. And under a thrill or a hint, I dropped her a message. She's happy she said, wishing she could, just like me, come over for Christmas. All of the memories have come alive, like when we walked to a party outside the town, and we found a cigarette lying on the snow, or like... The streets became a bit depressive, were they always like this? so I decided to come back home, and refused to leave again to meet my (somehow long-time-no-seen) cousin. He reached my home around an hour later. A bottle of wine, long time no drunk- red one, I don't really drink the red one anymore, hang on I practically don't drink wine at all. This one bring memories, like then when... You remember or when... 

 After a while he asked me if I had any news from a friend. Used to be our friend, but no, sadly. I was about to, write/call/step by/ whatever else but then there is this threat following it, the threat of unbreakable silence. After a while, you don't want to share things which went wrong. You stick it at the back of your head with a label 'personal', not destined to a friend marked as 'long-time-no-seen'. Ideally, such meeting should be joyful, and you should dig and dig until you find again all those qualities you used to appreciate in the person and, which is worse, inside yourself. Otherwise you can sentence the two of you to silence, not only a silence for one evening, but the eternal silence of your memories and past events, a silence which will be causing a hick-up everytime you ever recall the face of the person. It's that kind of silence no one could bear.

 My cousing is a counsellor. There is probably many things being a counsellor can teach you, but there is surely one of special significance: avoiding problematic relationships. And these are random relationships formed between two people meeting once again after a time of dispersal: as they are never what they ought to be. The bond of friendship is a magnificent creation of experience. Experience which, without continuity, breaks through and dies forever. Maybe if some people were counsellors, just like my cousin, they would know it. Unfortunately, they are not and they fall over and over into a spiral of sympathy and politeness which is right there to destroy their memories forever. 

 Coming back to my cousin, recently he received an offer from a friend to join a meeting with their mutual old friend. Surprisingly for the other side, he refused. 

-Are you crazy, what am I going to tell him?

-Exactly, what are you going to tell him at first place?

 By the chance of this dialogue, the eyes of my cousin and Frank are meeting. I can see them both, two counsellors communicating by the code we will never understand, nodding in agreement.

-The answer is always the same- explained Frank with his right hand raised in the act of clarification. -We met and it was brilliant. Because they always meet for a beer- both sides count on a possibility of getting drunk and let it 'somehow' go!

 I couldn't really join this discussion since I, for one of my rules, try to avoid people from the past. But in that matter my life surely divides into two periods: before, and after I met Kati.

The Escape

 These days I start to give to my pieces very short titles. Not like I wanted to make them more catchy, it is just we live in the world where everything gets shorter, story, relationships, sleep, the time between the first date and going together to bed. Nothing wrong about it, as life, as you can see, is short. 

 This shortness continues silently suffering inside me, dying a little bit with me each day which is over. I am missing these lost days, missed forever and left behind with no regrets and no place to look back, leaving only few hopes for what is there to look forward to. I feel guilty for them. I am abandoning them one day by another. Three days ago I abandoned three years of my life. And it was worth it. 

 One year ago I gifted my readers with a detailed report from my birthweek- not asking you for permission, for which I apologize. Cause there was no transition, no flowers falling from the sky, no fireworks of my way and no easy answers. For all that, I apologize. To myself. 

 This year my Birthday went quiet. Just passing, like a passenger outside the window, giving you a random look only to walk away within seconds. Because this year I know that life is not to provide us with easy answers and what we want is not necessarily what is to make us happy. There are not any great things to wait for, not a happy ending from a book, not a spectacular movie final neither an enthusiastic audience rooting for our success. Life is too low budget- doesn't provide even the curtain. 

 And if you understand what am I saying, it means that once you were, just like me, looking at your life as a race of achievements. Moving from task to task- throwing an amazing Birthday party, getting a job you want, increasing your income, realizing an exciting project, gaining good friends, meeting the one, having children. Achievement to achievement, task to task, a swirling buffonade constructing an eternal wall between the winners and the losers. What turned to be against the original plan, is mostly that the second ones tend to be happier. 

 Today I wanted to write. But instead, I escaped again. I spent a lovely day though, thank you! I spent it in the world of my imagination. In this world there is no future, there is no time. There is nothing I am waiting for. It's just a street and me, walking without any purpose, looking at the windows, observing how other lives go on behind them, in the light of the yellow bulbs. Thousands of bulbs, thousands of lives, breathing simultaneously in the rhythm of the city, which is not the city anymore, but something else. After dark the whole world is only a magical kingdom of the night, with its own secret treasures hidden behind the walls. It will never show you these stories- you have to write them yourself. 

 So these days, I did not achieve to enjoy my birthweek. Instead, I celebrate every moment, and if I have to I take on my magic carpet and fly away. Because there is nothing more to look forward, no magical solutions, no more breathtaking miracles about to happen, nothing beyond that moment. Because all of them, magic, solutions and miracles come in silently, as a stranger. There is nothing beyond this life which is now. Nothing else is today on the menu.

Home

 This week I suddenly got a little busy and didn't have much time to think about where to push my life to achieve the next step. Then afterwards there was a surprising thought just about to cross my mind: will my holidays, planned for a long time ahead and approaching day by day, actually happen. The reason for such doubts is nothing but beaurocracy and a simple fact that sometimes it is better to stay in place. But now, exactly, better for what? Because what on Earth can be more important than going home? 

 It was supposed to be a nice Friday night with Paloma Faith the great at the Proms but the sudden sadness about not going, turning off my long-planned holidays, has taken away all of the joy of the great night. I wished to come back home. And before you ask, what home?- there is a large amount of factors making us define our home. Some like to say that home is wherever your heart is- that's one of the biggest deceive one can do to themselves.

The definition of feeling home is strictly bound to the natural instincts- it's one of the most dangerous, illusional and desperate need in the history of human being- it's a need for safety.


 On Friday night I found myself needing a home- surprisingly- my home in East London. Just like many years ago before Thinkersoup and Tigerlily decided to head to Edinburgh, before A. have left to Belgrade, before Mr Charming has found his destiny as a sex guru, before The Guy I Lived With abandoned the big city flash, before Vincenzo's favourite team lost one time too much. Before that happened, once there was a home. But the one I was desperately running to on Friday night was a different one. It was a home which has built itself, somewhere aside, on a margin of my biography. It was a home within myself, holding tightly in between my own walls which only took some words to understand. I was running home.