“In order to write about life first you must live it.” – Ernest Hemingway
-
Lost in Space
She’s back. Her eyes look different, like traveling back and forth, didn’t do well. As if the pressure of being in different places at the same time, lingers on.
She’s silent. While I explain the grammar of things like past perfect and past continuous. This new language for her. She wants to be in Ukraine, with her family, friends and father. Not in fucking Brussels.
She’ll go back, when peace enters the mind of all people in Ukraine and Russia, and the rest of this judging world. When they don’t see fear, but see the same people, with different dreams maybe, but with the same wishes: to be free and to life their own life, far away from in ego rooting politicians.
That’s what I see in her eyes.“How was it?” I ask here after some silence and preparing exercises online.
“I’m even more motivated now to learn the language.” She says, not ironically, she means it, I see determination in her eyes.
“Yes?”
“Yes, you can’t believe it…”
Lena hesitates.
“It’s not my hometown anymore, I didn’t recognize my beautiful city. It’s…”
She takes her mobile phone and shows me a small movie she made. Shaking images of feet, a street and a weird sound in the background.“The sound that you hear is from drones flying over our city.”
Lena pauses for a moment, no, that’s not what she wanted to see.I hold back.
“Shall we continue working on grammar?” She nods.
I open the site. She looks ahead, a little absentmindedly. She knows that she will have to learn this language, that she will have to stay here for some time.“I’m sorry, I can’t focus”
“No problem.”“I feel hurt, I can’t find the energy right now, it will take time.”
“Just take your time, and make small notes on what you feel and think, maybe someday you can tell your story.”
She gives me a little smile. It won’t have sense to do grammar now.
Maybe it’ll help to talk about what happened, and I try to open some doors.
“But, everything is okay now you went back, you know with the papers and stuff?”
“Yes, and my mother had also a shop there,” she tells a little more enthusiast, “I grew up in that shop you know, helping customers and tourist, from since kindergarten.” She smiles, but it changes quickly.
“Now we closed it, we did sell everything…” While she bites away her remorse.“And how is it with your family?”
“Given the circumstances, well.”
“They don’t want to go to another country like you?”
“They can’t, they have sons and they can’t leave the country, many man has to stay.”
“And your father, you did see him?”
She nods, and definitely doesn’t want to say too much about it. A little tear tries to escape, but she holds on.
“A friend of mine, twenty years old, fights at the border and he has been shot by a Russian soldier… He’s dead now.”I feel useless, I want to help her, to comfort here, but, I can’t. I lay for a second my hand on Lena’s back. She smiles. I look at her. This brave young woman. Whose situation is far more anxious than mine.
“You now, it is really courageous how you deal with it and did dare to go back, and still want to fight for your future here. I don’t know how I would manage or even hold on.”Lena smiles. Her eyes shows that there’s still a spirit alive in her. Yes, she’s got a story to tell.
And I? Maybe. If I can shake off my useless thoughts and can become a better version of myself. I could tell something about the things I see and the people I meet, and my family’s story, who’s also broken but, on another level.
One day she and I will tell our own story. Completely different but still the same, a story of people searching for more humanity and writing about breaking so called rules, and about healing; cause if you want to improve the world, you first start with yourself, your own roots and if possible, your family’s heritage and then you listen and reach out to those who are lost, as the healing will evolve in connecting with each other. Not in fighting.
No president or king or leader should start their mission because they feel broken and projects their fears on others. If they do, he or she or them will just react as a small lost child. Like many others. And it’s okay to go on a personal mission, but not when you involve millions of people with it, while hurting them, because you’re just lost.
Lost in space.
As we all are.
Some days, some years.
Photo by Photographer Enric Cruz López, found on Pexels. -
To be alive
I am 21, and at this age I am really discovering it, that I am alive, or rather becoming aware that I am effectively breathing, feeling and being who I am. That my mind and body are one unit, which together can control each other, and that both are inseparable here on this globe. But above all, I am finally learning to feel that my body, also, is alive and taking in all possible energies that it encounters. From which I don’t have to run away, but may protect myself for it.
So I discovered during last sleepless nights, that for years I was drained by what seemed pleasant or sensational, such as social media, streams with endless moments of sitting and lying in front of a screen, forgetting and vegetating. Whether there is nothing around you, or there is very much, each time you have to be able to stay with yourself for a moment and feel what you are all experiencing. And I forgot that for far too long, fleeing time and again into fantasies.
Even if it is an apparent pain, if you concentrate and feel your body struggling, feel your blood flowing and your mind flowing, then you can also be able to enjoy this, because you are alive. That’s what I find myself doing, when I exercise or push myself. That feeling of letting go and moving on, I don’t dwell on that enough. I enjoy too little the “to be or not to to be” of life and daring to feel that.
No urge to be existential, but learning to live consciously, without a blindfold or sleeping mask or someone else’s glasses on. Existentialism is allowed, of course, when you are self-aware of your life, the life of the others around you and the here and now. In fact, to me that is the highest form of existence. But an existentialism in which you start seeing yourself as being “more than the other”, as an “I am forever because I do this or that”, that may lead to an obsession, which in turn is an alienation from existence. Life is a being, not a I have to do this or that, or a search for the meaning of, it is there and it is who you are in that moment and want to be, without running away.
So, I felt the last few days like a hurricane waiting to blow everything and everyone over, with a body on which there is a head, in which it spins with a tornado of thoughts, but also like someone who doesn’t dare to stay with himself. Like a madman who wanted to run away. Now I drop everything for a moment and try to concentrate, feel that I am, like everyone else, human, humane, a conscious living being with all the fucking shit that came with it and still comes with it. Good or bad.
Every tension, every vibration is now an enjoyment, away from the cutthroat sociology and the imposed bullshit, even this bullshit, I let it go and live my own life.
That’s what I’m trying to keep to myself now anyway.
-
Life for lust (Part 3)
It’s just sex
We were in film history class. German Expressionism. What I found an incredibly fascinating art period, did nothing for a while. It was as if Faust was sitting next to me and whispered, go now man, do it now, you’ll be rid of it.
Nosferatu, Murnau 1922 It was Rusty sitting next to me who noticed that I was grumbling about something.
“What’s wrong?”
“Um, I thought I had contact, a girl from third year, but she was just teasing me a bit, she enjoyed the attention and that was it.”
“Well, the hell with that bitch then.”
“Yeah, but I just want to, you know, with a woman for once.”
“Seriously man, are you still a virgin?!”I looked away, a little embarrassed.
“Go, If you can’t wait till miss perfect, go and visit some hookers, you’ll get rid of it and learn something, it’s near here!”
That was true, we walked past attractive and not so attractive characters displayed in lighted windows almost daily when we had to go to one of the college campuses in the station district. But I ignored it, I didn’t like it. Even though sometimes they seemed to look sweet and winked me, if I dared to look a little longer.
“It’s just sex.” He said.
And that stuck.But Rusty’s a weirdo, has a room next to me in the hallway and watches videos with real life chickens he fancies. And like me, he likes black clothing, but he has long blond wavy hair, is two feet tall and looks a bit like Max Schreck from Nosferatu. He just has to look deeply into the eyes of another person, male or female, it doesn’t matter to him and the night that follows I can hear him imitating a rooster, kukeleku! No, no kukeleku for me.
Still, the hormones are raging through my body, and if I want to be able to focus on my studies, it’s time to know what it is like, with a woman, and finally, yes finally…
But how? It will happen late at night, or very early. And then I go in. A sensual half-naked full slender sex goddess with dark warm eyes floats up to me and tells me what I want to hear and then does to me what I want to feel.
She gently unbuttons what is attached, touching every bit of naked skin with her delicate fingers. We take a bath then. The bathroom is all white and has the appearance of a Roman temple, with columns all around and a large mirror in the middle, a beautiful reproduction of the Venus of Milo and in the middle of it my Goddess. In a short transparent robe, she slips into the foaming bath, she dips a sponge into the sacred weeping water and gently rubs it over my body. In a huge celestial bed, lined with mirrors framed in gold, she then opens her soft shell that shimmers and sucks me in with incredible force.
And I feel, and I slide, away into an oasis of lust as her deep dark hair floats like a veil before my eyes and she places her loins over what too often crosses me. She teases with minuscule twists and turns, gently, I bite, I caress, I reach into the sheets, needing a moment to get used to it, open to the pleasure. She clasps my whole being like this, hand in hand she grabs me, entangled in each other, freed from so many years of desire, I finally … come to rest.
Yes, it must be something like that.
But.
I didn’t go past it.
I didn’t.
Never so.
It.
Is.
Enough.
That fantasy. -
Life for lust (Part 2)
It’s your choice
“And how about if I go one day to the ladies of pleasure?”
A long silence fell in the car. I could see his thoughts grinding. As if he first had something, like yes, of course, I did it also, and then suddenly changed his mind.
“Uhm, well, son, that depends on what you want, I’m a poor counsellor in that, I only knew your mother and have no other experience in those things. ” After which he coughed for a moment.
“But, is it wrong if I just do that, you know?”
“Nothing is wrong, if it is by mutual consent, the difference is that in this case you are paying for it and well, of course you don’t know the background of those ladies.”
“And if I were to ask about it first, and it turns out that she is doing it purely out of business and is not forced into it, if everything feels normal?”
“I don’t know, you choose, I would never do it myself,” he hesitates for a moment, “you decide who you want to be.”What the fuck do I get from that! Who I want to be?! I want to be able to decide freely and talk about it openly, without feeling judged.
There fell another one of those awkward silences, a g- uhm, with nothing in the end. Fortunately, I am different from him. Although I envy his often calm relatable words and stoic patience. He always leaves me very free, at the same time he does let me feel whether he approves or not. With my mother I don’t dare to bring it up at all, every time I did something, that coloured a little outside the lines, she indicated that it came from my biological father, because she would never do like that. Such as when I had a rage at school or at home, or just said very open and confrontational things, things they would rather not hear.
So anyway, his advice, as always, I’m ignoring. Now I have to plan how I’m going to handle it.
It has to be done quickly. As soon as my condition is better again, a week of no fast food, no alcohol and no online wank it now. After that, I will do it.
-
Life for lust (Part 1)
Part One
I’m going to do it. Otherwise, I will jump on every human being who looks me in the eyes and smiles or better laughs at me, while I’ll give my whole soul and it would be sucked dry only to be extinguished like a cigarette butt afterwards. I don’t want to enter a relationship like that. Not with the first person who just wants to dive into bed with me, if there would be one.
I want a woman who will suit me, who will understand me, hold me and love me as I will love her. Anyway, that could take a long time before this really happens. The woman I encountered where so far out of reach or troubled by their past, that my good looks only wouldn’t have a chance to change their mind. So, in the meantime, I am going to indulge not my romantic ideals but my lust in the city’s many galleries.
This kind of bullshit haunted throughout my thoughts, because that drive, lust for life or better the life for lust didn’t let go and demanded all my attention. My neanderthal brain of a highly aged adolescent has been thinking only about … that. Yes, I just want that touch, that contact and to go just a little further than, a sweet smile and a “you’re a good listener.” I want to hold, love, and have sex!
‘Roses by dEUS’ screamed loudly throughout my room as I tried to grasp my desires and explain to myself why paying for sexual contact doesn’t hurt.
Meanwhile, my fifteen-year-younger autistic brother, Eugene, was stuck like a gum to my sister, Christine, who did get bored to the bone. They can neither with nor without each other. Two wonderfully complex beings, perhaps more complex than terrible me.
I am their adopted brother, half, my mother remarried. My real dad left us when I was five and my new dad adopted me. And then twelve years later, welcome sister and after her, welcome brother. But neither of them tolerates anything from each other, cat and dog is still too light a phrase to use. So, I sent Eugene to his room, with muted aggression, for it’s always the same. It made me sometimes half mad, and then I hoped the weekend was over soon, so I could flee to my room in Brussels.
dEUS was now screaming even louder through the domestic corridors, if one is allowed to scream, so may I, and I turned up the volume some more.
Silence.
I had solved it. She polished my bike for a fee and he sat down in his favorite chair complaining into my old handheld voice recorder, record after record.
Finally, back to town.
My father drove me to my room at the campus. It is one of the few times my father and I really talk or rather complain about social problems, trying to make comments about people around us in the most cynical way, call it our way of putting social pressures into perspective or just intellectually bullshitting. This kind of “car bound” quietly grew, it felt like two peers, me in a pre-midlife and my father in a similar real midlife crisis.
But now it was time to have a real father-son conversation about the delicate subject: is it okay to go to a sex worker?
-
Stunned
you pound headstrong
with regained violence against closed doorsbeing free as you thought
pushes you unexpectedly to places you already cameour stupid heads bangs itself
against broken fortresses until it explodesyou lay the remains to rest
where no one has come yet, heroism lies far awayand you bash and you bash and you cash in
and you hit backand smack down
even getting up hurts -
Back to Odessa
The bus drives through large puddles of water. Rain falls from the sky. It drives towards my hometown. I can still hear her voice in my head, a voice that crackles a little, but otherwise neatly conceals all emotion. I turn on the sound of my earbuds, louder, it doesn’t help, I turn it off, pause.
“I’ve got to tell you something. I’ll be away for two weeks.” I looked at Lena as she sits here for her weekly extra language lessons. She’s from Ukraine and want to become a famous filmmaker, like Eisenstein. But in the daily lessons, she still suffers with the language.
“Me and my mother have to go back to Odessa.”
“Why?”
“Because of papers, for our house and my school.”
“Can’t they do it online?”She shakes off, not. Silence.
“I hope you will be safe and will be safe back.”
She nods. A somewhat awkward silence falls down.
“You’ll see your family back?”I try to comfort her. She lets a small smile escape.
She is going to a dangerous area, by bus 48 hours away, she said. Also for her school there, as she combines school here with that in Ukraine. For when she goes back, she doesn’t want to lose time and wants also a degree in her country. Lena takes classes online since the war started, sometimes she even has exams at the same time as us and combines them. These are periods when you notice she is on the verge of a breakdown.
She has a pale face, large eyes and a hidden smile. I knew her for some weeks now. Helping her out with translations. We follow the same creative writing classes.
I didn’t question further. I continued to give some more language tips and asked if she is going to keep a diary. She immediately said: “yes, I already do”. I gave her an encouraging pat on the back. Like old friends do.
“And send me some photos with the point of view from your house to the sea,” she told me that their flat has a balcony overlooking the Black Sea, “and from the Potemkin stairs.” Yes, she was definitely going to do that.
“Only when it is safe outside.” I emphasize to her.
That port is very important, both for Ukraine and Russia, and the rest of the world. The rain keeps pouring down. I have to be careful not to lose control. There is a war nearby and far away in the world and here there is flooding, a consequence of our industrialized society, just like the power and greed of so-called leaders that causes the rest of this misery.
I wave the thoughts away and turn on the volume of the music.
-
Tied up like Cupid
It is urgently time to write my story.
I’m studying at the film academy. Screenwriting, because I love cinematic stories, and I prefer to write them myself. My friends are better with images behind the camera, I with images on paper. I’m in my hundredth year, at least it feels that way. It is as if time has no hold here, and I am forever locked in an endless course of writing lessons and pale encounters.
I sit here with a bunch of frustrated storytellers, and in the meantime you must make your own way. And you do what you can, with the resources that aren’t there. You have to find those on the street, your best learning curve as a writer. Meanwhile, I gasp and long for love, because at night in my room I feel absent, as if no one would notice me if I dropped dead.
The streets are crying. It is Brussels. I decide to go out, to wander. I like it, even if I am willingly offered drugs that I refuse just as willingly. It remains a metropolis that is real, no masks, dirty, somewhat clumsy in construction and renovation, but with a masterful history.
I wander around and hope to find them, my muse, my inspiration. The love, the laughter and yearning. For now, it’s just a heavy suppressed craving, like Cupid tied up in a cage watching what isn’t there or maybe never was.
So it’s time to write my story.
-
Train wreck
Steaming heat from the countless holes collides and jumps with the cold, screaming children's voices, an electronic sound swells like tears from hell, they play up, from the restless animal, monotonous noise, silences thoughts, and lead the way home.
I leave the waiting room, while a woman right in front of me slams the door. Dragging suit and bag, I wait on the platform. An electronic voice tells me that the train has been delayed and how it will come, that I will also miss the next connection. I will arrive late at my parents’ house. As always on Friday evenings.
Children playing, running around and crawling under Dad’s legs, pushing each other off the platform, no fear of being run over. I only seem to have that fear. I fix my eyes on an old pot with green moss and a cactus in the middle, standing proudly upright as the lone rectified thing being pleased by the wildly rushing wind.
A big lady can't explain my strange behaviour, when I stare, with endless gaze, at that dirty old pot.
The iron wreck stops and pulls me in.
Again children, innocently calling on daddy, and I think, yes, I want lots of children later. I will populate this greyed-out world with children, young blood to combat old mistakes. As I stare out the window, I suddenly see that I no longer have eyes, only 2 black holes, empty and soulless…. I get hot and cold, sweat imprisons me, my heart pounds senselessly, I try to keep breathing, just breathing, try to think of my little room, where I will talk to images that should give volume to the empty feeling.
I look at myself, quietly alienate, no longer knowing what and why I think, why I am and why it feels that everything I do, is on repeat.
Shot from “The General” with Buster Keaton.
Fastfood romantics 