Tu choisis quoi; Un lovestory de 1ère ou 2e classe?
Perhaps it wasn't so much my reluctance to ask what you wanted
As your refusal to acknowledge my questions
As if it was somehow my own fault
that I did not know, did not understand
How you were waking up and falling asleep with someone else
Yet you still wanted more, you still needed me.
Perhaps I was always better off not knowing.
Perhaps you really did not know, either.
You would shamelessly demand
and I would shamefully empty my centre to give you more.
We are each other's worst version
Holding on to one another even though we were both weighed down
We think it's gravity, but it is the anchor uf us
We are sinking.
You asked me once, do you remember?
- Why do we keep doing this?
I sighed, sensed you did not want an honest answer.
- Animal instincts, I replied wearily.
You seemed pleased at the thought.
As if all that guilt you were feeling had been taken away.
I had absolved you, but what I hoped for was my own absolution.
We are children running to the playground,
Trying to navigate, crossing a minefield
we've banned most of what we have in common to numb our bad conscience
The memories, the guilt, the happiness, the hurt
Even fantasies are off limits.
This perfectly designed self-deceptive reality would crack, of course.
And how many times can we really break til we're shattered?
Lost and found
Something's going on. Underneath the surface, but I feel the bubbles rising.
It's been a long time coming, like an abstract premonition breathing me in the neck.
This presentiment of me becoming myself.
No, that's not it.
Of the world becoming more accustomed to me, perhaps?
Anaïs Nin wrote "I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself".
And Jeanette Winterson wisely added that "to be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a break-down".
And I do have this sense of things around me finally getting used to the shape of me.
As though the world got tired of trying to change me and decided to let me be.
And decided to start giving me compliments for being who I am.
Or, perhaps it was always just me getting in my own way.
So busy trying to be myself that I did not realize I was just playing the part of me.
I cultivated my quirks, but it was always more an act of defiance than the ease of just being.
Always cherishing solitude, but I treated even that with defensiveness,
shutting others out so that I could reconciliate with what I thought I had been confined to.
I repeated to myself it's FINE, capital letters, and of course it is. I know that now.
I used to obsess about people, too.
People who had hurt me, people I wish had tried to hurt me, people out of my reach...
All kinds of people without any real meaning in my life, but who yet ended up determining it.
Always focusing on aspects outside of my control, it is easier that way.
Easy and just difficult enough for me to be content.
But it is different now.
Maybe it's age, maybe it simply takes longer for some people to catch up with themselves.
And as I become accustomed to the real me, others are finding me too.
So, it is like Tolkien wrote:
Not all those who wander are lost.
But then again, some of us don't know we are lost until we are found.
Deconstructing solitude starts here.
Pour avoir si souvent dormi
avec ma solitude
Je m'en suis faite presque un amie
une douce habitude
Elle ne me quitte pas d'un pas
Fidèle comme une ombre
Elle m'a suivi çà et la
Aux quatres coins du monde
Quand elle est au creux de mon lit
Elle prend toute la place
Et nous passons des longues nuits
Tous les deux face à face
Non, je ne suis jamais seule,
Avec ma solitude.
OK Computer
Then someone mentioned your name, and I shuttered.
Not out of repulsion, nor from reliving some bittersweet memory.
More like someone who stumbles on her untied shoelace,
Because she actually thought she was barefoot.
So I push my luck.
I play the songs, I think the thoughts that used to be engraved in me.
You used to be my default.
Now there's a configuration process every time.
Starting 1..2.. 3 % but it never reaches 100.
I am re-wired now.
And it was over in a second.
I bent down, arranged my socks, tied my shoes and kept on walking.
Bruxelles, ma belle..
Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénêtre mon coeur ?
O bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits !
Pour un coeur qui s’ennuie,
O le chant de la pluie !
Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s’écoeure.
Quoi ! nulle trahison ?
Ce deuil est sans raison.
C’est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi,
Sans amour et sans haine,
Mon coeur a tant de peine.
Comme il pleut sur la ville.
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénêtre mon coeur ?
O bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits !
Pour un coeur qui s’ennuie,
O le chant de la pluie !
Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s’écoeure.
Quoi ! nulle trahison ?
Ce deuil est sans raison.
C’est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi,
Sans amour et sans haine,
Mon coeur a tant de peine.
- P. Verlaine
story unfolded.
There's a lady,
walking the streets around my office.
A little odd, she carries a Mickey Mouse backpack and she sometimes talks to herself.
In the midst of all the crazy professionalism of the EU quarter, she waltzes to her own tune.
I pass her by, in the little square right next to the large intersection
The city is drowning in a new kind of sunlight and everybody is soaking it up.
She is walking slowly on a small patch of green bordering the cobbled street.
Too busy throwing handfuls of breadcrumbs around to notice that there are no birds anywhere to be seen.
The square is empty, but for a few tourists taking snapshots of King Leopold on his horse.
None of this matters to the lady, busying herself feeding the fictitious birds.
What is she doing? For what, for whom?
Perhaps it does not matter.
If she provides the bread, surely they must come?
And if they don't, she knows she did her part.
Now, this could be a story of a bird-lady, about casting pearls before swines,
or any other story you might find yourself needing right now.
But it's probably not about birds and breadcrumbs.
Syntax, semantics and seeing clearly.
Lately, I've had this strange feeling, like a revelation
I have caught myself thinking I am reliving something I have written,
rather than writing about what I've lived or hope to live.
Tss, syntax, you might say...
But to me this is semantics.
This means something, everything.
Am I just growing up?
Maybe eventually, we all start to feel more present, more content, no matter what?
More probably, this is me starting to peel my way to my own core.
Shedding those dry, sharp layers that no longer do me any good.
Appreciating the remaining ones so much more.
The most significant lesson of them all.
And I am finding that underneath it all,
that copper coil of desire no longer conducts my anger,
but only fuels my dreams.
Wild and uninhibited.
The poetic generation.
Oh, the woes of the interconnected world,
at once, excruciatingly fleeting and eternally, irrevocably permanent.
We are documenting our lives to an extent hitherto unseen.
Older generations are puzzled, at best.
'Why do you do it?' they ask, their faces barely hiding a smug smile.
Thinking back at the good old days when nobody second-guessed an emotion,
when people worked without searching for their dreams,
and everybody's privacy was impeccably private.
So, why do we do it?
Is it because we can? The technology is there, why not use it?
Can we somehow blame it on capitalism? (Some do, I am sure)
Does our generation simply lack the cultural ambitions of those before us?
Or is it because we can't really feel ourselves living?
Emily Dickinson had to feel her life with both her hands, just to make sure it was there.
Is this not exactly what we are trying to do?
Sending out thoughts, messages, pictures; and waiting for them to resonate.
Waiting to feel that our lives are still there, somehow. Somewhere.
Does this make us the poetic generation?
- Probably.
Just an image.
Curious inquiry revisited.
And you think to yourself: "Will she ever stop?"
"Won't she just look around to see all her success, all that abundance; and just be happy?"
Because my obsession with finding answers to inevitable questions disturbs you.
(it déranges you, as the French would say)
But this is not about happiness or sorrow, unless it's about both and everything in between.
It's about finding the meaning of that story.
A story with infinitesimal variations, yet always the same,
surviving centuries, unadulterated, untarnished, ever elusive.
You know the story.
Boy meets girl, serendipity, attraction, happiness, complication, inevitable doom.
Relapse, zemblanity, loss and then; perhaps regret, perhaps nostalgia.
It's the average love story. Yes, we call it love, even if most of the elements are anything but.
Did you ever stop and contemplate this:
In an age of technology, science and capitalism,
- all realms pertaining to the rational mind, reality and trust in the market to make the right decision,
What dictates our lives are still the woes caused by the quest for- or the loss of- love.
So, is desire all about loss? Is love all about desire?
Why is the measure of love loss?
Why aren't you asking yourself these questions, too?
What do you use to seal illogic?
I recognize the signs, see the clouds gathering. Ominously
Catch myself doing the same thing, over and over.
Expecting a different result? - I am not even sure that I do.
But I keep on doing it. I keep doing it.
Is this really my pattern?
All those adjectives I've been told; were they just euphemisms?
How was I supposed to know they meant something else entirely?
It's me, I guess. It was always me.
I break the rules.
I invent stories, I wreck things that others have built.
And in the end, when all is shattered, I blame you.
Like a child, I wave my broken toy in your face,
I push until you feel the guilt.
Do you feel it?
Everything is too simple, nothing ever measures up.
I need the impossible to stare me in the face and say: take a punch!
Knowing I will never be able to, is what keeps me going.
Do you get it? Do you see?
How can I explain that things have no value until they are out of my reach?
How do I tell you these things without making you walk away.
Making me want you, finally.
I know it is wrong to seal illogic with a kiss, but I do it,
And so do you.
Keep you in the dark, you know they all pretend.
Some honesty?
Some reality-in-your-face-blah?
Some self-pity and remorse this Saturday morning?
Not that kind of post.
Yesterday I was thinking about truth and lies.
About storytelling as an instrument of truth, even when it's not necessarily a true story.
Sometimes lying is actually more honest than telling the truth.
A story always discloses the author more than the plot.
An unreliable narrator jumps off the page and sows seeds of doubt within the reader.
Real, valid doubts that the truth would never be able to convey.
Are you following?
Vargas Llosa says that the truth is hidden in the heart of human lies.
Question marks are more powerful than exclamation marks, if only we pay attention.
I do not want you to lie to me,
but please don't tell me the truth, the whole truth an nothing but the truth.
- So, who are you?
Favourite mistakes.
It makes me laugh, sometimes, how easily you forget.
And how simple it is for me to evoke those memories in you, with violent clarity.
We judge ourselves harder than anybody else.
There's no need for me to say anything. No reproach, no judgement.
You keep hitting yourself with a hammer. Perhaps because it feels so good when you stop.
When you forget again.
When you re-forget.
I know I am not the one provoking your anger.
I never was.
I cannot hurt you, enrage you, anymore than you do yourself.
But I do know this:
Everything is imprinted with what it once was.
I was that huge mistake you made.
And you are still not done repenting.
happen.stance
No such thing.
Right?
You have a bullet-proof screening process,
You have secured your windows and doors,
You made up your mind.
Nothing gets through.
Nobody.
This is the most important thing.
Why does nothing matter as much as this?
Because the past still lingers.
Not behind, but in front. How else can it trip you as you start to run?
Zemblanity revisited
There that notion again.
I'm not sure whether it's doubt, regret or just the attempt to recapture something lost.
Maybe it is nothing but the inexorable discovery of what I did not want to know.
I put you away- all of you, the whole package-
in a glass jar labelled "Do not open until..."
I erased the end of the sentence. Just to be sure.
Every time I moved, I took the jar with me.
Not wanting to relinquish it, feeling safer to be in control of you.
- Don't I know we can never be in control?
So, you got out. Or was that me?
How do we ever know who is on the outside, looking in?
What if I was the one stuck in a jar, running in circles around the lid?
Reminding myself not to let you out, I did not realize I kept myself in.
I kept myself down so that you would stay away.
And here you are. Defying gravity.
Breaking all the rules I wrote in stone.
The glass is shattered, the spell broken.
Just like us.
