What if?
What would happen?
freedom exiles
In a letter to his lover, Khalil Gibran once wrote:
"I have always thought that when somebody understands us,
we end up enslaved to them,
because we accept anything in order to be understood."
There are a few people out there, to whom I remain enslaved,
even after I have lost sight of them.
I get attached.
It is rare, but the implications are explosive.
Pieces flying about, ego shattered, heart bruised.
But sometimes I am the 'someone who enslaves'.
Serendipitiously, I see below the surface and I understand.
Like I saw your copper coil, understood your core.
I try not to show it.
Would not want to enslave anyone against their will.
Does that trap me or free me?
Fellowship imprisons, freedom exiles.
I am a peninsula, struggling to break loose.
Home and Away
I find comfort in would-be-strangers in a foreign city.
we bond in our restlessness, our singlehood and our ever-expanding dreams.
Tied together in our resentment of those who judge us,
those who want to save us, educate us or show us the golden path.
Never before has the divide between Us & Them been wider.
It is not a battle between singles and couples,
but the ultimate confrontation of conventionalists and norm-breakers.
I never knew just how provocating it can be to just follow your own path.I suppose Salman Rushdie is right:
Among the great struggles of man- good/evil, reason/unreason, etc-
there is also the mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away.
The dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
Serendipity, I've missed you.
It feels like being in the epicentre of my own mind.
A place where all thouts of anxiety, dissatisfaction or stress simply cannot enter.
Somewhere I have always been in my mind, and always longed to be in reality.
Scared of what awaits me outside of this serene bubble.
But confident enough to know it is my responsibility to know what to do next.
Heaven can wait, we're only watching the sky
I remember writing lists.
Long lists of every single thing to go in my suitcase before a journey.
Drawing pictures of the clothes I was bringing,
making mixtapes- meticulously- weeks before the departure.
And even though I was probably 14 at the time, and spotify had to wait over a decade to be invented
I can miss the thrills of travel when it was all new and a big deal.
There's a very vivid memory that I treasure.
It is an early, early morning, misty and damp in the middle of May.
The whole family in the car, heading to the airport.
Suddenly we spot an elk standing proud on the edge of a small cliff alongside the road.
And Alphaville's Forever Young playing on the radio.
Listening to that song still gives me goosebumps because I remember the feeling.
Of being on the edge of something wonderful.
Now I think of travel as a natural part of my life.
It is still exciting, but in a different, more integral way (if that is possible).
Don't get me wrong, I love to travel. Love it.
More than anything else the feeling of being renewed in another place,
of meeting yourself as much as meeting others.
I cherish the smell of a place that is not my home.
Mostly, I love the thoughts that come to me while travelling.
Sometimes I want to think of travel as I used to.
When a journey was a 6-month project, not a quick getaway with some time to kill at an airport.
Or perhaps it is not the way of travelling I want back.
Perhaps it's a state of mind.
I don't mind if you don't mind
Strangers.
Sitting side by side.
Carefully crafting a space between us,
on this pier where we sit and in our minds,
- distance.
And although handmade distance can be painful, sometimes it is needed.
Because I remember myself quietly singing:
'can you pretend I'm amazing, I can pretend I'm amazing' (instead of what we both know)
hoping to fake it til I could make it.
And now I am no longer that girl, searching for your weak spot.
Searching for anything at all, if it brought you to me, as if I was always undeserving.
As if I had to walk on my knees until you decided to pick me up.
- So, have I found your secret weak spot, baby?
And, so perhaps it isn't so bad to sit there
our gaze fixed on the water, thoughts hiding behind our eyes.
Side by side but far apart.
At least we sit together.
Ropewalker
Somehow I feel that because the seasons keep returning,
people, events and places should come back as well.
intellectually I know it is impossible,
yet I wait for them every time the seasons change.
And in the same manner of disrespecting reality,
I see myself as I have been all those past times, in between seasons.
The freckled me, red glasses, long curly hair on a Spanish beach.
Trying to impress the mischievous italians, knowing they were out of my league.
Crazy me, residing in Italian camorra-territory,
falling for strangers and teaching children how to draw dolphins.
And the childishly excited me, having just received an e-mail offering an internship at the United Nations.
Juggling my bad self-esteem with an overwhelming feeling of pride.
This is the me I always come back to.
I think I am her.
I show up at the VIC cafeteria, as if I belong there.
I return to Vienna, because it is magnificent and I because I miss my friends,
but more than anything I miss who I was there.
Could I still be her?
I know it's foolish,
hoping for the past rather than the future.
But could it not be both?
I know, I know- I am a contrarian.
Am I telling a story?
Telling myself as a story as I go?
- I don't know how else to live.
Standing and living.
A net to catch the word that escaped.
I say I like to read and write.
But that is not the whole story.
See, I belong to a rare group of people,with a strange fascination not only for the written word,
but for reading about reading and writing about writing.
The reason I am always quoting Jeanette Winterson, Hélène Cixous and Mario Vargas Llosa
is because they pull off one of the most brilliant acts:
They write about writing about writing.
And, for me, the truth is found in between each and every 'about'.
I am concerned with the places where fact meets fiction, where the latter becomes the former.
All truth lies, who said that?
With every layer, truth and fact are a little more diluted, a little more embedded in their story.
Vargas Llosa's La verdad de las mentiras explains why a good story is always a lie if the author is capable.
A veces sútil, a veces brutalmente, la ficción traiciona la vida,
Encapsulándola en una trama de palabras que la reducen de escala
y la ponen al alcance del lector.
{Sometimes subtle, sometimes brutally, fiction betrays life,
encapsulating it in a plot of words that diminish its scale,
putting it within reach of the reader}
Like a metaphor can illustrate a concept better than a clinically specified description,
so fiction explains life better than any well-intentioned professor.
We often think that finding truth is the key to everything.
And 'keeping things real' is the philosophy of people all over the world.
But rarely do we contemplate what we consider truth to be and how it is found.
And we never stop to think that reality might be a social-construction impossible to strive towards.
Whose reality?
I am drowning in inevitability, but it isn't truth.
on externalities.
Over coffee we got to talking about the past. About how everything changes.
This is what I fear, perhaps the most irrational fear of all.
Despite my settled existence right now,
and while a he was explaining how his garden had been changed by nature
for the last 30 years, I could see it all so clearly.
This is what I fear, perhaps the most irrational fear of all.
The thought of spending 30 years in the same house, the same garden.
How do people do it? without reinventing themselves, without changing?
Do they need the outside to stay fixed, while changing on the inside?
But, then again..
I once said I don't believe people don't change.
Then, coming from a bitter place, but maybe, there's something to it.
Is changing externalities just a cover up, to disguise the fact that we never really change?
Is escapism, in fact, not a bohemian lifestyle, but an illusive quest for... what?
Something better? Something bigger? Something?
Despite my settled existence right now,
in my mind I'm always searching, travelling, constantly changing.
Off to the next place, holding out for another adventure, an exciting opportunity, a challenge.
And I must come to terms with this duality or change.
externally?
despite everything.
(C) Wislawa Szymborska
The catharsis that comes when the story rushes out
What we think is fate is just two neuroses knowing they are a perfect match.
This thing about fate, what is it?
So unlikely, it must be better than fate.
Sometimes I think life would be better lived in short sentences.
No explanation, no details. Just a few lines, and that is it.
But then again, what am I doing here? Artificial living?
This thing about fate, what is it?
This desperate will to believe that we have no control.
I suppose it's discomforting to think of ourselves as wandering neuroses, but why kid ourselves?
Is it not more magnificent to imagine another neurosis, just like your own,
Casuallly aligning itself with you?
So unlikely, it must be better than fate.
So unlikely, in fact, that it simply does not come by.
Except it does. it comes in the form of sentences.
Everywhere I read. Everywhere I write.
here's a riddle for you.
I've always been more question than answer.
But, despite common belief, questions don't always want answers.
I ask questions I hope never to find the answers to.
Constantly asking and secretly hoping that you will, too.
I suppose it is a sign of a split personality.
I suppose it is demanding; never settling for what I know is there.
Always looking for more. Always asking (for) more.
But, despite common belief, questions don't always want answers.
Sometimes they simply want to be asked.
They crave the challenge, the twisting, turning, interpreting, erasing...
They crave the challenge, the twisting, turning, interpreting, erasing...
I ask questions I hope never to find the answers to.
It is frustrating for you that you cannot solve my riddles.
Because I do not want to be solved.
Enter: Me
Clouds gathering,
Substance of life, real and imagined,
The feeling is the same.
It is not safety, because I resent that. And it isn't comfort.
I suppose it is the feeling thay I am doing things right
For once, this is the sensation?
Surrounded by possibility it's easy to hope
And that's it, really.
The feeling that you can confide in your hope.
When someone asks you: What do you contain?
and you answer: 'an unexploaded dream', knowing it is true.
It is right there, ready to blow when the time is right.
Insisting on its right to become.
As I do now.
Spiced vanilla
I pick up the round jar, not without knowingly admire it with a faint smile.
As you might when recognizing someone that you don't really know.
I open it, scoop up some of the cream and strart rubbing it onto my palms.
Just for a split second, the scent throws me off and I remember him.
From a time when I always used to smell like this and always, incessantly thought of him.
Contemplating the mysterious ways in which the world works, I put the lid back on. My hands are a little softer now, even if I am not. And the scent will soon be gone again.
Challenge accepted.
- The easiest thing in the world is to wallpaper yourself from head to foot
and put an armchair in your stomach.
- Sounds very uncomfortable
- Oh, it's very comfortable. That is why people do it.
Worldly worries.
Lately I am worried.
Easy access information makes every crime known and magnified,
Even on a more personal note, it is easy to get swept away by this current tsunami of pessimism,
The truth is we live in a time considerably more characterized by peace and tolerance than any other.
Today, in Colombia, Barack Obama claimed to be 'open to debating the US drug policy behind the Drug War.
We are better off, economically and health-wise, than ever before.
Dictators are overthrown, opposition rises for the first time in decolonized countries,
youth activist believe in their own power to change and they use it.
How can we see all these things and not be optimistic?
I do not pretend that the world is simple. I don't want it to be.
By the hatred, the rising suspicion, the economic arguments and most of all by the sense of resignation.
We think everything is getting worse, and admittedly, it is an easy mistake to make.
Easy access information makes every crime known and magnified,
leading us to think criminality is booming.
The financial crisis is unintelligible to most people and so we blame the European Union,
because none of this happened before, right?
The international (but prominently American) war on drugs is causing more harm than good,
The international (but prominently American) war on drugs is causing more harm than good,
and we think there is nothing we can do, because fighting leads us nowhere.
Even on a more personal note, it is easy to get swept away by this current tsunami of pessimism,
so detrimental and so fundamentally counter-productive.
The truth is we live in a time considerably more characterized by peace and tolerance than any other.
Steven Pinker's research shows that, despite our perception, violence has declined.
He shows how reason trumps violence, just as Voltaire said that 'stupidity generates cruelty'.
¨
In Europe, we seem to have forgotten the idea of the European unity. A collective mind.
In Europe, we seem to have forgotten the idea of the European unity. A collective mind.
When economy fails us, we do not blame the financial system, but the very idea of Europe.
Seventy years of peace cannot convince us, because we no longer remember what came before.
Centuries of wars, rewriting the European map before the ink had the time to dry.
Xenophobia and bancruptcy are serious problems,
but we must not let them take away our belief in a bigger context.
Our belief in Europe.
Today, in Colombia, Barack Obama claimed to be 'open to debating the US drug policy behind the Drug War.
And all over the world, leaders and experts are discussing drug policy from a new perspecting,
where the consequences are debated, rather than morality and good intentions.
People are aware.
We are better off, economically and health-wise, than ever before.
Dictators are overthrown, opposition rises for the first time in decolonized countries,
youth activist believe in their own power to change and they use it.
How can we see all these things and not be optimistic?
I do not pretend that the world is simple. I don't want it to be.
But neither am I ready to give up on the world.
We are not there yet, but we are travelling.
The destination might be less important.
Ordo ad chaos
"Abyss, n.
There are times when I doubt everything.
When I regret everything you've taken from me, everything I've given you,
and the waste of all the time I've spent on us.
Better, adj. and adv.
Will it ever get better?
it better
Will it ever get better?
it better.
Will it ever get better
it better.
Corrode, V.
I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open,and it started to rust.
David Leviathan uses dictionary entries to conjure the trajectory of a full blown love story.
From the stumbling beginning, to the affair that rips them apart and the doubt that follows.
There is no chronology, no storyline, no genders- only carefully chosen words.
With words and sentiments, less is more.
The blatantly mundane is found alongside the otherworldliness that is love.
Each moment has its explanation, its immediate thought and reaction.
And I know it is the only way to create order of my emotional chaos.
The answer to my questions that I keep hidden.
The reason why we keep coming back to this dead end.
We have no guidelines, no lexicon for what we created.
No dictionary to translate between our worlds.
Surreality
Life.
So fragile and deceiving
that some don't even know if they want it
And others are sure that they do not.
And so strong must it be,
That pull from some darker place
The allure from the other side,
to make some give it all up..
Let go and float away.
It only takes a second.
You are here,
You are gone.
Nothing is the same,
But the world still turns.
21 grams lighter.
Shakespearean wondering
Writing to the sound of this.
I started tugging at something and now I feel overwhelmed.
And I wonder how other people make it fit?
Or can I cultivate all those quirks, hidden passions, strange contradictions,
I started tugging at something and now I feel overwhelmed.
Digging deep invariably means discovering more than you bargained for.
I found a door that opens up in every direction and everytime I open it..
- I find myself a little more, a little different.
And I wonder how other people make it fit?
All these things, intrinsically different, that I am.
Must I choose?
Make a carefully calculated persona of some bits and pieces?
Or can I cultivate all those quirks, hidden passions, strange contradictions,
- all of them, at once?
Does that trap me or free me?
