Life is beautiful, life is impermanent: The seedy underbelly.
So. I am officially crying again. How did I walk for one day, let alone six days, with this inside me?
When I write, the impetus is my heart. Many words have gone unsaid in my blogs and communication with the world around me. My heart is fragmented in the shadow of my mind. United, the rational stands strong and ready to dominate. Fragmented, the heart’s voice is a whisper I’m craning to hear. Sometimes.
I have been speaking words that I mean, and words that feel empty. I speak words which I repeat over and over in the hope they will sink in and become some kind of cohesive reality. I worry I am repeating myself. A symptom of de ja vu, my reincarnation? I am repeating myself.
Unspoken are the Band-Aid boys, unspoken are the internal struggles. Unspoken is the anger, and oh, such anger. The words ‘He said there would be a home waiting for me, whenever I came back….’ leave the anger, desertion and betrayal unspoken. ‘He wrote in our book- and I was sure we gonna get married‘ says nothing of the story which went not untold, but unlived. ‘In our last conversation, we argued about god, and he told me that bad things happen for no reason’ doesn’t open up to you the senselessness I am now floating in. How socially inappropriate.
Today is funeral day, but fuck, every day is funeral day.
And then I’ll be going to Israel…
Why are you going to Israel?
To see Ariels grave….
Who is Ariel?
Exactly.
A friend tells me, there is no clarity; it’s foolish to try to live with clarity. A life pierced with fleeting moments of clarity amongst cloudy confusion is the best we can hope for. He tells me, there is no perfection, we cannot be perfect, but you can’t accept that.
He’s right.
My moment of clarity said: Life is fleeting, it is to be enjoyed. Do not waste your time worrying. What matters is sharing and making the people around you feel good, like he did. Do not waste your energy on anger when you could be enjoying the presence of those you care about. Share, because today is all you have.
Now back to the human. Back to the imperfection and back to the inadequacy, after sitting and crying with god. How do I grieve for you, and at the same time honour you by enjoying my life? I am moving on unwillingly. (I have no choice but to march onwards through this life?). There is no rewind button, there is only the here and now, and the thought of life with no more Ariel makes me want to fuck the here and now. The word death makes people squirm. How do I honestly share how I feel about life and what is happening without alienating the people whose company I want to enjoy? Without ruining their day by bringing loss and incoherency into the picture, when I want to be delivering sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. I find myself uncomfortable in my own skin, tripping over and dropping things and feeling awkward and embarrassed.
Strange things have happened to me in the past 3 weeks. I learnt a little about anxiety. It isn’t what I thought it was at all. When I heard what had happened to my housemate, as I cried and cried, I sweated. And when the tears stopped, I noticed my heart beat loudly, and quickly. Anxiety is pain, pain is anxiety. Knowledge of our own fragility naturally makes us feel unsafe. I experienced for the first time that alcohol really does numb emotional pain. I knew it made me feel different, but, for the first time while drinking, I cant even remember what, I found myself laughing. I learnt a little about the comfort of having people around you. Sex drugs and rock n roll, baby. I found myself floating from friend to friend. Exhaustion numbs you. At night, I would feel deadened but not cry. No energy to feel anything. And the pain? What is that? Why do we hurt? What does it mean to hurt? Why is pain a universal experience when someone dies? Awkward.
You can survive anything if you have a purpose. So, finding the meaning, the coherency behind all this. Yes, I constantly find myself in just the right situation to speak to just the right person at the right moment to express what I need to express. Following the mood is easy at Vinarska. But what is the fucking point? An old question that I know I have nothing new to bring to the table on. Yes, I can get up in the morning and make myself look pretty and feed myself and make social niceties, if I must. But do I have the will to walk on, as it rains senselessness???? I have no choice but to move on, life moves whether I like it or not, to a constant schedule of change. Punch after punch that I must roll with, whether I want to or not. So I move unwillingingly, passive aggressive seeping through my pores.
I want special treatment. I want to scream at everyone I encounter, No I won’t fill out your form and provide the details you want, Fuck You, don’t you know my housemate died? No, I can’t pay my phone bill, things are complicated right now, Fuck You. No, I don’t want to talk about Australia, my house is empty of the body that is supposed to be living and breathing and waiting to hear about Europe, Fuck You. Yes, I am still upset about it. No, three weeks is not long enough for me to come to terms with this. And Especially! Fuck off, no I will not kiss you right now, sorry, you may not have noticed, but I am busy trying to hold my heart together with sticky tape and gritted teeth.
Why am I at the post office? I’m picking up a package from Australia. Of my housemates memorial.
Who?
My housemate who died.
Your who?
My housemate. The person I lived with in Australia. He died.
Oh…
I’m sorry.
Yeah.
Sitting in the Czech language office, I look over my paper. Apparently 67 is not good enough. I want to slap the lady in the face as she curtly informs me that a father cannot be many, he must be nice, and that dve, obviously means two, even if it is not stated as plural. I want to throw the fucking exam in her face and grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she realises her own mortality.
Most annoying is the recurring realisation that this is not special. This is just life. People die all the time, so just fucking deal with it already. Yes, it’s sad, but it’s hardly a fucking tragedy, Kim tells me when she calls.
This happens every day. Babies are born, people die, such is life. To add insult to injury, no, I was not the closest to him. No, he was not my lover. No, he was not my best friend. No he did not have my blood in his veins.
I look up and airplanes trail across blue skies, I ache. I write in my Czech exam ‘Mam pět sestra a nemam bratr’. I don’t point out that, well I had someone who felt just like a brother, but he had a tenancy to jump out of planes so now, ne bratr. I write that ‘Mam chočka. Jmenujes Murphy’, and don’t add that I entrusted my most precious companion to someone who, intentionally or not, left him, left us. And where is he??
This fucking question screams at me. Where did he go? Passed away to where? and, relatedly, Why are we here? Who put us here and why, What is the purpose of this whole fucking charade?
I tell Axel, I want to vomit on my life. You pin pictures on your walls here to give your ego something to cling to so you can walk through each day in denial of your impermanence. Identify with things, to avoid the harsh reality that it is all dust and ashes, baby. Nothing lasts. I truly didn’t notice that before.
sunset yearning 