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"Tell me something about yourself", he says, leaning on the terrace railing, while lighting a cigarette.
Calmly, with confident movements, he approaches to the lighter, draws in a smoke, and gives me a significant look.
I turn my head towards the city which is in flames beneath us and think how easy it would be now to think up someone else’s story. A story of some nameless and apparently very ordinary resident of, let’s say, that building, who might also be, at this very moment, standing on the terrace and thinking about his ex-love, that he never got over. Or, maybe, to guess a life history of the people behind the window, from which arrive incessant melodies of the piano, mostly Debussy.
I could think of a story of our neighbor, too, a retired professor, who carries a bouquet of fresh flowers every day, although he doesn’t have whom to give it to, anymore. I could..
"Hey, are you okay?", he approaches me. (I love his eyes...)
I am not okay. I cannot tell my story. I miss some words! A river of thoughts which are never satisfied with their expression, do you know what a hell that is? My sentences dissolve, words have a strange echo, they resound inside me with some unknown reverberation, a trace of a wonderful but forgotten poem.
And sometimes, words used to mean everything to me. Now, I don't recognize them, or they don't recognize me. They are standing before me, I imagine, and looking at me disappointedly, that group of all my stories, poems, notes, now lifeless phantoms, who chase me. ''Why did you take away our meaning from us?", I hear how they, distraught, accuse me: "You've stopped liking us? We weren't good enough for you anymore? You wanted to mix us with thousands of new languages, and then, having made such a turmoil, we slipped from your control.
"You know very well", they are whispering", "that now, we are a part of you. And by disowning us, you are disowning yourself. Not only yourself, but the reality around yourself too, because, we, we are your reality. Now you need to find new categories for the world, as we have stopped being that. "
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"You won't be able to find the soul of the language, the essence of story telling, the happiness of clear and precise naming, all of that is - dust and ash. Smoke! You have stripped us to our banality, that's why we are now going to be only a potential for you, only the possibility of actualization of your poetic dreams, but never their realization. What do you say about that, writer?
"I'm okay, love", I managed to escape the thoughts, "only, you know, it's hard to say something about yourself just like that. I mean, I'm not such a good story teller as I used to be, you remember I told you I was writing before...Anyways, you already know everything about me, or you could conclude... I too, like everybody else, have my dreams, fears and past.
"I know your dreams, everyone knows them. Tell me about your fears", he takes a long smoke, "what are you afraid of?"
"I'm afraid of the silence. You know that standstill between the notes? When you are not sure if there is another act or that is the end of the composition? I'm dreading that kind of uncertainty. In my case, it is words, their disappearance, that is. What to do if you don't find a word good enough? Or, even worse, what if the word you are looking for doesn't even exist anymore, although it has existed before, somewhere in your memory? Well, that is search for the lost things.
Of course, you never know when you will start looking for a word that no longer exists.
You start knitting the thread of the story, entwining your patterns, some of which you find familiar, while the rest of them you create on the spot, and then - you get caught, accidentally and tragically. Then you are desperately trying to find that word, that needle movement, which will somehow save you and and wonderfully connect all your past broidery with the new parts. However, as it is often the case, words that I possess, those are some new patterns, of different origin, and they only serve to, simply, destroy the past, to make it meaningless, to turn it into one big "nothing". And then, from that big nothing, from those crashed parts of sentences, I need to take out the "red thread", to which then I connect the remnants of the story.
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"You see, love, that is all my tragedy, as well as my delight."
Thin lines of street light, of various colors, are falling on his face, and he now almost looks like a boy from the southamerican tribes, with these colors on his cheeks. I'm laughing. He is looking at me puzzled.
"I don't believe anything you've said" he says. "You always tell stories so nicely, you must have made this up too. It's impoosible that telling stories is hard to you, and that words are slipping from your control, as you say. Everything you talk about sounds so harmonious and spontaneous, as if everything you've wanted, you put on the paper from one shot, or you say in one breath. "
What if he is right? Maybe I have stored, somewhere and somehow, the knowledge of embroidering words, in my way, like I have always done it before. Only now, maybe, I don't have direct conscousness of it. As if I am creating a story covered with a see-through veil, but still thick enough that I can feel it is there.
Is this maybe some new prism, through which I am going to perceive reality from now on? A new shelter for words, new vision for structuring everything I want to say?
Anyhow, even if it is so, even if my words are clothed in some new attire, as long as their echo is resounding in the ears of at least one being, it will mean that I have succeded in conveying a message that I wanted.
And there, few steps further, holding a cigarette in one hand, and a lot of light in another, such a being is looking at me, the confirmation of meaningfulness of my words and me.