It's just like in one of those stories I composed at the age of 12. In fact, until I started this, I did not fully realise the extent. In the background of this page, there is an ominous field of ripe rye; reality supplies thunderstorm, pensive mood and a song, the same song I thought my characters might tune to. I even doubt that I am older here than they were at the time. Accordingly, the name the singer wishes for herself starts with a very same letter.

It is peculiar to sense the pressure of hands tying the stomach as if it were the hands or the stomach which belongs to someone other than the person who records their mentions. There has passed enough time to feel dispassionate about it. Will I be able to miss the consolations that I offered myself, the caressing of the hair and of the stomach? I must confess, it works well.

The most wonderful justification for any kind of moral concession. There is not enough evidence with which to back up the decimation of it. I'm sorry, World. You will go on forever, ending stories, shutting doors to the old heroes whose lives have become uninteresting and has gone out of focus. Should there be my 'later on', after I left every one of them, kind and honest, rogue and cruel, with their visages impassive, and did not continue with them as far as I wanted to? And us, what could we make of scenarios, of legacies left by these heroes? Should I give up as easily? To become an ending of some story because of some forces. Could I progress instead in spite of everything to some kind of glorious contingency?

Death is something that seems reassuring to me today, the end of all ends. It's the possibility of not being vulnerable to salty stains and decayed rye in the fields, when autumn comes, bringing about some new circle to follow, and all the old songs to bore oneself again. What's the point of the grip of this life if it teaches us everything for nothing? Is this what my home should be like?

Heard the cold wind say
'You're a fool to stay'
But I did
Yes I did

Neither prosperity, nor prominence, nor success, nor, for heaven's, luck, if all these are irreconcilable with me becoming m'self.

For this, I will suffer well.

I miss forest in the city that gathers dust in its corners. Forest is the most celebrated deconstructor.

The two men wore leather coats, which rendered their shoulders more massive than those of Prometheus. Yet neither of them had just his way of exulting. One addressed the other in an uncarrying whisper, which hampered the chances of recognising the matters. Perhaps, it is about the meeting that they conversed, set up later that night in the churchyard; but the place was, practically, non-existent. No one remembered at that moment that the adjacent buildings would most probably carry the remnants of the place forever.
This is modernity: I chance another look at the walls in the dim light. Tales for children, are they around? Just how many of us remember the sound with which the earth gave way, and mountains started moving. And large holes appeared in an unoffending paddock. All of these brought along, I thought: Really? What did they care about to bring it to the church? How dare they bring it to the music? I shuddered at the thought of the walls starting to turn. The eagle was longing for more liver. Shadows quivered, malicious, and continued to climb up to the dissected ceiling. Yet no holes emerged, and the matches were still in the girl's hands. How long it has to be before the night descends and the wind will put them all out?
Those men were no writers, nor tellers. They did not even seem amiable, good-natured. Perhaps, they were not even supposed to meet in the churchyard, among the graves no one sees anymore. I blundered through the door, and outside, where streets smelled of more familiar frenzy, of carnavals and carnivores. Someone somewhere must adapt another myth.

' Thus it was that a kind of blight fell on these early forms of going forth and being together, an anarchy of the affections sprung from too much universal cohesion. '

' Yet so blind are we to the true nature of reality at any given moment that this chaos—bathed, it is true, in the iridescent hues of the rainbow and clothed in an endless confusion of fair and variegated forms which did their best to stifle any burgeoning notions of the formlessness of the whole, the muddle really as ugly as sin which at every moment shone through the colored masses, bringing a telltale finger squarely down on the addition line, beneath which these self-important and self-convoluted shapes added disconcertingly up to zero—this chaos began to seem like the normal way of being, so that some time later even very sensitive and perceptive souls had been taken in: it was for them life’s rolling river, with its calm eddies and shallows as well as its more swiftly moving parts and ahead of these the rapids, with an awful roar somewhere in the distance; and yet, or so it seemed to these more sensible, than average folk, a certain amount of hardship has to be accepted if we want the river-journey to continue; life cannot be a series of totally pleasant events, and we must accept the bad if we also wish the good; indeed a certain amount of evil is necessary to set it in the proper relief: how could we know the good without some experience of its opposite? '

J.A. 'The System'

I have never been better for wear. Hunch-backed, but not before the day sealed itself. That's how it left me. The immediacy, with which the blizzard descended on the pre-suburb, where I settled, made shuddering more justifiable. I am scared of snowfalls, you suppose, but this supposition is untrusworthy. We are, instead, always too close together - the yellow nylon doesn't like this fact. I succumb, because it provides warmth.

Something had happened at the corner. The whole range of corners was sealed, thus dooming the glass building inaccessible. Unfortunately, it had the best department store in the New Center. I gathered that the nearby shop started its sale on that occasion, and made sure to refuse their offer: all possible reasons why I might have acted like this meandered their way through my mind, just as the knobby-fingered lady was circling the entrance to the underpass.

A package of tea smelled of plastic and duplicates. Yes, that was, indeed, a perfect excuse for leaving the package where it stood, and not carrying it to the belt.

The person speaking wore black sportswear. I wore the face of divine practicality, but that accent was one of the most unstylish ones I'd had. Hell of an accent, and with epithets, too.

With scholarship on the agenda, I was on the verge of pointing out that social activities does not suit me - and hence both I and my supervisor were to take for granted my withdrawal from the competition. And nor do I seem to want to pertain to 'society', conceived of as a set of groups, where by belonging to whichever one finds eternal comfort. From childhood onwards, I have thought it deplorable to like things other delight in, fear things others are scared of, study things others take up. What made me so different and what did I see that may have been taken up as a reason to abstain from such relations? A question I could not allow to be left unanswered, with the actual answer being so simple. I was smart.

But what use is there of smartness when the ability to understand - anyone, surely, can cope with this task - is corrupted. The understanding, which is totally unaccompanied by relating, by creating, by interpreting even? Bad for me. But even worse for the multitude. I have good memory for them, regardless of interpretations. I have a sense of them, if not of how they talked about and wrote about. The suspicion, which I possess beforehand of any one, before they reveal themselves to me, is the only thing that can be, therefore, altered - but all the same, I, without ever recalling what they were saying, would always recall what they meant. And dreams of them, that I may have, become the only witnesses to tell of vanity and dignity. I trust these cryptic accounts to become the underpinnings of my practical and my systematic. In accepting that not remembering the answer was also the answer, I busted what others think of as unknowing. Not remembering, which contains the relevance, even without wording, is a real want, a fever. Gods know I always needed to relate - and I still feel the need today.

I despise parallel announcements from the other life of yours - they are similar to moments when I watch Xavier Dolan and caringly nod, swinging back and forth with the chair. I cry because a hint of the jocular vanity is not going to depart.

start somewhere in the middle.

18-Mar-18: in medias res

I wish someone like me would not forget flocks of young chrysantemums, and the grumpy barn at sunset. They jumbled up the dream of a few days ago, and blazenly so. I also remember that the two kittens were more enthusiastic about the bucket of milk, which was, incidentally, green, but not the green I have come to think about with tenderness.
- Could not be more perfect… - she chuckled into my ear, and then bent slightly down to brush a stranded tickle. The movement was so fleeting that I felt vibration in one of my nostrils - as if someone had lip up a match, and the smell was trying to get out. She had not dyed her hair, and that was the only difference. Even her posture held. She missed my lips by a few lengths of a hairpin.
- You look normal.
- I don't look anything. But I do many things I do not do today. Is it called 'today', even? But rather, a shred of time, which is very-very yours.
- Mine?..
- It appears to me it exists on your orders. I should have been able to keep, oh, hilarious, only the awful gray and the boring white in that, which is my own. But don't trick yourself into believing that this is my reason for accepting this ability of yours… Oh, to say this is the same as letting it slip that I simply could not let go of your face.
- You are saying… You could have stopped this?
-… But instead, out of my stupudity, I dare to hope that you cannot let go of mine either. I wish this was true.

She demanded something I did not want to apprehend of the people, who sat on the floor near her yellowish feet, faces earth-toned and downcast. There was the amount of rumbling in the hall, and a strong smell of pine nuts. A small boy near the armoire played with the toy animal, which reminded me of a stag, but looked more grumpy, apart from having only one strandled horn. He would never look at the quarter from the same angle, more especially as he was to be taller than I had been at that age. He was yet to add the nuts to his breakfast sometimes. He was the only one whose head twitched at the sound of her voice, which, I thought, gnawed deliberately on the silence in the chamber.

- Don't go…
- Say that again.

I missed, trying to catch her soft upper arm, which was not muscular. She threw the chains aside and streaked through the steel door, past the garden tools that lined the porch, not pausing to clean the usual scraps of cat hair. Much as I wanted to help her, I did not pause either. At the moment, I had to retain her. My intestines were sizzling with the desire to retain her.

I knew they had not heard. They did not listen to their stomachs. The interlude, which was in their minds and also the love of their lives, was too interfering. Apparently, they did not resolve to kill. Or, if they did, that was in a most boring manner possible. This is why the victims could not return to them safely. They were left to the gray, and the white of the mould. But I could be trusted. This is why her road led farther right than I had ever lain in the grass.

She made one more joke to my strained croak, and told me not to let go of my killing instincts. In my mind's eye, strangers settled down with what they have heard often, they were coming to terms with swift romances, with dirty university toilets, with classics and goth music.

- Just keep your outdated updated, - her face looked serious under her fingers, although the phrase was intended funny. - Bring paperback show programmes as a deposit, sometimes. Just an example! Just an example! But you can, though.
- So that no one will be able to see?
- I'm sure you should.
I had a stray tear break away from its asylum. Or was the tear trying to find the real asylum somewhere else, within the usual trousers, which were never jeans, or the half-cured wound from a loaf pan?

- Are you coming? - she looked amused at my hesitancy.
- May I? Will it be necessary?
- Oh yes. And this, I am afraid, is the only time I can forbid you to.

What else was left, was the feeling of her heavy cheek on my shoulder, and her heavy hand on my knee. When I looked her in the face, I was safe, I had always been. There would sprout its youth the new wild cress for me to lie down. I believed it violently.

I watched the sunrise today, but brushed off its moist caprice. This morning, the Earth was dissatisfied with something, and doom-laden. We both looked upwards, and we were diagnosed with hypotension. Perhaps, in the few hours following sunrise, I could drop the receipt in the street, next to the petulant ticket machine, and walk energetically back. And, I could tell where I was heading, because the writing seemed decipherable; a circle left by the can of beans sat neatly in the corner - it was perfectly round. I had half a flair for stealing winks from the adresser - one can find it by looking at the clouds sufficiently long. Ingenious homonymy! It breathes. Brívs.

"France is the only place where you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on your door".

*small squeaking noise*

We do not drink, but we know things. We speak multiple languages, incidentally, no less than four at a time. Buildings are lacerated by sunrise: the contents of blocks, which lay buried under the creased rubble of the surrounding streets, are still to be discovered. I haven't the slightest ambition to help.

Я битый час не сознаюсь жене, что последние восемь ночей мне пришлось провести с другой женщиной, и от этого мне еще внушительней тошно: потому, что никакой жены у меня нет, рядом с моим домом нет храма, а последние восемь дней я чинно отправлялся спать около восьми пополудни. Согласитесь, никому бы и в голову не пришло отсчитывать вечерние часы от полудня.
Говорить не о чем: я даже не могу вспомнить, в котором дне мне казалось, что это самое место, тучный, раскрасневшийся кустами роз участок, точь-в-точь важный гражданин, этот сад, где грушевые деревья потеряли свой лоск в тот раз, когда их целую неделю пожирали бурые пятна, и мамочка теряла голову, подпрыгивая с мерным сосудом, этот сад был не иначе как святым местом. Отстройка здесь могла бы начаться хоть завтра, я бы тотчас доверительно распахнул накидку, где в грубо пришитом кармашке хранились пережившие гусей образцы философских атрибутов, и утвердил бы все акты, которые подлежали этому, уполномочил бы всех, кто подлежит этому. О, я сделал бы так много, так, сколько не сделаешь для всех женщин во снах. Я читал им о преемственности истории, я рассказывал им, что вслушиваться в самые отвратительные, тошнотворные, отталкивающие речи можно, разыскав там неподходящие тени. А они вовсе считали неподходящим мой голос, или, скажем, они находили мои речи вышеописуемыми - вкупе с их нелогично решительным нежеланием слушать, которое плавно воплощалось в нежелание внимать советам, и плыло, плыло кругом. И в нашем плавном танце, в хороводе, их платья снова стесняли меня, теснили меня.
У меня не было ни плаща, ни пера, ни, в конце концов, храма. Все разрушилось: я имею в виду, поля были убраны, и сушилка для зерна давно перестала звенеть среди полосатой земли. Там, в пыльно-бежевой пыли, где я молился, где я стоял на коленях всяко чаще, чем у приютских каминов стояли мои назойливые английские сестры. Я был влюблен впервые, когда впервые выспрашивал у Бога, поверив в то, что у Бога, должно быть, огромный язык - он, как предпосылка большого знания, вертелся в его рту, как огромная лопасть, думал я, и, точно, по мотивам этого вращения должно было выйти из берегов какое-нибудь близкое озерцо. Чтобы верно приладить разбитые внутренности, кусочки которых я так и не нащупал: вероятно, я бежал чересчур быстро, чтобы они не растворились за моими ушами, в углублениях на спине и между бедрами - там было мокро - чтобы приладить кусочки обратно тщательно и верно, я попросил отыскать для меня в кладовке фантомно теплый и фантомно клейкий материал: не мыло, не молоко и не яичное тесто. В кладовку был запрещен вход, кладовка виделась мне первородной и образующей. Неясно только - после? Может быть, с тех пор, как мои сестры говорили мне, что эта первая дверь, что открывается оттуда? Но с тех пор, я уверен, Бог разливается во мне.

Я не люблю иконы восточного образца.