I want to tell you a story.
More than a year ago I gathered all my paper jungles: notebooks filled with my stories, verses and drawings. I managed to cram five years of my thoughts into two plastic bags. I didn't even look through them because I thought I'd change my mind. And I wanted to go through with this. Get rid of them.
And I did.
...used to write letters. So many of them. Some to you, to my friends, family, imaginary and real people, characters of my books, future self... hundreds and hundreds of unread letters. I thought one day I'd arrange them into small files and send them to the recipients. They'd read them and know that during those months of my silence I wasn't silent at all. I hadn't forgotten them. In fact, I remembered and thought and cared. And they meant a great deal to me. They'd read those letters from decades ago. Memories of our brief conversations and adventures would warm up their sparkling hearts and slightly older hands.
Almost all the letters were in the second plastic bag.
If I didn't tell you this now, you wouldn't have ever known that perhaps once there were quite a few letters addressed to you. Which you were meant to read. Which are lost now.
Does it feel strange? Because that is how I feel when I think about leaving the planet when it's time. Being lost into nothingness isn't what I fear. In contrary, I fear how much I desire that nothingness.
I thought I'd get rid of my thoughts when I was throwing those bags into the trash cans. I felt easy and spotless for an hour. But then I felt cheap. I was determined not to give in. And I didn't.
And today, one year and three months after the disappearance, I think I know: I feared I'd become one of those writers who are "so full of words" but not life. I dreaded the fact that writing would consume me. And eventually I'd ran out of subjects to write about. I desired freedom and independence even from the threats of my future self. But most of all, I feared that after all these years I might not have been so different from others: Did I desire to be noticed and loved? I loathed that thought - so vulnerable, so human.
Turns out, you can be noticed and loved by many but all the wrong people, and it doesn't make a difference.
Sometimes, I take a book off my overweight shelf and discover a paper in-between the sheets. It's a letter or a verse.
I chase and collect my lost papers now.
Here are few of my thrown away thoughts:
I come home. Late at night. Classes end at 10 pm. And I am supposed to be tired. But due to the fact that I have no job and am successfully neglecting all my class workload I am anything but tired. I’m active aggressive I guess. That’s because I’m hungry. I’m always hungry. There are times, like once in a month when I realize that I’m not hungry and it’s a very good feeling. It’s not that I’m dieting or trying to starve myself. I’m just quietly hungry almost all the time.
Classes are not major success for me. Nothing is anymore. I try to remain positive. But who am I kidding. I always preferred to be sophisticated than happy. It’s a weird thing but I remember from the New Testament some kind of metaphor saying that happy people are like grain-less wheat, facing up all the time. Their heads do really lack some thoughts. So, since I were a child I had decided I’d never be one of those care-free people who lived their life with no frown or a doubt. Turns out being not-happy doesn’t automatically make you sophisticated. I think I’m more depressed than sophisticated. That’s why I try to keep secrets so I seem mysterious to people whose opinions don’t really matter.
Almost 2 am and I’m still up. You know what I thought, I should quit chasing these great aspirations of mine. Accept the fact that I’ll never be someone special in a way that Hemingway was. Looking back at my life I think I’ve spent all of my time chasing the stars and missed out on all the fireflies.
There are dreams and there are illusions and it’s not very easy to distinguish the two.
You know what sucks most of all? I’m trying to find someone who has figured it all out and lives happily just so I can believe that there is a sense in my experiences. And guess what. Everyone is as fucked-up as I am. Each and every one of them. So disappointing.
I used to wait till the midnight almost every night. I would wait for exact 00:00 point and congratulate to myself the beginning of the new day. It was my tiny celebration of meaningless future. Now I still wait till 00:00 and I still congratulate myself. But I celebrate the fact that I made it through one more day. The stopwatch starts again every night, counting down the past.
Each of us is a machine. We take impulse and transform it into another one - a thought, an action, feeling, and unrecognized piece of memory.
