Three Star, Happy F***ing New Year!

No, not about me

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52nd week is one of utter madness. For some .. for some life stops in 52nd week, for others it starts all over. If you belong to the first group, those seven days might just kill you. For all that bustling and sprawling, that magically seizes the better part of one whole week, as every nook and cranny of worlds murderous machine pretends to stand still, is actually the time, some, but not few, find themselves cast in utter silence – a vacuum without a breeze. There are more people dying in 52nd week than during any other time of the year. Mechanized Suicides. Loneliness is a killer not to be taken lightly. Once the best headline of a prized journalist , who of course now is rotting away in some home.

I was in the middle of 52nd week when a question popped into my mind.

“What is the most valuable thing you own right now?”

It was a creaky, sneaky, almost bluffing stammer, a shadowy whisper of a voice which belongs to someone, who wants to know something you do not. It was phony, it was fake.

“Well?”, said the voices mocking counter-part, “Well? Right know?” I raised my own brown eye-brows while staring on the blank face of my wall, imagining a mirror. Annoyance has its way to drip. “Right now I would guess that would be the headphones grabbing the sides of my head.”

A lover’s embrace. It was noise – a silence-filler. It was meaning. It was loud blaring music, which echoed within the ghostly remains of feelings, once so deeply felt, somewhere in there. Some slaughtered musician’s grapple of a hold on existence.

“You know what day it is?”

The mocking voice again.

“Do you know what day it is?”

I heard you.

Knock, knock, knocking…

“The Day, punk…”

December, the 28^th. Three days left of another wasted year, in another wasted life. Four days after I sat next to my mum for Christmas. 36 years. There was a time when we were five people on Christmas Eve. Five – that’s a force to be reckoned with. Serious fun. Two people, two related people … that’s just … ridiculous.

“We still have us!” My mum.

I missed the precise year, the exact moment, when she started the spilling. I can’t remember under which fucking Christmas tree, I saw for the first time, that there was a little sauce, a little spittle, a tidbit of some fluid running from the corners of her mouth. It was spilling back on her plate. Grief had turned her face into a sad grimace, years ago. Still, she was lucky. She started feeling the pain, when she was old. It came to me when I was young. I’ll never forget the exact moment. The instance my lungs started burning, because I couldn’t breathe. It hasn’t stopped since. Do you remember the first time you jumped from a diving platform? 10m, 5m, 3m, one … Have you ever felt the panic that swept through you on the way back up? When you thought your breath would abandon you half-way to the surface? When a numb, but hungry burning spread through your lungs, your veins, your head and when you were aching to give into it? Do you remember the moment rationality was screaming from its corner about certain death, the punishment of giving in? I’m talking about that kind of burning. It started on that day. And every day since then I’ve been tempted to give in, to fill my lungs with delicious air, when vicious water is all that awaits me. This kind of burning turned my mother’s lip into a tic – something she obtained to piss me off personally.

I was in the middle of 52nd week, when past failures started clamping down on me. What are a man’s failures? Women, of course, those sweet creatures which are supposed to take the pain away. And they do. Love is a wonderful thing. It attaches meaning to an embrace, a caress, a small gesture, a smile. It fills the endless, contingent chaos with something you can crave … up until the moment, it turns to ashes among fingers. Nature has a sadistic sense of humor. It creates empty bubbles in our being – holes, blanks, emptiness nagging you to be filled. And filled they get. By people who are not up to the task. Have you ever wondered what kind of cruelty the words “I love you” compose? There is nobody in this world, who can fulfill the liability that comes with them. And as much as we like to hear them, inwardly they scare you shitless .. you and me and even your annoying, completely useless little mutt. But we all hope that they can complete us, oh how we hope. Why? Because of that lack of any perfection people seem to feel within themselves. And every crestfallen hope rips bigger blanks in our being.

She took the biggest part from me, back then when there was much to take. But I’m a grinner, I’m a cheater, I tried to breathe by shouting it away from me, tried to calm and still it with a thousand angry words, powerful in taking the guilt away from anybody. I didn’t deserve this pain. She could take my anger and sooth her doubts about herself with it. My words assured her that she was a good and worthy person, that she didn’t deserve whatever small and insignificant thing happened to her. It would have taken less — my words being sheer overkill for her pains. All too eager. And when she used them and turned them against me, she made them worthless to me too. She consumed me, she used up every beautiful thing I had to give, any truth I could find and would give away carelessly. Oh, how she liked doing that kind of thing. They all do. What a fleeting thing truth is. So … conscious of its surroundings, so fickle. If you cannot have truth, don’t you need beauty? That’s what you lose next.

I was in the middle of 52nd week, when I started counting: How many words now … and then. How long did I used to write, when I was in a frenzy? When it poured and burst out of me now and then, what numbers did I produce? 1998 averages at 15,245 words per outrage. Today? I don’t have to count. It’s a trickle. With every defeat I lost a few favorite linguistic specimen. Devoured by some stupid hoe. When the words ran out, I started losing the pictures and one day … memories. In the end, all there was to color my existence was gone; all I could cling to in order to barely keep my sanity. When you think long enough about it, you lose it. I remember the day, when real meaning seized to exist. What a delicate thing meaning is. Just a little  difference – a difference that makes a difference. Got it? Creates it. Puts it into reality. Did you make that difference? Did you have any say in this matter? Ever wondered why people don’t like differences, but still need them? Ever wondered why we turn artists into folksy folks who are different from anybody? Why we turn anybody into geniuses? They have to be something else, so they can represent everybody, so they can stand for any cause. If you want one good advice from me, it would be to never ever get a cause. Listen to me, kid. Don’t burden yourself with the stale and shit illusion that you can make a difference. You don’t hold that kind of power. You really do not. See above.

I got almost through 52nd week, when I accidently looked into a real mirror. There is a faint danger in seeing yourself.

“That’s you – in all your glory!” The voice of vanity, didn’t hear her for a while.

“You’re whole, you’re complete, a fine specimen.”

I raised my hand to my face and with the astonishment of a toddler, saw my reflection doing the same.

Unity. Control. Control through unity. This was me.

“This is you. THIS is you. This is YOU. Grimaces and big, gaping eyes. Look, look. It’s so easy, there it is.”

All I’ve been looking for. There wasn’t a single part missing.

Age old pictures were flooding the mirror: Me from the outside. Me imagining, how I must have looked while doing this, while feeling all this.

She broke your throne, she cut your hair
And from your lips…

Why do we never consider ourselves as complete as what we see in a mirror?

“Because it’s fiction.” Some other voice.

“That’s what you are – voices.”

“But they are not you.”

“You are not complete.”

I am.

No voice.

“Just a feeling.”

It was the last day of 52nd week, when hope stepped back on the scene.

It was the last day of 52nd week, when something started talking shit.

It was the last day of 52nd week, when that new year seemed like a great chance.

Because something is happening here.

It was the last day of 52nd week, when my dreams again looked impenetrable.

Beautiful dreams. The last resort. A chance.

Soothing word clicked together.

“Breathe.”

And exhale.

And … go for it, sergeant:
“This journey might take us longer than any one of us might have ever expected. We do not know if it will ever finish, we do not know if man can be redeemed, clutched out of the deepest abyss of his own fear. There might after all be no more in this world but man. His existence a short deterrence, his life a gift, which has become a burden due to this faint nowhere everybody feels within the most inner core of his being. It’s the real, the one thing, that cannot be voiced, put in words or cast in images. The one thing anybody feels within himself and feels ashamed when first noticed. Humility, humanity, there are a few fibers shared by everybody, which bond us to the same fate. Think about this whenever somebody strives to alienate you from yourself. Think about this when you fear anything.”

My hair .. it feels … damp.

A speech. A fitting gesture to begin another year.

…

It was the first day of first week.

I made it.

Hit rewind.

Push play.

Do it now.

I’m sick and tired of this muck and muddle.

“Yes, ma.”