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"Luna"
Chapter 6, Luna :
"... With books under my arm, I laugh along with my friends as we make our way up the steps. She passes me in the hallway, and her smile is orange.
Every pair of eyes possess specific words, and it is up to the viewer to pluck out the vowels and consonants from underneath the multiple layers that disguise them.
The girl is unguarded, and I accidentally read the words in her eye:
She pulls back the layers and lets her black hair fall over her face. She hurries past me and I feel my head turning to stare at her retreating figure. She is my afternoon delight. There is no mysterious force for her in me, just the fickle fascination of reading her eyes. I see numerous people throughout my life. I read the eyes of people. And words, they come and go like silver waterfalls tumbling down a mountain goddess' slender back; ever word imaginable! Fuck, I read in the rabbi's eyes, who was conducting a Bar Mitzvah, one day when I was twenty. Serendipity, I read in the prostitute's eyes one day during the last few minutes of our lovemaking. Liar, I read in my wife's eyes, fifty years later, when she told me she had just been to the movies. One day the years catch up and leave me with shriveled skin. My hair, smooth white. I sit under a tree carefully turning the page of a book filled with confessions. Over the hill, a lone figure makes its way towards me. The sunshine makes her eyes impossible to read, but she nimbly runs off the path and climbs the hill, folding her legs expertly beside me, her messy brown hair clinging to the odd green rucksack she carries. I'm from the circus, she says as an introduction, a hint of ennui and mystery in her singsong voice. I can turn cartwheels as gracefully as planets in orbit. I'm an old man, worthless, I say. Surely you must be good at something. There must be something you can do, old man. Her voice is urgent. She reminds me of a little elf. Yes, there is. A long time ago... well, I can read the words in people's eyes. I pause and wait for the cruel laughter, but the girl nods her head encouragingly. That is a gift, old man, she says. I am silent. Then: It is a gift, to read people's eyes? You feel like a culprit? she suddenly asks. I am surprised. Like I steal thoughts, yes. Yes. How did you know? Read my eye, please, she says insistently, leaning forward. She opens her eyes wide and stares into me. Letters swirl, shapes, dark green liquid blending with white lazy stripes, and in that moment the sun hits her eye perfectly and a word has never been so brighter... Harvest moon, I say, simultaneously remembering the girl of the stairs. You're right! She laughs heartily, rocking back and forth. You really can read the words in people's eyes!... A few months later I am on my deathbed. There is no moon tonight, no sound tonight except for a soft owl hooting in my ear. My wife's old, tired frame leans over the bed. She smooths my hair away from my brow. She stays with me, for how long I'm not sure. And the girl still laughs, over the hill where I read her eye, dragging the moon along with her across the dark sky, tied to a string..."
The Game is Broken
Things have a way of turning out, just as I have a way of twisting things in. Like bubblegum dreams, I think of ways over and under, how to get by, making the least number of mistakes possible. But of course it's impossible. I like impossibility, it only intensifies Hope. You remember Hope, don't you? If you stand on hope's shadow then the sun must be behind your back.
But this isn't about Hope. This is about myself. This is about things that matter, and don't matter. This is about a nice, low-key lamplight replacing the harsh flourescent glare of impersonal spaces. And this is about more days, more months, more time. And this is about twirling the ends of your wishes around each finger, making tight pink circles, then stretching these wishes as far as you can, arms wide, like pink bubblegum elastic dreams.
And finally the bubblegum springs back, its length shortened, sweetness intensified : Probably, this is about me, and who knows, this could be about you.
the beauty of now and later
I declare unto you...  Le Jul! Well you know, I don't really care how far or how close, maybe proximity is only a concept. I don't really care how long or how short the time we are apart, maybe time passes all the same. I refuse to be downy clowny because you make me happy clowny. If before we met our worlds used to be as far as the eye could see, then the world will just have to grow a little bigger. And while the world gets bigger then I shall wait, because it's you, and the time between then and now is always worth it. and i love you wherever we are
Hey Euclid, I could be anywhere
...and so maybe in the grand scheme of things you could be anywhere, gray skies floating below you and the powerful engine roaring in your ears, or laying on damp green grass that licks your cheeks in the green empty field and wouldn't you know until you get there...?
Anyway when I was five my parents stuck me in an all-girls Catholic school and I had to wear crisp uniforms that were uncomfortable like hell and wear my hair below my chin and it was lonely and up in the hills far away from civilisation and I only got rid of this torment when I was sixteen.
I think back on that and eleven years is a long time to be dressed in uniforms and eating in assigned lunch tables with girls who think too damn highly of Saint Therese and I've got nothing to complain about Saint Therese but I'd like more books about people who have terrible afflictions and town lotteries where people are stoned to death in order to keep their traditions intact and stories of little boys who stick their fingers into a hole in a dam to save the whole town from flooding.
 It's ironic that Catholic education made me doubt the years of spoonfed faith and turn an eye towards the stealthily-masked hyprocrisy of organized religion. But I'm not completely ungrateful. If there's one thing I thank God for it's for geometry and science and passion, because geometry told me all about parallel lines, science taught me all about infinity and passion tells me that I never want to be caught up in the hellish idea of parallelism, that stretches to infinity without any hope of meeting nor changing. Because well, however much people say you can't go beyond the lines drawn, why should you sit there following a line into forever when you could be anywhere you choose.
Panic
My nerves are fraught and my fingernails bitten down. Indeed, thou art in a state of panic. See the pretty red siren hanging over my head? It's a good day outside, wind is picking up and throwing me down the ground with forceful pressure. A glowing lightbulb in my chest about to explode. Someone call the band, the clowns. And please, lend me that party hat.
Tropicalia
Shaolin Soccer
Least Liked Beatle
Pedro the Lion
Of course I know it's just not happening, ever. I mean having a lion for a car. God. Just please no one give me any more lion books. Anyway that all happened Saturday and now we've just crossed the border to Sunday so thankfully I'm done with that. Ain't life strange.
The world is not your enemy
It's not, no matter how hard it tries to convince us that it is. After all, we are products of love. And of course we all belong. We have society. We have each other. We have longing to fill emptiness, we have hate to give meaning to love. We have constants. We know that night follows day. We know we breathe oxygen and release carbon dioxide.
And aside from that, we're given more. We have instincts. We know, without concrete proof. Belief? I'd rather call it insistence. We look at the sky and map out our futures with our little constellations. We predict. And we plan. We give meaning. And we rise and fall like the tides, we bask in the moonlight which isn't true light... but anything that tints us in silver is okay. So if the world is our enemy how come I never want it to stop turning? And if the world is so evil then why is there poetry in wind blowing through trees, to comets, to asteroids?
One night I stood by the sea thinking that it would simply be an inverted valley, had it not been filled with salt water.
I'm glad for the sea, because it's my constant mystery.
Wingdings, anyone?
One of my greatest complaints about this PC, apart from the fact that it enjoys stalling just before saving a very important file, is the lack of fonts. The story goes like this:
Rewind a few years back, when I got one of those font cd's. Kala exuberant. Yay, I'll install it. I mean, I'm late for class and all, but I can spare a few minutes.
Halfway through the fonts starting with the letter B downloads, the computer stalls. Cursing, I shut down with the intent to continue installing the rest later.
Fast-forward to present day, September 4, 2002, and I still haven't installed it, and I lost the cd a long time ago, and I couldn't care less about getting/borrowing/installing a new one. I have one million reasons not to. And you won't care about hearing all of them, because they don't make sense except to me.
So all my font list goes something like this : *extensive A fonts*, *extensive B fonts*, then comes the rapid downward spiral: ComicSans MS, Courier, Garamond, Impact, Lucida Console, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Verdana, and Wingdings.
Please, tell me what will I do with Baltic, Central European, Cryllic, Greek, Turkish and Western Arial Black fonts? This isn't Spot-the-Difference.
When centimetres feels like miles, seconds like hours
A long time ago, Julien wrote about sentences being ill, about electrogrammaticalograms and being a nurse of lost words. I still can't forget this mail because it puts me in a certain mood. I'm sure you know how certain words, books, or songs can transport you. Déjà vu. Reminiscent of the time when we were children still in awe of what lay beyond ourselves, and what we couldn't avoid. You see, no matter how old we get or how much we believe we can take on the world single-handedly, there's always that emotion that pops out of nowhere, similar to when we were still holding on to our mother's skirt in a busy marketplace on a Sunday afternoon, cautious enough not to let go because doing so would result to a frantic search through unaccustomed faces, for one face that never seems to materialize. The universal pathos of suddenly being misplaced.
But then you find that person, or that person finds you, appearing before you in a sea of the unfamiliar; cool and calm and smiling, refreshing as an oasis in the desert, saying that it's all right, you're okay, of course I won't leave you here, just hold on tighter next time. And then cancels the dazed look off your face and murmurs comforting words until your panic subsides and you're feeling calmer and you're confident to go through the crowds again, now that you know.
People have commented on my offhandedness and nonchalance, but the truth is that I miss him an awful lot, more than I care to show. I may own a vintage wind-up robot, but I'm not one myself. Sometimes, TV dinners get the best of you. I've had those nail-biting evenings at the gallery, an open book propped on my lap with my mind wandering. Though group dancing is a world of fun (why do all my evenings always involve group dancing, in a drunken stupor may I add?), it would be fantastic to slowdance too (especially when you're drunk; then you can put your spinning head on someone's shoulder, and vice versa).
That said, I shall be in Jordan in a few days' time.
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