Dear Jaro,
Knowing that it is your birthday, I am sad.
I cannot buy you a drink or a bottle of wine.
I cannot congratulate you in person.
Knowing it is your birthday, I remember that once I could bump into you on the street, meet you with no prior plan, and enjoy a brief conversation.
Knowing it is your birthday, I remember pleasures I once had, and compare my present life with my past---and, so I feel angry, sad, and desperate.
Knowing it is another year that I have been in exile in a cruel land where “vehicles” are more important than people, where the twisted souls have learned to accommodate the machines which run their lives, and have
forgotten to complain or scream---instead living lives of frustrated obedience to rules and rulers they cannot see.
And I go about like a blind man bumping into their ignorance. It hems me in, chokes me and fills me with disgust, despair and rage. At every step I am kicked in the balls by ignorance. With every breath I inhale the putrid stench of decay.
By comparison a hangover is a lively, pure, and beautiful thing.
By comparison it is sheer joy to be ripped off my feet by a tram taking a sharp corner, to see faces and hear voices in a crowded tram.
By comparison I was more alive when I returned home soaked from the rain and cursing my inability to predict the weather. More alive than I have ever been here in this total desert of dry anti-culture and misery.
And, in the meantime, the past travels at lightening speed, leaving me behind, grumbling, dying, but not dying fast enough.
I wish I could believe escape were possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment