black&white

I'd like to tell You (yes, the as vague as non-existent You) about J.
J. is two years older than me and has very bright hair, the brightest hair I've ever seen. Her skin – perfectly smooth, as if made of marble. She's of medium height. Sometimes she puts on a soft cotton dress and then she looks just like a child. A baby girl.
J. was born two weeks before a Christmas and she's all the essence of the Advent. Special and festive. Smelling nice. One feels like being next to her not because of some social splendor or not even to kill the time by means of some small conversation – it's for the warm silence that's inside J. Or for the sense of beauty being protected, the sort of beauty that is tiny and unique, wrapped around with large, soft cloth. A little candle, a December night. J.
J. loves Sweden – a country, where the Advent is the best time of year, with the Saint Lucy's Day (December 13) as the apogee. The smell of saffron and gingerbread, early nightfalls and the beautiful woman. Red wine a year ago when we celebrated her birthday. (Like it usually happens in case of females I admire, I didn't like her boyfriend at all.)
J. Winter, wind, see. A little cottage with purple heathers on the windowsill; warm, subdued light. The spices aroma mixing with the smell of warmed body.
J. The baby girl.
There's also G. A totally different one, and less familiar to me so I don't know her smells and colors yet. Anyway, she has dark, thick hair that I always stare at. And dark eyes. Low voice that she rarely uses, and if she does, then it's only to say few words.
G. was sketched with bright, simple lines, marked carefully, stable. She's devoid of the silly part of femininity – of the not-being-able-to, of the embarrassing infantilism and the cosmetic obsession. And at the same time she picks very cautiously the colors for herself; they're always deep and intense; clear and vivid.
Actually, G. is a mystery to me – I don't know where she comes from and I don't seem to recognize her form. But it is a surely blissful state to smoke cigarettes with my head on her shoulder in some Warsaw club. Very nice indeed.
G. doesn't care much, I guess.
G. seems very strong.
G. embarrasses me, sometimes frightens a little.
G. and J. like each other a lot.
And me? Today I almost burst into tears (into the inside, not the outside of my body) during our classes whose main theme was the marriage. Me – totally alone and lonely. My father sometimes-probably-maybe feeling like leaving my mother. Sure, go on asking me about marriage. About love and warmth. And then about breathing deep and feeling free.
After all, "the most tangible description of bread is a description of hunger".

P.s. I just found out that from the Saint Lucy’s Day on the Sun sets later and later – yet it begins to rise earlier only from the December 22 and that's why it is when we talk of the days growing longer. But still, December 13 is the omen of the bright part of the year. Just look at J.'s hair!

a new story from an old world

It's still grey outside, I guess everybody at home is asleep. I'll wrap myself in a blanket as well, till I still have the safe margin of the before-day, the pause that nobody takes into consideration when evaluating the day. I feel like defeating the time when sitting like this, as if on the edge of a chair, lingering over the moment that was supposed to be only a short minute between waking up and beginning the daily actions. It feels good down here.
In order to make the best of the Sunday's before-day, I checked the updates on the JW's website. It smells of conifer needles and it calms me down; there's a road leading from here column straight to Christmas. "...because that is what the Christmas story is – a new story from an old world". I love her sketches of the holidays, they're "old-fashioned" in the most positive sense, quiet, made of wood, snow and red-hot oven with her favorite mince pies. I'll have to keep this picture somewhere in the back of my head for the two weeks to go to my final coming home for Christmas. These are going to be two tough weeks, and the tiredness won't let me work as hard as I'd like to. I really hate what the studies make of the December-January season, I don't like mixing Christmas with stress, New Year – with the challenge of passing eight exams waiting just right on my doorstep. It disturbs the silence. And when I sit in the basements of our Institute during our long-winded, arduous classes, the dense air and artificial light make my thoughts ferment and spin pictures of a summer countryside, of the warmth, abundance and the bitter smell of the meadow. I seize those few colors very tightly and anxiously as if I knew it's the only way to preserve some juice, life and freshness in myself. It's hard, without a moment's respite. I guess I'm still getting used to it.
That's way I'm so glad that in the middle of the endless list of things to do this moment of the before-day has come up, this hiding place when I can read the Christmas story by JW for the second time. I must have been absent-minded last year as my thoughts bounced off the words; I didn't get into the story. This time my concentration was also a bit disturbed, but I managed to see this text and feel it as compatible with the Christmas vision by JW, full of quiet anxiety and secret; a soft night in which the light appears as a blessing, neither a Christian one nor Muslim nor Buddhist, but a humane one. A humanistic one.
JW saved another piece of my thought.
I can hear guys getting up.

emotional spring

The snow fell again. The sun is shining. I'm in Warsaw. It's beautiful.

Today in the streets we conducted a sociolinguistic research. Together with O. we studied frequency of various Polish names for a pencil sharpener and a plastic bag. I had to abandon my form of the scared vulnerable one, who in the everyday life perceives the passers-by as potential thieves/rapists/canvassers, in order to get into ecstasies over the people, most of them being half asleep at 10.30 a.m. I almost got lockjaw from this amount of smiling, O. blew her nose all the time. Among elderly ladies, all refused to talk to us. Among young mothers wandering with her babies – none refused. Young gentlemen seemed embarrassed. The sunlight was intense, the air frosty. The cobblestones slippery. And I liked every part of it.

For the first time since I've been stationed in Warsaw I have the awareness that N. is staying at the parents' place. Strange that it feels exactly the same as when she was 5,000 km away. But on the other hand I had a feeling on Sunday that some missing piece has fallen into its place, that something made me feel like I used to feel some time earlier. I thought I was missing it. I'm not. Actually, for the first time since... long time ago I'm glad that I'm moving forward. When M.B. suggested few weeks ago I should have perhaps accompanied her in Cracow, I was surprised how obvious and clear it was, that I'm here to stay. In Warsaw, with its university, movie theaters, conference halls and joints. And I'm safe – if nothing changes dramatically, I have 3 years of studying at the university ahead of me. And I know I'm able to do it. Perhaps I'm in a good place to look for opportunities from.

Or maybe I'm so frightened by N.'s attitude that I'm trying to persuade things myself.

I find it strange that winter has become my emotional spring.
Just like last year this time I'm listening to Tracy Chapman all the time.
I want to call M., first time since her mom died. I'm scared to death.

eye of cyclone

So many times I wanted to write something here. Things unimportant and light in its meaning, but noticed and called their names; acknowledged. I didn't get down to it, and then heavier things came, whose names always sound like a gibberish, and then finally came the heaviest things for people around me. And now I'm sitting in my safe eye of cyclone and this is where I finally transmit from.
Death of M.'s mother, preceded by illness, long and painful, and a strange kind of tension; frequent thoughts sent to M., since words or real acts couldn't be found – and N.'s arrival, awaited as a happy return to family home with its usual attributes (emotion, positive response to the warmth, telling stories till late at night), which turned out to be an approach of a big dark cloud and nobody knows where it came from nor how to heal it, how to brighten it.
And in the background the strangest weather: spectacle of light and dark on the funeral day, and then, in the afternoon, when I saw N. for the first time, the snow, fluffy and abundant. Today all filled with sunlight, contrasting with N.'s depression. The sky big and bright.
And me in the eye of cyclone, sitting and watching.
Neither words nor real acts can be found.
Their future was supposed to be so different, now fulfilled as wrong and gloomy.
And it seems so real and tangible, just like everyday bread, irreversible; even if I woke up thousand times again and again, I'd always wake up to M.'s sadness that I'm only guessing, and to the dismal indifference of N.
Helplesness.
At the same time the eye of cyclone is brighter and brighter, the warm sunlight gets inside by the window, somewhere in the background there's soft music (new Tracy Chapman is warm and sweet). The eye of cyclone is cozy and makes the projections of the outside cheerful. I do a lot of work, I'm tired and I don't sleep well, but it's all right anyway. A teapot is makes a fine compensation.
Of course it's calm here in the eye of cyclone; what takes place is just enough, and the rest, well – it's all right for my dream. After all the snow is falling so quietly, it'll wrap all of us.
But I don't know what's inside M. and N. It's not the responsibility that distracts me, it's rather my sense of empathy – sometimes being a true curse. I want to believe that it all isn't a big deal and I shouldn't worry. But not this time. They're really very low.
Contemplation of their happiness, my wishful thinking, is really too little.
I want to wake up and that's all that I'm capable of right now.

a graver kind of celebration

Autumn is truly beautiful this year. It flourishes in its colors and favors the human race.
I notice.
I appreciate.

But I just can't help being stuck in sadness.

so,

Autumn – golden, sunny.
The university – hard. Texts by Chomsky, in the original English version plus classes from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m.
The scholarship – being granted from the average four hundredths above mine.
Living with my new flat mate – in harmony.
In the speakers – Boards of Canada.
Every Wednesday and Friday – English lessons with eight-year-old Michał, I guess he likes me.
Once a week – classes that make me thrill and my tummy ache.
In the evenings – a bit empty.
Before I fall asleep – irrational dreams and fantasies. And nightmares afterwards.
Satisfaction – rather not.

Bread – crumbles and isn't delivered to the grocery on Sunday.

This is how I used to imagine my studies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yMcZEQ2sLE&feature=related

her name was Hattie and she chewed some bread

October, Warsaw, classes at the university. Introducing myself to all that once again:
At the Wednesday/Thursday nights I should't sleep on my right side cause my piercing hurts afterwards, which seems exceptionally irritating on Thursdays when I have classes from 8 a.m. till 7 p.m.
A new flat mate. She gets up at 6 a.m. only to have forty minutes in which to stare in the pale screen of her computer before we leave for the classes. After a week and a half I still find it bizarre.
A few interesting new lecturers. No-one has made me sob so far, though one lady, looking thirty, being fifty, has a truly mermaid-like smile.
Once, last Thursday, I burst out laughing during a break at the university; the rest of the group caught the laugh. I seem to get to like them a bit.
All that doesn't matter now. I'm at the parents' place. In the morning we went to buy three bottles of wine and some cheese, and there was a Woody Allen on tv, luckily from before his vagina-and-phallus era. A lot of warm light and too cute Samantha Morton who in 1999 already chewed bread exactly like eight years later in "Control".

Cried a little bit last night, but.