just a few nights before spring comes

February was vivid.
at nights I went to J.'s place across the whole city. alcohol, cigarettes, four hours of sleep before I go to work. curiosity, touch, February nights can actually be hot.
halfway through the month I had short holidays in Barcelona. cold nights, sunny days. sailboats in the port. we were riding the bikes along the rows of palms. rioja, the stress and grief mode OFF. we were sitting at the roof, the Brazilian guy was rolling himself a cigarette, a ray of sun fell into the bottle and he said, life is beautiful. I texted J. all the time and was glad that when I get back to grey Warsaw covered with the remains of dirty snow, that drunk dwarf would be waiting and I'd see her soon.

there was enough will only for one evening. afterwards, she bet on distance between us, I checked twice. unease, sleep deprivation. at work they called an ambulance for me. is your heart all right? finally, I laid down my cards and last night at 2.30 I took a taxi home.

Without chances, without options
I’ll give you everything,
Sun and moon, you are going down and down,
You're already at the bottom, poor man
Unpleasant sleep, last year's snow
In your words there is lie and emptiness
You forgot to recognize the actual me

useless brothers and sisters

21st January, USA. President Barack Obama: Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

25th January, Poland. Krystyna Pawłowicz, lawyer, politician: We cannot expect homosexual relationships to provide the continuation of life because they are not procreation oriented. (...) Those people are useless.

''look, the snow, the stars in January, just for you..."

no idea no idea no idea no idea how I still find energy for it all.

at the pale office I have stomach cramps as I hear questions asked with the assumption that I am a heterosexual woman, yet everyday at 5 pm it occurs to me that it's not that bad after all. only from time to time I get struck by the astonishment that it is actually possible for me to work there and not go crazy.

on Fridays there is beer, drag queens and J., a girl two years younger than myself. we come from different worlds, lead divergent narrations and use codes that are incompatible – probably this is why I'm so attracted to her. plus her smell.

on Saturdays I have gender studies: we read Sarah Kane and watch Ghost in the Shell. I find myself in extremely pleasant states of mind.

my pants stink of tobacco and there are pieces of chocolate all over my laptop.

I turn too shy when I'm near the pretty O., so I trick her to get her phone number; this gives me hope that I'll meet her not that accidentally one day.

I see my father rarely, so his depression seems to fade away to me, then I meet him and I feel guilty again.

I cuddle up to my mother on those rare days when I'm with her.

I call my sister very often with lots of laughing but not much sense; there is no content between us, but I keep up the form so that the bond doesn't get broken.

the snow looks unearthly when I get back home drunk at 3 am. intact, so special, and kitschy.

I talk to gay men who are strangers to me and I get very little sleep.

and I can't stop any more, I've given up reflection a long time ago. in this hum and hurried activities I keep the low murmur constant. this won't give a chance for the deeper thoughts to come to the surface.

not much contact with myself, which is I probably I feel so good.

the carnival stylistics has always had magical influence on me.

"My advice to anybody is GET BORN." (J. Winterson)

We were standing on the sixth floor and Sz. said that he did feel sorry for all the cats and dogs, but the fireworks were just so pretty. And we all wished each other that things would get better – as if it had ever been up to us.

As if it had ever been up to anybody else but us.

The cat, paralyzed with fear, was sitting quietly on the kitchen chair, I was drinking up my third bottle, and around me there were revolving a few satellites – a bunch of old friends who are my little family in this city.

Sarcasm can save you from collective hysteria, excess of emotions and hasty enthusiasm, but using it against people who always remember about you or against family who is always there ready to help when you turn around – it’s like hurting yourself really.

I don’t dream of revolutions, miracles or great victories. I have developed a liking not for a life that glitters, explodes and rouses me as a life like that happens only rarely – instead, I have a liking for a life that goes slowly but also surprises you with places and states of mind you find yourself in, and the quality of those places and states is so weird that you can’t even tell it good or bad, yet you feel immense pleasure of experiencing them, perceiving them and remembering them in a funny selective way. It’s good to realize that life is not a streak of pleasures and to find pleasure in being alive instead.

2.30 am, a short message from a gorgeously smelling girl whom I met on Friday; well, it deifnitely helped me sense that pleasure.

a hopeful look at one's despair

"If only my mother hadn't hoped so much. But to say this is to posit the impossible. Throughout her life, my mother had been incapable of doing anything else but hope, hope in extremis, and against all odds if need be. I do not mean to imply that she was a cheerful person. Quite the contrary, she was almost always dueling with depression. This was clearest immediately after she woke up, when, in an effort to shake off her despondency, she would talk, about anything and at breakneck speed, as if to overwhelm her mood with meteor showers of verbiage. And yet, paradoxical as it may seem, even the ways in which she parsed her own despair could themselves appear like a subspecies of hope. I only realized this fully when I saw on the first page of one of her journals, written in the immediate aftermath of her breast cancer surgery, the sentence 'Despair shall set you free.' At first, I assumed she was making a morbid joke, but, reading on, I discovered that she had been entirely in earnest. 'I can't write,' she noted, 'because I don't (won't) give myself permission to voice the despair I feel. Always the will. My refusal of despair is blocking my energies.'
"Described in this way, my mother's exhortation to herself to 'give in' to despair becomes a new project of self-transformation, even of self-improvement, almost in the same way that her self-assigned reading lists and itineraries were such projects. But how could it have been otherwise? My mother's refusal of despair in its conventional, paralyzing sense, and, more than that, her sense that whatever she could will in her life she could probably accomplish as well (except in love: there she thought herself bereft of any gift and did not believe the will of any use at all), had served her so well for so long that, empirically, it would have been madness on her part not to have made it her organizing principle, her true north."


[David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir, source: http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/excerpts.php?id=17834]

starry curry night

last weekend, postitive energy exploded beyond the frames and spilt through the whole space-time. I basically shot up into the sky.

not to see Mon. for nearly a year, and then to meet her, after so much has happened in my life and when her things are totally different now – and yet to feel that we are just the same for each other.

to start a conversation with a random guy in a club and to shout to him through the loud music all the words my throat is able to produce, and then to raise our mugs of beer as if we have just signed a non-aggression pact with the whole world. to run in the middle of the night, with the cold rain falling on the heads, together with a bunch of people I didn't even know the day before.

to fry apples (antonovkas, of course) with marjoram and to cook rice with curry and almonds for my dear O. – 'case although I am a totally hopeless cook, when I put my heart into this, I become a master.

and on Sunday evening, to keep my fingers crossed for the week to come so hard, to believe so strong that I will get a job and everything will start to brighten up, that I can almost see it happening.

so, keep your fingers crossed – whoever you are – if you are somewhere up there.

silence is scarry.

so good that there's still a bit of road to go, a bit of night to sleep through, before...
I didn't care that so much would change, but now I feel a sudden urge to keep a few old familiar elements to myself. 'cause it seems like everybody else has giant plans before them, great and beautiful ones, while I still can't find job and have no foundation of warmth and sweetness. how am I going to make it throught the fall?
sometimes, when I get stressed out, I start feeling sick.
it will be my first weekend here in the W. city since I can't remember when; a twinge of anxiety.
someone took the summer away, turned off the light, dashed my hope. the room is empty, I'm counting the popcorn balls on the floor and the steps echoing in the distance.