tsvetoslav shalev

Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also.

― Brian Jacques, Taggerung

There are enough words in this world to fill up multiple lifetimes. With the help of generative AI systems, we could probably make a dent in the ever-growing nothingness which tears us and the universe as we (don’t really) know it, apart. Yet, no matter how much noise we end up manufacturing, nothing feels quite like a knowing silence, shared between lovers. My feet are cold, the sky is a shade of grey you couldn’t possibly associate with sensuality, and all I can think of is the process of thinking itself. An anxious hypocrite of idempotent thaumaturgy, I probe my inner repository of despair in search for breadcrumbs of meaning, mindlessly forcing the formless into a painful existence. Nothing of beauty can come about in such a brutish manner. You know this, I know this too and yet..

Now, I am some place and time different, from when I first started this draft. Back in the UK for the past month, my mind still dances to the dissonant tune of unresolved feelings and incomplete ideas. A lot has happened since; a lot more must take place before I can get a much-needed sense of contentment. It’s difficult to reconcile the idea that time flows differently at any one point in space. The universality of it, in that case, is altogether illusory. We seem to know that time is an arrow, with a point of origin and a trajectory. We look forward to things and events, but only in reference to the past. A source of heat gone cold cannot rekindle on its own. And yet, there is comfort in this shared fallacy that all is predetermined or ‘as it was written’ (to borrow the phrase from DUNE); life’s cyclical nature, an immutable engine of hope renewed. And because we are incapable of remembering the future, we imagine it instead. Children and daydreamers are preternaturally good at this. Those who spend the bulk of their time surrounded by family and friends, learn to live in sync with social and cultural edicts. Countless individuals either micromanage the heck out of it, or waste time with gladness. But what if none appeal to you? No, scratch that. What if none of these options is truly accessible to you? A mindscape littered with broken hyperlinks and stale factoids is surely on the outside of space-time, looking in. What of his owner then? If not evil, are they good by default? Or pathologically misunderstood and helplessly confused. Asking for a friend, is all.

The room begins to spin as I think of how, during a sunset, it is the very earth we stand on, that which rolls away from the great yolk in the sky. Or maybe, it’s the second litre of laxative going through me in prep for a morning colonoscopy appointment. A yuk, a ewww, and an ouch, but we need to make absolutely sure the procedure goes well. You want as few of these as possible in your life. For the next ten days, I am also the impromptu sitter for Oliver – just over a year old stray cat my brother’s family’d adopted recently. Timid, shy, a habitual tail wagger, and a connoisseur of grilled chicken pieces, he spent the first 12 hours at my place cowering under the couch. Gradually, I was able to lure him out with food, gentle pats and a blanketed seat on my old recliner chair. As of 21:06 pm, the hairy motorboat engine is on 99% of the time, and all is right in this microcosm of mine. Life is good, just painful and complicated more often than not, alright? Alright then.