1. ABOUT A MAN

I knew a man like that once. He had no values, which obviously meant that he was a dreamer as a child. I didn’t know him to be anybody. He was hardly able to be anybody, to tell you the truth. 

He killed a child, once. They found the body buried in his front garden, with head by the mailbox and feet by the feet. So he had to have picked up a shovel and dig up two holes. But if you ask me, he didn’t have it in him to do an honest man’s job. 

He went to prison, but his house waited for him. And when he came back, he was a much reformed man. He would take his time then to smooth out the fertile soil and plant some weeds. He didn’t use any gardening tools, only his hands and eyes. 

And he would demand from his front garden, ‘What is it that they have left to want? What is there left to be picked up like art of garbage and desired? What’s left? To believe? To feel? To be?’ And he wouldn’t stop when people crossed the street, nor when they halted in front of him, gaping with their eyes open and their minds accepting of his sermon. He wouldn’t stop because that was proof in itself that something was left. That although the words themselves didn’t pretend to carry the meaning, the still required to be uttered. They were all that was left. 

My wife was a quiet woman because she didn’t care much for others’ business. But she did ask him once, calling to him from our front garden, her voice strong enough this one time that it carried mercilessly across the empty street over to his laboring form: ‘Why did you kill it?’ she asked. I hardly remember any flavor of emotion in that question, perhaps a bit of conceit. 

“I killed him so you would’t have to,” came the reply, strong enough to carry back across the empty street and beyond. It was an empty threat. We knew as much. 

2. ABOUT A GIRL

She almost didn’t remember the precise reason why she took it off, but then the memory suddenly reappeared as a dead body from a deep lake, only surfacing after the anchor was untied. 

She remembered now that in fact there was a night when the clasp broke while she was washing up her hands. She didn’t have much time then to deal with it, so she just quickly placed it inside her wallet. She could have thrown it away, of course—the bin was just there, under the damp paper towels for which she reached automatically. But that thought somehow didn’t even occur to her. She had no idea why not. 

She wouldn’t have minded to be rid of it, really. It’s not as if she had to keep it close to remember something that never was, and never used to be even when it was. Perhaps she kept it for that very reason—keeping it close to her meant that she wouldn’t think about it. Only the absence of the bracelet, it’s ultimate fate to end up buried in trash somewhere, miles away from her, would make her remember. And there was much to remember. 

For the bracelet wasn’t a testament to love, as anyone would have thought. It was a testament to her power over him. She basically forced him to buy it for her. She persuaded him that love was all about that. She gave him a false idea about the world, the reality that she occupied. And for what reason… He went and did it. She didn’t know it then, not consciously at least, but only his defiance would have saved them then. As it so happened, she received it for her birthday. A couple months after that, they were a history. 

I will preface this post by saying two things: I should really be working on my essay at this moment, and yes, it's been a long time. It is not coincidental that writing and time and the two themes that keep swirling around in these posts. They are in fact still as freshen in my mind as ever. I feel them in my body too, words flowing as they haven't in years and time fleeting faster that I could ever imagine. 

I started this site talking about changes and here I am again, months later, saying that not much changed when in reality I have not stopped changing. I often think that some of my friends from college would hardly recognize the person I am now.

This is the third night I can’t sleep. At those moments when I would rather be cold dead, or at the least deeply unconscious, I seem to have the need to think about everything. There are far too many people interested and I have little idea of what to do with any of it. Sometimes I act like Brian, because it suits me. I do him well. Sometimes I have doubts, but they are never so strong anymore that I would find myself crying. Have I cried recently? I can’t remember… I seem to have this sick need to push myself forward until I lose everything. But has that happened yet? Not yet. Not ever. 

I am holding to the now, the here, though which all future plunges to the past. 

We were always very good at the theory of our relationship, even friendship… In theory, we could be civil, and loving, and caring for each other's aims and dreams, but in practice, without ever noticing this divide, in practice we clung to our egos with fervent, never stopping to consider the other, but never too stopping to consider our real selves and how much we were hurling our own dreams to their meaningless decay. 

It wash't a surprise then that we didn't separate nor did we finally take the cue and simply didn't appear back at the doorstep of our home, rather we prolonged the time of silence and,  unwillingly when spoken about loudly but willingly in private, we layered a great distance between us, one that accounted for half of the globe and half of the day as one, upon waking into another dreadful and cold, eventless day, could barely catch the last minutes of the dreadful and cold, eventless day of the other. 

Yet it did come as a surprise that it wasn't the silence that at last burnt to ashes the ties we worked and attempted hard to construct between ourselves. No, really it was the opposite of silence: the carefully well-crafted words that, somehow, reached us in the twilight of one's day and it the dawn's of another, that reminded our hearts that they were no longer crushed together by the same context. 

Without a context, it was as if we never existed.

Sometimes I dream of the other eventualities that could have played out in the shadow of our true fate—in one, he died and I moved on, but in another I gave up my wants and settled for his needs, and yet in another we sailed on a ship years later and by a coincidence were reminded of each other's existence and simply embarked on a path that we purposefully left unexplored until then. None of those, however, ever counted for a happy dream, although it possessed the sweet quality of fantasies from which one never desires to wake up from only to face the reality, that presents itself barren and dry of his presence and memories of him. For, without a mistake, when the future hands out its lot, memories no longer stand a chance against the powerful wind that approaches from these turbulent seas. 

Without memories, it was as if we never even persevered. 

For one second we were, then another, we weren't. 

• Traveling: I miss exploring new places and the stupid feeling one gets when he finds himself in the middle of a city he doesn't know. The mystery that is left to be uncovered. The feelings that stir the unexpected. I always feel like I am in a perpetual state of becoming. I know myself better as a swarm than an entity. 
• Friends: I feel separated from friends. Not sure how to relate to someone anymore. Not sure what I am in relation to others. Not sure where discussion leads if not deeper into our intentions and ambitions. Not sure if I ever will be able to figure out how to be a whole, and how to relate this whole to others. 
• Reading: I do read some things here and there, but it's nowhere close to how much I used to read in college. I don't have much patience with long novels that swirl around the unsaid and leave you to find your way out of labyrinth by yourself without the ever-present tug of golden intricacies. I don't even have much patience with technical works since they require me to stop browsing in my mind and concentrate on a single idea. I feel a bit lost in text in general. 
• Consciousness: The presence of the world is missing from every day activity of living. There is still some meaning, but I hardly care about its weight. 
• Driving: Just going off for a second or a day. Feeling productive and yet mundane. Nothing compares to the calm of driving when I don't have to make a single new decision because I am already trapped in one made prior.
• City: Nights to be danced through. Lights to be left behind. Life to be wasted. Hot food to be smelled and desired. Coffeeshops everywhere, where tea and familiarity with the generic can be enjoyed. Conversations to be witnessed and broken off. Arguments to be forgotten. And touches to be kept in between the two of us. 
• Emotions: I miss feeling. I miss being passionate and lost in an emotion and not in a useless thought. I miss standing up for something, arguing my point inappropriately, laughing carelessly, crying carefully, and feeling full of opposing forces. 

I'm not exactly sure how I feel about anniversaries. I think of them as temporary traditions; some milestone we fabricate to design a history, a past with someone who we have known for a mere, but exact, month or a year. Exact being the key word of an anniversary. And so it just happens that this day has turned out to be an anniversary to a couple of different things.

First, it's been a month since I have consciously become a vegetarian (and mostly vegan). I think that there have been weeks before in which I did not have meat nor did I want any, but I have never consciously decided that I will not eat meat anymore. So far it's been very easy. Don't get me wrong, I do like meat but after spending five years in the US, I no longer really crave meat. Moreover, the idea of eating meat has become somewhat dirtied in my mind.

For a long time now I have not felt entirely comfortable with the idea of eating meat not only for ethical reasons, but also for health and economic reasons. So once I made this conscious decision to be a vegetarian, being a vegan wasn't very far off from that for me. I already don't really care for cheese or eggs and since moving to the US, I have loved the new market of different milks (soy, almond, rice, hazelnut). I only consume milk if I have cereals or if I feel like adding it to my smoothies will make the miraculously better. I am not at all a yogurt person. I don't like salad dressing and I hate mayo.

The only reason why I said "mostly vegan" is because I don't really care too much to investigate into things I'm buying and meals at restaurants and occasionally I enjoy eating some eggs and bread. I also add honey to my teas and coffees. So really the change wasn't very drastic for me.

Still, three weeks in, when I found by an accident that there were pieces of chicken in my meal that I thought to be vegetarian, I had a very visceral reaction. Upon eating the small bit of chicken, I was first very unsure what it was. It surprised me because I suddenly didn't recognize immediately that I was eating chicken. It was as if I already forgotten the taste to some extent since the flavor was so unexpected. Then, I felt a little sick to my stomach and for a brief second I didn't want to finish my meal. This whole thing lasted about two seconds after which I had no problem, but even those two seconds of disgust upon encountering meat was a very new experience to me.

The second anniversary is related to the fact that it has been exactly ten days since we are no longer together. This whole relationship has caused me much pain and much joy, but it couldn't continue anymore. He made a choice to stay idle and not to risk anything for us. And so I had to move on, because I would never forgive myself letting the world happen around me as I cling onto a single hope and that is a relationship that means too much, but also doesn't mean anything.

Still, it hurts to remember. It's not a savage pain, though, because day by day the abyss between us had widened and words of bondage had become scarce and barely audible. And because I felt that I had lost too much in this toxic swirl of emotion and pride, I let myself walk away and I let myself mourn the possibility itself. After all, it was always just a possibility.

I don't think he knows what chapter of his life he is living through. I don't think I know what I want right now. And so it's perfectly clear that there are many questions, but neither one of us ever bothered to direct them at the other, for they didn't belong to the other but purely to our selfish selves. Walking away wasn't the only option, but it was the only hope.

The third anniversary marks a full month since my return back home. And I hate it. I hate my room, I hate that nothing feels like it belongs to me or I belong to it, I hate looking at old books that are just reminding me of someone I apparently once used to be, but now can't remember, I hate trying to communicate how I feel in my mother tongue that has now become so alienated and so obscure, I hate not living alone or with him, I hate the bed that's too big for one but too small for nightmares, I hate being confronted with Czech people as if I was observing them from the outside, I hate the different foods and social rules that I forgot how to follow, I hate the weather and that people always fucking stare at you in Prague, I hate that nobody here can mind their business, I hate to feel excluded from my friends and I hate to feel included with strangers... I hate all the ways in which I have changed, and I hate all the ways in which I haven't. But still, this hatred is transient: it appears for a second, sometimes very early in the day, and then disappears, leaving me again without much feeling and without much thought. It's better thane expected actually; I don't hate the city.

I really hope that with time, it becomes easier. By the way I feel, you could have said that I am experiencing a real break up with Santa Fe and my way of living in the US and my way of being myself when over there, while I am experiencing a mild "moving on" sensation with my finished relationship, one that you get when moving houses or coming back to the site of your childhood.

That's probably true for now. I take harder the fact that I feel completely out of context, completely barren of my self than the fact that I will probably never talk to the one person who made me feel like I and with me the world mattered.

Anniversaries. They are my new context, my new history, my new past.

It's very early in the day, only three am and yet it's already (or still) too hot to see a focused image in the open windows. Too hot to sleep. I don't want to be on this strange schedule again. I fall asleep just as the first touches of light appear on the horizon, licking the tops of the trees. Trees always look very gray in the early mornings, very uneventful. This sensation only serves as a physical reminder of what the past hours have been, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep.

My life has not turned into anything better than reading crappy novels and watching awful shows. Once in a while, I walk around the fence and sometimes I dare to hope. But both moments occur so sparingly that I don't really think about them nor do I count them as something substantial to remember. Days come in and days go out and time still feels like it's abundant and yet missing. I don't think I'm going to figure out much this summer or learn much for that matter.

Maybe once a week, I have a realization of sort. A thought. Something I don't need to be completely ashamed of. One of these thoughts has actually been the question of how are people able to think? The act of just thinking, sitting, meditating, doing whatever it takes to think seems very alienated from me (or at least from my current state). Even at school I struggled with the idea of thought. I couldn't just sit down like everyone else and think about the thoughts and ideas in my essay. I couldn't even ponder someone else's thoughts further than an oblique attempt at solidifying the author's philosophy. But that's not really thinking, it's just connecting the dots in one way or another; it's just getting evidence for a piece of subject.

I find it hard to think. To design thoughts, to creatively address questions, or to even embrace questions. Questions, and thoughts, just don't really come to me. But as I said, once in a while they do occur, out of nowhere, maybe when I'm brushing my hair and staring into my mirror image or when I'm stuffing myself with sweets that are supposed to make me feel full of eventfulness. They do come. And I usually write them down.

At least I still have the ability to surprise myself. But I wonder, do I have enough control to be free? Isn't that what we need for thinking?

I never thought I would say this but I wish I was raised by much stricter parents. Parents who would teach me through the hard way how important structure is and how dangerous idleness can be. In that sense, my move to the US for education has proved to be very motivating and successful for me because it gave me the rigid structure that I needed to focus on the big things. Although I generally resent any structure that is forced upon me by a single authority, the truth is that I perform much better under such rigid system than when given all the flexibility and freedom of the day.

Freedom itself is an interesting concept to me. It is freedom that I've changed my opinion about the most while studying philosophy. The more you examine the move from scholastic philosophy to modernity, the more it appears in the writings of moral, political, as well as epistemological thinkers that freedom is hardly the absence of bonds, but rather the acceptance of them. We are most free when we succumb to a firm and unyielding structure because only then do we have the freedom to focus on thinking itself: the absolute free state of mind. Even the curriculum at my school was a representation of this idea. While it was given what texts you read and in what order and a single curriculum was mandatory for all students and tutors alike, the same rigidness and constancy was never enforced in what we wanted to think. I did quite well in such an environment and so without it, I naturally feel like I'm slipping into nothingness and idleness.

Usually it is true for me that the busier I am the better I am at completing all tasks and at squeezing into my schedule even more activities. The more idle I am the less amount of work I actually do and the final result is never of any quality. I learned that lessons very early on when for one semester I decided to join a track and field team instead of doing gym hours. While being on the team was much more time consuming than doing three hours a week of mandatory exercise, which was also the reason for why I didn't want to do it in the first place, I learned that the structure that came with it was freeing and exhilarating. Suddenly I didn't have to worry when I do or what I do for the three workouts. I could just show up each day after school at the field and I would be given something to do. It was really mostly about removing "worry" and "planning" from the concept of exercise, which made it much more enjoyable to me in the long run and which freed the time in which I worried and planned for something that was more important.

While we tend to think that planning and worrying really doesn't take that much time, I am convinced of the opposite; I think that just being in this mindset of worry, plan, and the worry again when you don't do what you planned wastes our time and attention the entire day. Often it is hard to fall asleep because of guilt or planning for the next day and more guilt. I get so tired of trying to plan something, make decisions mentally, and then never following through and worrying about it and feeling guilty and useless. When you have a rigid structure, you can escape this entire scenario altogether and at the end of the day feel accomplished and satisfied. The amount of time I really spend in this mindset of worry and plan is incalculable. Besides wasting my time on it, it also makes me feel like I can't move from one place, like I am frozen in this perpetual motion of running in one spot.

But if I know this, then why is it still so difficult to submit myself to some routine? Why can't I do it myself instead of freely submitting myself to something else to decide for me? All I know is that, for some reason, I can never take myself seriously when I try to do it. I don't respect myself and the provisional rules I try to set out for myself. Really, it's as if I am constantly fighting myself but I don't even respect myself enough to stop.

It terrifies me:
We are so alienated from ourselves and we can do so little for ourselves.
The bonds of pleasure make us dependent while the bonds of pain make us free.
And while we know it, we just can't help ourselves and free ourselves from one just to submit to the other. It's almost as if in all this we never possessed free will, as if our decisions really were never ours to make.

For the past couple of days I was reflecting on the choices I made in my life. I don't mean the big choices, like moving to America or drop out of high school, but rather the small, often insignificant changes we all make every day. The little choices that end up ruling over our life whether we want them to or whether we even notice.

Since I cam back home after I finished my degree, I have been very idle both mentally and physically. Part of it is the fact that I feel like I have lost the dominant element of myself. My education, my school, and my community mean a great amount to me. In some sense, I feel like I have blossomed and come to terms with my limitations and my aspirations only while being present there. It would be odd if changes that essentially happened in me would be irretrievably lost if I moved away, but it does seem to me that I have left a part of myself behind, a part that will never materialize itself again. Some fundamental part of how I defined myself, of who I was, was separated from me and is only accessible through some deep channels in the mountains of New Mexico.

I felt the same way after I was forced to leave my high school in Wisconsin. I still believe that, again, I left a part of myself somewhere hidden in the frozen woods and lakes of Lowenwood. While I do carry my experiences with me no matter what, I don't feel the same way as I did when the experience was part of the real world in front of me. In fact, I feel essentially formless like someone who only sees blurry field of vision and so doesn't connect nor disconnect objects from shapeless colors. I am unable to think firmly and with deep sincerity about the person I have become. It seems—no, it's true!—that a sensation of a 'person' or 'becoming' doesn't easily come to my mind anymore.

And so I think about the choices we make, like staying inside the whole day, anxious of what may happen in the world outside of the four walls. Staying inside an apartment, inside my head, inside the person I think I used to be a mere couple of days ago. We resist change and especially one that comes from the external: one that imprints itself on us and shapes us like a piece of inconsequential clay. We follow the slipping flow of time, but only because we don't have a choice. We pray for something to happen to us, to wake us up from the limbo of our existence, but only because we can't make it happen ourselves.

Am I afraid of living or do I just not know how to do it? I think it must be the latter for I feel like I still possess the hazy memory of living and being present.

It has been such a long time since I have written anything (not just a blog post) that I am not only unsure of where to begin but I am doubly unsure of the why behind this post. Truly, I lack all knowledge of why today, of all the days full of writing inactivity, I choose to actually put some words down to some unexplained and definitely useless end.

It is not entirely true that I have not written anything; I have produced a considerable amount of words that contributed to all my school essays and recently also to my senior thesis. But my relationship to writing has changed very dramatically in the past five years. I used to be excited about writing, crave it even and always hope for the best in my thoughts as they became still and naked in writing. Now, I dread the moment when I have to finally sit down and write my essay (the only writing I do and only because I would have never graduated without it). Moreover, I am afraid of writing. I no longer feel good enough to even dare think of transforming raw thoughts into immaculate expressions, and along this path I sometimes feel like there is no hope in my writing, in any writing, or in words themselves.

Do you know the feeling when you are too concerned about the quality of your creation to the point that such creation becomes impossible, precisely unthinkable? As children, we used to draw and sing and write and act just to express ourselves, anything, but now we are too worried if this expression, or even this self, is good enough for the world. It doesn't really stop us from creative thought, but it does stop us from breathing an air of life into this thought. We let it sit and we watch as it ripens and without a care, without a single desire to share it, we let it spoil and turn into rotten mush that only attracts flies and disgust. And after that, only to make the culmination final, we let ourselves to be seen singularly through this image. It is our self that has just died and again and again.

I think that at this moment in my life I am sufficiently bored, depressed, stagnant, lifeless... In short, I have a great case of ennui... that I am not really afraid of writing anymore. There is not much to lose. The principle of overturning my flesh first to a damnable carcass, then to a damnable image, has lost its grip on my shoulder. The one thing I'd like to know by the end of this summer is why it is possible to feel this way.

As an individual, I have been very successful in those past five years in which you had not heard from me. In retrospect, my success has been apparent on every imaginable level: I have become a stronger individual, a better citizen, a kinder friend, a more educated human being, a more conscious observer, a more passionate advocator, and a humbler man. It is not even that I do not have any prospects for I am very comfortably set for the near future and nothing is really stopping me to explore the world, to daydream, and to act.

So really, I ask, why am I trapped and why don't I do anything? Anything.