My words were clumsier
but at least they were
passionate.

It's not like I have forgotten how to write.
Well, may be that too.
But mostly
I don't have
what
to write about.

I don't have a who
to write about
in the sense that
I'm not a who
myself.

Sometimes I think I am not living
just playing along.

I've broken
through
many barries

but never

my own.

Wimp

  I am a wimp I guess, in may ways. The lines are set, the walls are built, the door is closed. All are welcome to leave, none is welcome to enter. I realised recently, I am so set on this belief, this expectation of disappointment, I am a romantic for everyone, except myself. Words either fail me or die on my lips, I feel as if I never reach across. Perhaps it's why I thirst to reach and touch, fingers brushing on skin, I shiver at the thought of this fragile connection - I've grown so disillusioned that I don't see anymore.
  I realised that nowadays I always make sure I can creep out of peoples lives silently, unnoticed, the sound of the door so subtle, low, they won't even realise it. I'm afraid of making an impact because then others will make on me too.
  There's too much doubt on who I've touched.
  We fear what we crave.

Your needs and wishes are branches
pulling at my hair
flies
cramming down my throat.
I am floating
no more.

Eyes like hands

Eyes that touch
eyes that
violate.

*

  I try. It is really nonsensical, almost invisible on the outside but there's a constant chaos waging on the inside of my head and I try to tame it, to somehow make up for it. The expectations of others, the pain shame of disappointing, of never enough, always just by little bit but enough not to pass unnoticed. Over the past years I've been dismantling; reassembling, then taking apart again, looking through the pieces of memories to find the core of truth, the one thing that will somehow make everything worthwhile or logical or bearable or pretty. Once the illusion is broken it can never be put back together, no matter how hard you try or plead. Maybe growing up is about having all the youthful illusions broken, the eyes once opened never close, the vision can only be clouded, numbed, but it's still there.
  I've seen the most part of it, the friendships, the families, the lovers, all those supposed to be meaningful to be always lacking; supposedly sufficient until they're not. And then the confirmation whispered, that they were never enough, but they could have been, they could have been.  And the more you see it the less you want to but you don't want to go back either, willful ignorance is pathetic, something to be pitied. It shows a weakness of spirit, a denial to know and accept one's self.
  And you accept, and you learn to embrace it and then to live with it, to enjoy what you can and even to fight. And I wish that were enough. But when you're soft you don't choose the places where the skin gives way, where the light hurts most, you're just soft all over and if you can't punch through the world then you wrap your self around the world, your world and try to make it all ok. As if holding on tight enough will keep everything together. As if you can keep anyone together.
  You can't even keep yourself together. The needs of everyone just keep pulling at you, your needs too. It's not a voice that screams, it's the little things that eat away at you. The silences, a bottle in the freezer, an unused room, things that were never moved, questions, promises whispered, appointments said but never fixed, it's rolling around to a pillow, the leftover smell in some else room, a special drink, stories that happened to somebody else, your stories happening to somebody else, it's knowing the next move without even seeing it, the smell in the air, sometimes it's knowing the wrong side of people too much, too well, sometimes it's their good side and it hurts equally much. It's your hands, hungry and cowardly, all the words drowned at the back of your throat, a cemetery at the based of your throat that chokes you, it's being always careful, never relaxed, measuring words, measuring the loudness, constructed. It's speaking truthfully low and slurring and avoiding to do so sober because then you can't be held accounted for what you say, it's the liquor speaking, not you being human.
  It's all this and much more, your getting accustomed to them but not really, a numb mist spreading over your mind, a hollow laugh, too cynical for your age, you were supposed to dream still. It's knowing you don't and even if you did, you have no idea what it would be of.

Rós

And as the music rose
the rain began to fall
turning the skin sticky
then slippery.

His voice pumping
its way into my bloodstream
deep breathing and swaying

the feeling of sheer,
exhilarating
ecstasy.

WN

It's the white noise that disturbs me.
The soft buzzing near my eardrums,
it sounds menacing. It's
so low that everything else
sounds loud,
an exaggeration.
A distant laugh,
carried by the air through open windows
and over rows and rows of balconies
with roses and magnolias.
Fabric,
gliding down skin,
leaving it bare,
hair standing on attention,
electrified.
A gulp, 
the slow turning of the neck,
fingers brushing away hair.

Breaths,
getting irregular and

more.

Still there

  It can not be helped. You can still trace its outlines, feel its edges. The tiny prick of jealousy, like a small, almost imperceptible wooden splinter, pricking through soft tissue. It comes along with questions; what girl is he taking out tonight, who did he fuck? It comes along with solid certainty, even after the realization he's opened up his mouth and blabbed about you, perhaps even unknowingly recommending you, never understanding how he's put you into the radar. Or perhaps he has.

  It's a rotten thought but knowledge often desecrates the tender moments. It bathes them in a cold, ghastly light, bares them naked and finds them wanting. Crumbling. Common. And if your memories and treasured moments are common and cheap and faked, what does that make you? People are supposed to be the sum of their memories and actions. The first is false, the second impulsive, sometimes vile, usually misguided. 

  It makes you feel an emptier version of yourself. 

  And you accept it.

  You accept the jealousy you have no reason to feel, rationalize it, dissect it. It's not what you know that haunts you. It's all the possibilities of what you don't. We're all junkies is deep down, we have that one thing we can't resist, that we'll do anything to get a dosage of.
  For me that's tenderness. The resemblance of intimacy.

*

"I can't seem to get comfortable," I said and he reached across and grabbed my arm and pulled me from the arm to lie down next to him on the couch, limbs entangled and bodies heated, pressed close. I dozed there for seconds, stayed curled and enjoyed the intimacy. The movie ended and the room grew dark, we stayed there breathing, his face buried in the back of my neck.

Pulling, pulling, teeth grazing skin, the smell of salty sweat in my nostrils, the craving for heat, for proximity, for violence, then resting.

I slipped out of the bathroom, he was fast asleep and I got dressed quietly and headed to the living room. I rolled a cigarette with the remnants of my tobacco, laid across the couch, solitary this time, drew long, burning breaths, my eyelids heavy, the cigarette slipping between my fingers. I woke up couple of hours later, he was standing above me.

"Why would you sleep here, don't you want to come inside?"
"I didn't want to disturb you."

*

  I swirled and let my eyes wander, devouring everything around, accompanied by the other senses. The touch of sand, the smell of sea, the taste of salt mixed with the sweetness of mastiha, the sound of the breeze coming from the Baltic sea and running straight into the surrounding forest. The sun never truly settled, just hid temporarily and painted the sky brilliant shades of colour, there were moments when the waves were licked golden by the light.
  I walked in the ruins and got a bit lost in them, I nearly lost my footage - had we not managed to hold on to each other in a peculiar sort of balance we would have fallen, straight into the greenish waters. We laughed about it with our heartbeats throbbing rapidly at the base of our throat.
  Heading towards the car, the others already waiting, I heard the sound of motors from the dirt path that led us down to the secret post. I looked at the low rising of earth where the came cleared, dust rising like fog, the lights of the motorcycles clearing through it as they started descending. Some ten riders, all clad from head to toe, I was breathless at the sight, my camera resting in my hands unused, I would have missed them had I tried to capture them.
  Blue eyes locked in mine from far ahead, contact broke after he passed me, I hurried to the car, my throat tightening.

*

"I honestly hope he'll meet a girl and find a companion in her and will be happy."
"I don't think that will happen," she said. "He's too old to learn how to love and be happy."
And my heart broke in a million places.

Insubstantial

  I like to act brave but at times I feel my knees give way out of me and the trembling continues, the erratic heart-beat is thudding in my head, I feel like I am vibrating. It does hurt in spite of everything - not the way a lie, it's like a fear I caught with my teeth without realising what it is and now it's lodged there and I am not the one who's caught it, but the other way around.

  The headaches are not so much worse, these past few days I've found that a combination of alcohol - not too much, just enough to feel tipsy - and cigarettes helps combat the subdued panic I've been feeling for months and that is good, the realisation came just in time. Otherwise I know not how I would deal with this, how can I be so calm about it.

  I am not scared of the knowledge of not being unique myself. What scares me the most is the possibility of the unperceived absence where presence was expected, of the most solid moments collapsing in of themselves, void of everything, like photographs with gaping holes in them where a whole person or a face used to be. 

  I am paralised by the potentiality of this. How there is no way of absolutely refusing any chance of it, that after all moments when I felt most untroubled were nothing but a comedy played for no one but myself. A pointless play, unnecessary as it is now painful. 

  I don't feel hurt, not in the way I expected to be. I just need to see some things as solid and I will breathe out again, if all is as insubstantial as I feel myself to be, there is nothing to hold on to but the only chance is to let go completely, to chase all shadows in the hope you'll manage to grab one that is real.

It will surreal still

This went
Far too smooth

I tell myself.

It's funny how

we've been conditioned to

believe

that talking things out

is hard 

and

impossible

so that when we talk

we only expect

explosions.

I feel the need to write still about this, more, like I have so much thoughts and emotions around this I feel like I might over spill at any second, moment, at the sidewalk of some street, I might drench everyone with all that's built up.

The truth will set you free

But it will break your bones
I've learnt.

But the lightness of it sears me, like a heavy weight unloaded, liked a voice strangled at the base of my throat that finally comes through. It felt so egotistic. I felt like doing what was right for me teared down some things for her, I felt like I degraded personal moments that I had no right to touch. It made me so fearful but once it started there was no stopping it, I thirsted for this moment of liberation.
  How do you do right by someone? To which degree should you? Do you protect and lie and how far of a lie is a protection, if it is at all? I am an excellent liar - I can weave a story thoroughly, organizing all the details in my head. But I choose not to do so to people I hold in high regard. So when she asked, I answered. I knew I didn't have to. But there was no reason to dance around something and play along for an audience that consisted of no one else but us.
  It felt surreal and perhaps it is vain and naive to say so but in a way it made me feel closer to her. Not just my being truthful but her reaction as well. So many things shared and I was scared that with every passing moment I was tearing down something else for her. I wanted to explain somehow that all those moments she lived were not fake or meaningless, they were not copies she was handed over, a show repeated spectator after spectator. That she was there for a reason. That there was a reason he chose to share them with her, even if he has shared them with others. Even if some things he shared them with me.
  Phrases and words have stuck in my head, like wooden splinters piercing my brain, it's strange, I feel the need to protect them both in a way, but they're not powerless. I feel the need to protect what they had as well. Don't demolish it and pick it apart, I can't quite explain it.
  I can't explain anything. I chase the words and I fail them, or just language, an array of symbols, is just too poor a label to express all that bursts inside, burning coals that explode with the smallest of emotional caress.
  Maybe I'm too strange for my head at times.

*

Ήθελα να σου ζητήσω να σε δω
μα το φοβήθηκα.

Δεν ήθελα
στα σκοτάδια να σε κλείσω.

Hotel rooms

  Every space has its own smell, a form of odour id. Upon entering somebody's home the person is tied with the aroma or stink of their personal space, and you recognise your presence in their small world only when you recognise the particular smell. Sometimes it's an indistinct smell of sweat, the stale air of a room shut down for too long combined with the heavy smell of burning sticks - regardless of their professed aroma they all smell the same.

  But it's a little bit to make you feel safe - you know a little bit more about them, you read behind everything, adding small characteristics here and there in their profile. It has substance and in time, you begin to occupy a certain space however temporarily.

  Perhaps that is why most people feel unnerved by hotel rooms - they either smell of nothing in particular, sterile walls surrounding a sterile space, or they smell of some cheap perfume that is a bit too strong for the nostrils but all hotels seem to favor. It might burn all other odours out. There is a constant reminder that not only are you a visitor but your presence will come and go unnoticed, there is no one to notice it anyway, there is no one to read here. Just you and yourself.

  I've always loved the state of limbo in a hotel room, you're neither here, nor there, you're anonimous, unimportant, unnoticed. For a while you get to be anyone, getting treated raki and tea by turkish waiters or sneaking around and talking with people you have just met. And then you disappear, as surely and decisively as that. There are no rules to bend, just invent them and break them. You get to dream and feel things that in a space that feels real you never do.

  You get to be yourself more than you get out in the so called real life.

*

Your presence

turns the whole city

into a

minefield.

*

  I used to want to write it all down, word for word, breath for breath. I used to be naive enough to think the logical arrangement of symbols on paper could somehow retain some of the original warmth, the original spark, the original... anything. But the truth is far more simple, I pour my self out on paper trying to be methodical, I empty myself and the result of all this out-pouring is just as empty.
  I think that is how my personal writing grew nonsensical, so that unless you have the one word that clears it all out you can never be too sure of what or who this is really about. I try to enslave the fragmented moment, the feel of it in a move that is almost desperate, I know I'm failing and words are always haunting me.
  Moment after moment I lay there breathless, trying to take it all in. "I will remember this," I think, but usually the only thing imprinted on my brain and memory is the desperation of trying to remember. I'm caught up in the fragrances, the feel of warm skin, of cold sheets against my body. I throw my head back and soak in the sunlight when I walk in the streets, this feels too reckless for someone who's learnt to always to be in control but it feels good sometimes to let go. I twirl around nostalgic, I play with the light and then hide, I like to go to bars unaccompanied and just drink something alone, in that moment I escape in others without interacting with them.
  People tell me I'm an odd one whenever I say that.
  But they say so anyway even when I don't.

Irony

It finally hit me
The sheer irony of it.
There were two things we said
one each;

You said
"I don't want us
to turn into two people that just fuck."
And me
"I don't want us
to end up going in circles."

We did both.
I accepted it
with a smile.

The only pain left
is that
pf acknowledged
defeat.

*

  The visitor comes and sits, for a day or two and sometimes longer, quietly in the corner. He is not to be commented upon, just idly accompanies me. Always turns up unexpected with nothing so much as a notice beforehand. His exit from the room and subsequent departure is anticipated, though the exact hour and moment a complete mystery. I revel in his presence, don't question, too delighted with his proximity. 

  We read in quiet and sometimes I draw, there's daydreaming on end, he introduces me to music from the world, lately he's taken it into his head to listen to flamenco music and cuban, something about the language being unknown that enchants the soul and soothes it he says. I catch words and phrases here and there. Smoking is rarely included, not because of an untold restriction but rather due the absence of any internal need. I smoke only in the company of others that inspire me to. There has been talk of me cutting but I treasure the ritual of it, I promise I'll think of it and never do.

  The silence is precious, the balance usually fragile but still I feel content. Then a cloud passes over the eyes, he gets up quietly, a kiss, a vague promise to return, some time, at some point. 

  I acknowledge the reality of the situation.

Spilling

It crossed my mind
it did
it did
I chose to bury it deep
instead
for I could barely

stop

my self.


He was
caressing my belly
and you mouthed at me
Kiss me
I'll explode

and I was filling up
with desire
and self-restraint

and I am spilling
spilling

all

            over.

*

I think I

figured it out

after all.

I am the comfort

the warmth

the intimate familiarity

without all the

troubling

questions.

Quiet

always

dis

a

ppear

ing

*

How do I say to you.

You can't appear
and disappear
taking advantage of my weakness for you
setting me on edge
every now and then

and not pulling me back.

You were the one to stray
cutting ropes
saying

Better stop now
than turn into
two people that just fuck.

*

At the very least
I seem to never be
surprised

by silence.

He's back in town

All she said was this.
I detested the way
my heart rate sped up
and I started trembling
and felt nauseous
with anxiety.

(Not) Unexpetedly enough
I turned around and saw him at some point,
laughing he said
"What goes around comes  around"
(in greek it sounds like
"everything is paid here"

the language is richer

more
apt).

"Come here",
dropping his stuff on the floor.
I went in for the hug
in an instant,
unsure whether that's what he meant.
"When will I see you?"

He always asks
and I answer,
more to humour him,
I know no meeting will be truly set.

(Except for the bad ones,
we never fail to meet for those.)

Sometimes I think
I'll recognise you anywhere

and see you everywhere
in stangers
and refections

but to be fair
I doubt we'll share again a
somewhere

"Sorry to come back to this
but
from a psychological point of view
it seems that
you are afraid
of something."

I'm afraid
of everything
and nothing.

Washed out

  I try to explain the emptiness to him, sitting in a small cafe, scribbling all the time. I try to explain the absence of feeling, that impassive moment when you observe and are aware of your every move but all is done in a mechanical way, there is no active motive behind them, just keep going, it seems to be working so far.

  He doesn't seem to get it, to grasp the idea appears to be beyond him. How can one not feel? he asks. Is it boredom then? I struggle to find the words to make it clearer, I like talking to him, more than I like kissing him, my side is turning more and more into a platonic emotion. No, I say, in boredom there is something to do and you don't want to or there is nothing to do. The situation I am talking about is something else, you know there is something you need to do and you do it, except you're not really present in the moment.

  And where are you then?

  Well, fuck if I know.

  I don't know why he's even going along with it so far, seems merely content to be in my company and kiss me, it is in a way the purest way I've experienced anyone.

  It's just that pure is not enough.

  In life, sooner or later, you have to decide whether you like it dirty. 

  And a little bit of dirt never harmed no one.

Excitement

I miss
the excitement
you gave me.

The
-I can't feel
my knees
or legs
or anything anymore-
kind of excitement.
The only real thing
to hold onto
the erratic beating
of the heart
a low buzz
in my ears.

I've stopped
looking for it.
I stopped looking for you.

It's been years now.

It's not
a punch in the stomach.
It's a sigh of
resignation.

Misplacement

Every time I speak
I feel as if
only noise came out of my mouth.
Long
tiring
useless
words.

There is
this ever-present
sense of misplacement
like I'm here by accident
like any moment
I'll be erased
and re-written.

Fine

I don't sleep.
I run around
distracted and
in thousands of pieces,
trying to be everywhere at the same time
trying to do everything.
Constantly exhausted
but
too tired to think
my mind constantly buzzing
with this thing
or that
I don't have much time
to feel anymore.

I answer I'm fine.