Another year of merda

   The end of this year feels heavier than the previous one - I have held a strong distaste for the holidays for the past few years, though I try to refrain from being superstitious about them. And in the past few years I take the time to reflect on what I have learnt, gained and lost in the year that passed. And the counting this year was painful and resembled pouring salt over wounds that remain unhealed. 

  In this year I felt the rug of what fragile little security I had built being pulled from under my feet. One of my most important relationships dissolved and I am still trying to balance the automatic-guilt with the fact I did not deserved to be treated like that. Another important relationship has all the trust I placed in it sucked right out. The sense of home I had tried to built was picked apart and now any room can feel like a home in the sense that if you decorate any hotel-room enough you can play-act it into being a haven. I came to realise that my bones are my only home, weary and heavy as they are and I quit believing in almost anything. 

  The last day of the year finds me home, looking out at a grey sky, feeling disconnected from everyone and slightly desolate for it. My attachment to people has become more discoloured than it was in the past and I allow myself to face this feeling without guilt.  May the next year be kinder. May we learn to give a shit and show that we give a shit.  

  May we learn. And grow.

  So that all the pain has been worth it.

  I expect nothing out of anything.

Entry #11

   Spending so much time deliberately looking inwards is bound to unearth various results. I have always had some sort of inclination of what kind of person I want to be and what sort of life I would like to lead but I was taught to always be careful and caring and nurturing and while those are all fine qualities to have, they can shatter a person when they are the main ones they have. And now at my age, in the midst of the pandemic, breaking my back at one shitty job after another, I realise I am not even top notch on these qualities either. 

  I find my self hungry and with a lack of any definite character or set of skills.

  The hunger has been one unexpected constant in my life and though I often find myself either detesting or pitying this emotion, I can do no more but to recognise its value as well. For every time I have dared to set a foot outside it has always been a move pushed by hunger. The trap however, is that the more you start to open up, the more starts pouring out. And the more that starts to pour out of you, the deeper you can look within and there always more skeletons to drag out of the closet, more things you want to learn and reach out to.

  In some ways, I am hungry for myself - for a sense of self that feels like me and not a man-suit that I am wearing. I am hungry to be exposed or rather to expose myself, to open up to touch that I can monitor in some ways, rather than feel that I am always subjected to the caprices of life without a will of my own. I am not talking about "rebranding", such fancy, almost filthy word, no, indeed, I do not refer to rebranding myself. I am not searching for a brand or a label, even though all my life I have been taught to chase after exactly that. A label. In greek we say that it's better to have your eye gouged out than have a bad label stuck on you.

  But I have found that all the good labels can feel like hot iron set on your skin too. And you end up scarred and just as empty on the inside. 

  I feel the pressure - in fact I feel it all too well. The pressure to be defined in a very clear, objective way - and I often desire to have the ability to do so but I find myself entirely incapable of doing it. And, for lack of better words, there is something that begins to kick inside me too. I have felt the kicks for years now but the more time passes, the more acute becomes the pain of every hit, the harder it is to be ignored.

  All the story tropes reside deep within. 

Entry #10

   I always told myself I spent too much time in front of the screen and that is true but this year it seems took it to another level. All of a sudden I am called to spend an innumerable amount of hours and now there is more work, more research to do - and often more amusement to look for. 

  It is also the first time where I am confined to the screen for communication. The first time that I have been called to not only retain but also grow relationships confined to the screen. I have met the other through media in the past and with some we have only had communication like this but this is different - this is now for the first time the main thing. 

  It makes me more nervous than I care to admit. I have often felt unease when called upon interacting with others and now this cutting off from reality is perhaps changing me even further. On one hand I feel like I am growing more on the inside, like every thought and action become deeper, obtains a different hue. On the other I feel like I have grown more sensitive and callous at the same time, my tolerance for the physical presence of others - and therefore the inability to shut them off whenever I feel like it - becoming shorter and shorter. 

  There is no normality to go back to. At present more and more of us are snuffed out, some out luck or lack of circumstances. I feel like we are laid bare and we still refuse to see - I include myself in all of this of course. And those that resurface, whenever they do, what kind of people will they be afterwards? What kind of connections will we form?

Anonymous and traceable

 I have traces of me 

scattered around the web.

Some of them nameless

others not.

I have scattered pieces of me

some abandoned

others not. 

I crave the times

when being unknown was

an easy kind of trick. 

Now I feel like pouring all my brain 

into even smaller

nameless 

little parts.

As much as praise

and recognition fuel me

they also set my surroundings on fire.

They poison 

every thing

that I tried to keep pure

for myself.

Creating

and living

and thinking. 

As much as I don't like to admit it

I fell prey 

to the same

(day in)

(day out)

trap 

as most of us.

Sometimes I wonder

just what kind of person I would be

if the opinions of others didn't matter.

I am deeply grateful for all the small little tidbits of private expression that I still have. I used to be paranoid about the blog, concealing it and not talking about it and hiding it from search engines. I have let go in part of that, over the years I have shown it to one, maybe two people.

And I am grateful for all it is. A private little space, where I can write silly little words and I don't have to worry too much if it's not good enough or not.

Entry #9

   Someone I knew died recently - he passed away noiselessly in early October and it was not until recently that word of his death spread quite like fire from mouth to mouth. Or, to be more exact, from screen to screen. In a year full of ups and downs, heading from one small disaster to a new one, this one death shocked and shattered the quietness of quarantine. 

  I thankfully spend the second quarantine by myself, in complete isolation using the excuse of empty days to empty my mind and balance whatever there is left of it after a roller coaster of a year. A lot of things remain unprocessed and I do wonder not just when the world will go into some sort of balance but also how long it will take for each community and individual to do so as well. In a state of collective trauma that varies in levels, reality is sometimes difficult to stay in touch with. 

  And that is exactly how I have been experiencing life lately: in a state of disassociation as if most components are not real, as if we have entered a parenthesis that at the end of we will be able to go back to our lives as we knew them from before, except not all components of our past will be there. And this crisis has pointed out all the many ways in which our previous reality was fragile at best.

  But I digress. On a quiet evening in Athens, looking at the building from across the street at the opposite apartment, death slid quietly in my DMs. For the first time I realized that there is no normality to go back to. For once everything opens back up, whenever that happens, whenever we can hug friends and acquaintances that we see on the street without wondering whether or not we have exposed each other irrevocably to harm, we won't go back to life as we knew it for that life will no longer be there. Going back to our favorite places, the bars and schools we frequented, we will realize that stepping out of our house will also feel like stepping in a photograph with holes in it. 

  We will go back, maybe, but not all of us. 

  And it makes you wonder, who will I go back to? How long and what quality of time do I have left with people I love? How have I been using it? How will I use it? Time feels more and more elastic but more often than not it's as if we're experiencing it on the verge of breaking. We feel the cracks around us seem to thicken, how do we grasp life truly back? 

  I struggle for the answers.

  I have not found one. 

  I hope you found the peace you craved in whatever you went. 

Entry #8

  I was not aware that the closing of a door could have such a finite feel to it. And yet looking back all the ends almost always include the closing of a door; the door of the airplane as it shuts closed, the door of your previous house closing after you have handed in the keys, a taxi door, a class-room door. Sometime the sound of the door does not accompany the ending itself, it is only later, when you return to your current adobe and you close the door behind you that you even become aware of an ending. And more often than not, those moments are hardly melodramatic.

  When he left I closed the door behind him in relief. It does not bug me in the slightest to admit so. This was an ending to our chemistry, the thing that had been building up under the surface and had to be released at some point. And once that door closed he was back to being himself, another man, in a way a boy, in many ways lonely. I have tenderness for the lonely people but I do not delude myself with what is an extent of a need and what can be rooted in genuine emotion. And I felt relief for once the line is crossed and you see what was on the other side you can comfortably go back and move on.

  When I closed the door behind me that day, I looked around at was my new house and could not help but think back of another house into which I had entered with a feeling of elation, with so much positive feelings for what the future would hold. This now, this was a different matter, a different feeling. It was the first time I moved in someplace feeling near sick to my core, disillusioned, tired and wishing to be away from every one. I still think of those moments with a bitter feeling, sometimes the bitterness is directed to myself.

  When I came back last night and closed the door, knowing that in the next three weeks I will be in complete quiet, with very, very disturbances from the outside world, I was filled with bliss. Things are never allowed to be quite so simple, of that I know. But the bliss was there none the less. The present situation removed any need for a pretext, for a reason to sit back and remain reserved and keep my mouth shut. And with that I drew in a deep breath.

  And I allowed myself to plunge inwards.

Entry #7

 On Sunday mornings, I almost feel myself again. I woke up surprisingly early, surprisingly with ease this morning. I made coffee and cleaned the house, I took down most of the winter clothes and re-arranged my wardrobe. Yesterday the chest pain didn't go away until I lied down to sleep, yet I drifted fast and deep. I woke up feeling more like myself, part of the anxiety melted away with the night. I know my job is slowly sipping the life out of me and I know it's unlikely that it will get better. I know that the anxiety will have me back by the throat once tomorrow rolls around and I cursed for not noticing sooner that I am running out of my melatonin pills; since I started taking them, I sleep better on most nights.

  I ate breakfast, then lunch around noon. I have left the covers outside in the sun to be aired. I ate with friends twice this week and this gave me joy. I like having people over and feeding them. There's something about sharing things you made with people that is full-filling. I sat on my arm-chair by the balcony doors, this chair that I have come to love so much, and read. In some ways, in my head, I have created in this weak even though my soul was bleak. On the hours when I fall, I fall hard. And then I get back up by myself, stumbling along the way. I struggle to find peace, yet I recognise it at once when I come across it.

  There's only peace in learning and in standing still. In staying in quiet places, sometimes sunny and sometimes not. There's peace in grievances shared with people who won't judge you for not being well, in the moments when you can speak of your pains without having to be told what you already know, that things could be worse, indeed they could, but that does not make many things better. 

  I hear the rustling of the leaves and I know, that as time goes by the ties I have with this place are being severed one at a time. I am shedding the person I used to be.