At the end of my money I smelled the dust on the brown linoleum in my living room next to the two red chairs which I had found in the street just a few months after moving in. I somehow wished that the metal shelves, filled with books and toys and probably just trash, could cave in on me, just burry me, just make sure i was killed. quickly... by Astro Boy, or Goethe.
I played with the tears on the floor, little salty drops that turned into trails of dirt under my fingers. I made crosses, triangles, no circles...
I ate Matzo bread and onions, since they were the cheapest thing I could find, I froze juices diluted with water, to make a taste last longer. I so wished I maybe had a dog, or some pet that could maybe just eat the bills from my mailbox, and then maybe me, once the shelves caved in, buried me, smashed my stupid skull in, at last.
A friend came to visit, we had been paired up to work on a big project together, a few months prior, it was supposed to be a big one, I had spent the thousands in anticipation of the great success. We failed so miserably like never before and never since. The company paid me a symbolic dollar to just make sure I do not say they did not pay me for the weeks and weeks my partner and I failed at visualizing our really lame ideas.
So here we were again, in my living room, my tears wiped, the matzoh on a plate, the empty kitchen closed, we on the chairs, far away from the window, staring at each other silently.
I took her in my arms and carried her light body into the other room, the one that was just bare with two found tatami mats on the floor, no futon, really cold. Oh, there were hundreds and hundreds of small photographs, near the ceiling, but that's a completely different story.... She looked so incredibly fragile, barely there...
We stared at each other with a most desperate completely silent intensity. I think we might have kissed, though we probably have not. Or did we maybe touch each other's bellies? No we did not.
Then she just left. I do not even remember how quickly or really when and how. Oh, I remember her probing her thin limbs into the sleeves of a flimsy worn out t-shirt... Her translucent skin less and less visible under layers and layers and layers of fabric.
She later, much later, told me that she had been pregnant on that day when we met, in my pathetic apartment of unpaid bills and rent.
She had lost the baby shortly after.
It was as if somebody had been listening to my pleas to bring death quickly into my apartment, and the reaper came to visit, rushed through the rooms, found us staring at each other, on the mats, on the cold linoleum floor... and then he killed, and he killed the weakest one he could possibly find...
Dear God, why are you making me think of this right now?
I think that we remember the most desperate, devistating periods of our lives when we (for whatever reason) need to bring into perspective the comparitively insignificant things that we find to complain about during more prosperous and fortunate times.
Reading this left me in tears, and brought to the surface many things that I often do not often think about. It is an enormous reminder of how foolish I am to not appreciate how different and better my own life is now than it was just 6 or 7 years ago.
"Dear God, why are you making me think of this right now?"
that, my dear witold, is the million dollar question... one that only you can explore, one that only you can answer.
a lot of the times, we recall certain memories because we are possibly going through a similar situation or experiencing similar feelings... i believe that things happen for a reason... and that the things that happen in our lives, the people that we meet, the things that we witness - how we react and what we do with what we encounter are there to teach us... we either learn something about our world, about each other, about life, and most of all - about ourselves.
errr one other thing... "onions"?... like you would eat an apple?
This reminds me of a Thomas Mann short story, sad as it is.