3

a cup of tea
and two clementines
and some red wine.
taste and smell persists no matter how much time has gone by.
the only other thing i remember is that it was raining that thursday. at least, tonight the sky is clear.

Homelands..

'In a love affair, most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland's sadness. To that person, they remain faithful.' (Old Map)

'The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.' (Arc Lamp)

(Walter Benjamin, One Way Street)

soon?

Not only is time relative--temporal terms that we use in everyday language are even more relative. We say 'the other day' and we might mean a week or two months ago; we say 'often' but more often-than-not we mean 'rarely'. 'Last time'..which exactly and according to what, is that time classified as 'last'? And worse than anything else..'soon'. Who decides what 'soon' means?

Going back to good old Saussure and the 'signifier-signified' system of signs that gives my students immense headaches always, the linguistic signs that we use to refer to time are the most arbitrary of all; not only because they don't have any relation to the referent, term that they stand for, but also because the term itself is relative and one could even argue not existing. So arbitrary signs for a construct.

Hence, as a last thought of this week or potentially the first of the new week (depends on how one perceives the start and end of a week), i think that i wish to ban from my everyday language any linguistic reference to time: no 'tomorrow', 'yesterday', 'a couple of days ago', 'soon'. I could potentially keep only the references to hours that clocks count (knowing ofcourse how relative these are as well).But yes, if only I could ban all these empty linguistic temporal signs from my everyday communication--perhaps, I would get alienated from people but at least I would run away from yet another stupid, empty language game.

'when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of the world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.'

(Paul Auster, The Brooklyn follies)

friday (or the difference between a person and a place)

'I handed myself over. And you ran away.
You can't just leave people.
A person is not a place you can just leave behind.'
(David Greig. One way street)

two teabags later

it's been a while but the clock seems to have stopped..
curious, last night i dreamt of a white rabbit running and imagine i was following it
without a reason..it just made sense to me, in an irrational way

it's been a while but i am still sitting on the same seat by the window on a plane
my hair grew short but when i look at my image i am still wearing a purple top and have long hair

it's been a while but i still remember of broken glasses, walks in the sunset and some sweet words that made sense to me in an irrational way

pause..15 years later

no just two teabags..bugging me like the hours i spent by the window waiting for a car to arrive, a text to be received, a story to be told again from the beginning

it's been a while..a week or two..time is fucking relative. we knew this already. we just remembered again.
and you look yourself in the mirror, and roll cigarettes, and take boiling hot showers to wake up from the dream.

and wonder, as now, as ever: whatever happened to human contact? and why did you lie to me when you said that things are easy? the world is easy..

it's been a while, it's been years, it's been two weeks and a day, it's been just two minutes..long enough to make two cups of tea and throw the teabags away