28/02/25

-"That’s what a gaze is. Attention. An invisible string that connects us. Sole focus."

It must have been around my 11th birthday. Or my 10th. It was around that time when I met myself for the first time. There was the kind lady that always seemd to hang out near me, the butcher that only casted side-glances at me - as he was preoccupied with packaging meat for us when we went to the friday weekly market - and now also a tiny piece of everything huddled near the boxes, breathing quietly. There are lots and lots of people around me, and then there's I. Going through the events in my life, feels like flipping through the pages of a picture book.

Everyday, although I am no longer in school, reading it remains one of my main assignments, and ever-so diligently I must interpret it, very carefully, and the feelings in me, they whisper and plead, so that I favor one over another, but I know all of them are liars. Still, although there are no teachers and bad grades anymore, I must choose one, otherwise when I wake up again it will be very late in the day, and I prefer to be a morning person when I can. And so, among the soft cries, the gentle sounds indifference makes when lapped up from spilled inertia or the hateful whimpers of some now abstract trauma, using a sort of knockoff nitzschean reasoning, I would always, always choose the most practical. Might as well make it useful, I thought.

As to not mindlessly descend in some pathos-laden tapestry of pretty yet hollow words, as I am accustomed to - and to which this very sentence particaptes in, self-hatred being as cyclical as always - let me share here a distinction that I've come across in my studies. That is, of the perception in 1st person and of the perception in 3rd person. If the air surrounding you would, at this very instant, grow colder, how would you experience it ? Would you, after noticing slight shivers running through your spine, deduce that you are feeling cold ? No. You would simply think, or say, "I'm cold".

I do not have such luxury of a direct access to qualia, I can look around my room, and around the objects I perceive, my body, my thoughts and my will I would include, and with no more reverence than how I consider the sparse trinkets that it holds. That is to say, under certain definitions of consciousness, I would fail to qualify as one. Leaving behind the consistency of my self, whether it would be ash or snow, I hold it in no particular regard, even if someday I were to melt gently at sunrise.

Still I remain here. Writing in a language that is not my own. Learning about yet another slew of phatic acronyms, grammar distorded for utility's sake, and of these words making images. Perhaps it is to rewrite them. To rewrite the borders and the margins and the padding, the endless space between you and me. Why here, why this place ? My breathing goes short. My fingers tremble ever so slightly the sounds of the keys grows ever-more sonorous, in psyche I turn around a corner I crumble on the pavement... And it is neither cold nor coarse, it is warm. The warmth of the faint traces of the footsteps of perhaps the junior ballet that shared the room with us, the pearly black laminated floor. Right. In my heart I am still on stage. Expanding endlessly, coating irreverently the humid soil on these days of pouring rain, and the yawning sea that I seldom see, however close to our home it may be.

Ah, If I am to fated to play a role then please, let me choose it. Worry not, I have thought of everything, not too perfect, not too flawed just the way it should be. She will be kind to a fault, sometimes childish, sometimes a bit dispassionate oh but deeply determined a quiet storm brewing, never quite spilling out, perhaps rare moments where it would seep, her eyes pleading for some comfort. Maybe even a bit of a klutz although she wouldn't think of herself that way. Quite anxious also, never quite blooming but if she ever feels comfortable, her normally wary and cautious heart would disspipate so. That makes her sound quite needy but still I really believe that she would be a very lovely person. Truly. And she will be the happiest girl in the whole wide world.

Thus, bereft of the sky I stood under, beyond language, there remains nothing but to encompasss it all, the rising and waning of the tides, the world turned from syllable to sound: All of me that was not heard as a rustle or a rumble, will be said in one word, arbitrary, meaningless, a word for me to fill, for me to make, for me to be.

Simply said, I have thought of a name. Esia sounds nice.