mockoblog

ME

I left my home in Christchurch, NZ, on Monday (Romanian time) only to arrive in Bucharest some four confusing days later… I’ve been through steamy Singapore and foggy Frankfurt and at the end of the beginning of my journey I found the city I used to call mine.

Bucharest is like nothing I could explain. It has evolved outside politics and fears, yet it is governed by them. Its ugliness, somewhat embedded in my hardware through people and their actions, has now become beauty in my fading random access memory, which makes room for nothing less than positive reasons for who I am and what I foolishly think I choose to do. I find myself a spec of colour in this rainbow of shades and tints, I feel I belong here and this place doesn’t seem to reject me but keeps on sending me hints about who I might actually be. And it subtly tells me to stay away within.

I don’t love Bucharest. I just feel part of it. I remember uneven stones in the pavement and I know they’ve been there from before my time as a conscript communist soldier, a rowdy student, a lover of pubs, arts and women (not necessarily in that order), a first-time father, a capricious journalist and a never accomplished writer-to-be. I know those pavers can’t possibly be uniquely mine but yet they are!

When I walk down mental streets I find no surprise. Young lovers still hold hands and kiss each other. Music still streams from behind shabby fences into the open World. Transcendent perennially remains the same impossible yet so utterly present ‘belongingness’ feel of Bucharest. Once my city, always everyone’s hometown. The less you are part of it, the more it makes you fell it is part of you.

I hate to love this place. It contradicts me and my personal choices and I must reject it for it was its people who made me leave it for good (?) and it was I who took the step out of it and hoped to forget Bucharest all together.

The beauty in the ugliness is style. And Bucharest has it. People just walk by. Style stays. There is no meaning, no logic in this.

I’ll catch a train out of this town tomorrow and I’ll forget all about this attempt to write a story set in Bucharest. That story seems to have been written already many times over and, although it is about so many of you, people who for sure live here and people who certainly don’t, I modestly volunteer the working title for this never started but purely finished tale of understanding what can’t be understood – the title would be ME!

(Bucharest, 07/08/14)

I am so lonely that loneliness breaks apart and takes people with it in small scattered splinters. I see my life down the reverse track like a bullet looking back on the barrel that gave it birth. Yet alive, I contemplate the stupidity of love as parts of me die and are being eaten by the germs of time. I’ve never been anywhere and nowhere is where I’m destined to go, though now, in my final days or years, I accept the mystery of nothingness. As a kid, I used to smell flowers. I climbed trees. My knees were always hurting, covered in blood. I stole fruits across fences. I drove knives into fish I caught and I ate nothing but dreams. As a teenager, I wondered about love. I tasted it with beautiful women who never existed but in my mind. I was a writer of sorts. A speller of truth. A joker of destiny. I lived. And who are you?