So Scentless. Everydayness

November 2000

I was on the other side of myself, as if my body had remained in one room, while I, the real I, had seeped through the gap under the door and ended up where time turns its back on everything alive. On the other side of time, on the other side of the border, in a region that appears on no map, because no one in their right mind charts their own abandonments.

Where I landed, there was a silence so dense one could brush against it like a wall. And yet I stood inside it upright, as if waiting for inspection. For an assessment of my absence. Because what would remain after my non-abandonment, after that hypothetical version of me still shuffling among people, is only a mechanism. A pure set of learned reactions, like a clock wound by someone who has never seen me but knows the basic manual for operating a human. Everything unspontaneous, smoothed like stones in a river long after the water has dried up.There is no glimmer in the eyes—only a dry reflection of light, like on the surface of a dead fish. A face without expression. Extinguished. As if someone had cut the power in an apartment where the furniture still stands, but no one has lived for years. Every next step that this mechanical I would have to take would be executed with calculated effort, like a move in a game one no longer wishes to play, but feels obliged to finish so as not to make a bad impression. Gestures kept alive like an old machine left plugged in out of habit.

That was yesterday. A bit like today. A bit like every day since I lost access to my own centre of gravity. But there, on the other side of myself, something else happened. A small thing—barely a flicker, as if someone had shifted an invisible switch within me. I had held myself upright on borrowed ribs, half-transparent, slightly late, slightly oversensitive, with a strange readiness, a capillary of hope—thin as a spider’s thread stretched between me and the future. Touch it, even with the fingertip of a thought, and it trembles like a string.

But today, more than yesterday, I feel the door swollen from years of moisture finally yielding to the lightest pressure of a hand.

So, how am I?

“I fell to the floor” when I read, at the beginning of your letter, about goodbye.

I think I’ll stay down here, crouched on the ground, until you answer my earlier, worried questions.

Circumstances demand from me quite a bit of sensible practicality for now — after all, we have visitors and such good evenings are happening. On the other hand, writing my “terrible” letter (as if it were that terrible…) brings me back to my worst holes inside — those black holes that sometimes swallow everything — all of me — until only a shell remains.

You’ve given me such enormous freedom — after all, anything at all can be in there!

That’s why it’s so sweet, being able to write without… limitations, because it will all disappear in the fire anyway.

Meanwhile… sorry that it’s typed.

Meanwhile…

I must go now, so that I can come here to you and see how you’re doing.

Sooner or later, one way or another, I’ll appear somehow, and nothing at all

will bother me about not being anywhere else.

Nostalgia. Sings to you there of bygone dreams that may never return, doesn’t it?

Sooner or later, one way or another, some equally good dream will appear, Here or There — no one knows. I so wish it would appear here, but what can I do, I’m just a slippery Alien.

It’s so sweet to see something so distant… and yet still write it down beneath the signature.

Mayhem – son of Chaos

Ps: As for being boring…

Isn’t water boring? It always tastes the same.

And air? Hehe — so scentless — only on special occasions does it allow itself a bit of mischief, bringing us sweet and curious smells… yes… air is definitely boring too.

And gravity — how boring is that! You throw a stone, and what happens? Does it come back to you like a boomerang? Or fly off into space? No! Thud — on the ground…

So shall we take offence at water, air, and gravity, and cut them off… stop paying attention to them completely???

You say you’re boring?

Let’s see how that looks so far.

I speak to you, and you listen. More than that — you’re interested. You want to share worlds — even if they can’t truly be shared with someone else, because, after all, one cannot just “plug into” you.

I ask you, and you answer — sometimes in such a way that behind your words stand ten possible meanings and ten opposite ones — and I’m left with a greater riddle than before I asked the question.

And sometimes you’re simply there, beside me, a bit in the background — and there’s something in you that, even if I crawled out of my own skin, I’d still never find out what it is, nor feel that blues. That’s your “deep down,” your “everydayness,” as it looks through the lenses of my glasses. Boring? You say, “boring.”

I, however, would rather not have it cut off — just as I’d rather keep the water that always tastes so good whenever I’m thirsty, the air without which I wouldn’t last more than three minutes, and the gravity that lets me lie in bed and sleep, instead of bumping into the ceiling or walls at two in the morning while kicking my legs in the middle of some new nightmare. Because through them — and through others — I see meaning.

I hadn’t seen this in you before — you create. You make ordinary moments—calm or restless, gentle or wild, miserable or splendid, sad or joyful—ceremonial. A ceremonial flag should fly over every moment, over every day. To me, the moments you share are not hollow, blind, deaf, or deaf-mute; days they are alive.

And when you refer to something familiar as you speak about a topic, those are things no one else would ever have referred to. That’s your “deep down,” and that’s your “everydayness,” as seen through my lenses.

And what then? Should I be bored by that?

I can’t.

Crista Uwase, Blue to the core, 2018