Goal of the day: 233 words. Written: 1060.
"It all started at midnight. And it ended there." This is the beginning of a hundred and fifty-word story I wrote for the Lithuanian Writers' Group.
Hi, Simona, long time no see!
In fact, if we count only real meetings and not online meetings, it was more than two months and two weeks ago. Three weeks before I return home.
Will you wait for me?
Are you going to try to hang me again?
Will I still try to hang on if you still don't reply to my emails?
* * *
Psychological theory tells us that the brain works in such a way that all humans are not only capable of creating (i.e. imagining non-existent things), but that this is a ESSENTIAL mechanism of existence.
We are a tribe of creators, creatures with imagination. We are people who imagine.
* * *
Today, I stood in the bathroom in front of the mirror before I took a shower. I looked at my greasy face... And, I don't know, for the first time in my life I didn't recognise myself and I thought:
"But this person is me. THIS is me."
Remembering Aristotle's (or was it his friend's?) phrase that if I think, then I am, I also thought that I had just experienced what five-year-olds unconsciously experience. And consciously experienced by people who, well, meditate, are interested in themselves and try to understand themselves - spiritual monks by nature.
I looked down at my body. I have not exercised for over a month and I have dropped my push-up, running and squatting challenges and it was already noticeable. My body was a bit flabby again, like an old tree, and the muscles that had been prominent before were starting to fade.
* * *
I hate my roommate. I have to confess - I really hate exercising when someone is watching or can watch me. I don't know why I feel that way.
* * *
Today's scenario (for the second time, I think): And what if you want to stay just friends?
This time presenting: The question is whether a guy and a girl can just be good friends.
My conclusion and default answer: No change. No.
A taste of the script: Christmas and the period around it.
Additional options:
- You write that letter before you go back.
- You sign it in a letter when you return.
- You say that when you meet...
- Mint Vinetu café. I drink cocoa. Niam.
- Somewhere unspecified (I guess Vilnius), next to a snow-covered bench. I have my hands in my pockets, my butt is getting cold.
- Close to your house, when I arrived, still standing outside the car.
- You did it a week after Christmas, before I left to finish my exams.
- You will do it two weeks later, after I have left.
- You do this after an indefinite period. Along with dramatic "I've been hiding all this time" and Mileta-esque squeezes.
Duration of script development: Thirty seconds and a minute trying to read The Godfather.
Lessons learned from the script: A new plot for the book.
Comment: It's a pity I don't write love novels.
* * *
Simona, I am hurt. That you are hurting. It's just a pity that I have no idea how much it hurts - maybe I won't find out until I experience it myself. Or maybe I won't find out at all, because sometimes I am a heartless monster.
If I knew any traditional phrases, I would say them. In my own words. It's just a pity that I don't know any such phrases.
I am very sorry.
* * *
The other day I was thinking about what I would do if my grandfather died.
The only grandfather I ever knew. The one who built me and my brother our first small hut and later a tree house, donating an entire apple tree to us. The one who always helped me in the last winters to fill up the car's battery before it started. And the same one who so patiently endured my tantrums when I was playing video games on my grandmother's computer on his floor five years ago.
I'm so sorry, Si.
* * *
I don't know the best thing to do when a relative of someone you know dies. Especially if that acquaintance is a girl to whom you write insanely intimate letters.
If it would make you feel better, I would like to be with you. Tangibly and physically.
I don't know if I should do that. But, well, that's all I can think of. If my grandfather were to die, I would probably be crazy to meet my friend after a few days of collapse.
* * *
Imagine. Think.
It is what makes us human and it is also what makes us live. Not in the sense of "you only live once", but in the sense of survival.
Why do we always imagine the worst?
Why do we imagine before we go on stage that we will say nothing or be booed off?
To come home after a holiday to find them burnt? That after a routine drunken binge by the father, the mother won't get up and hang herself? That if you strip naked, everyone in the street (or on the beach) will make fun of you?
Psychological theory holds that this is for the sole purpose of survival. When we imagine, we create scenarios in our minds and prepare for them. Despite the fact that, in reality, they may not happen at all.
* * *
Sometimes I don't know why I write to you. Letters and more.
Sometimes a million worst-case scenarios pop into my head, and your softly spoken words "Don't think, don't think" disappear amidst all the noise.
Sometimes I wonder if it is worth writing to you at all. If so often I don't get any signal that what I have written you have seen. Not even that stupid smile that made you smile at me.
* * *
I wrote. A novella.
Fifty thousand words, with a small margin of fourteen words.
The story of a girl who never wanted to know her parents and ran away from them as a child... After an accident, after which she loses everything... But she finds her parents.
I don't know why I wrote that.
I don't know why a girl is so much like me in so many ways, even with her psychoticism, her desire to push everyone away and her craving for physical violence, even with her hatred of books and her adoration of TV series.
I don't know why the guy she ends up meeting is also so much like me and the guy I would like to like, maybe, if I were a girl.
(Although it's true - a boyfriend wouldn't love me. Not Tom Elbrus with your Caspar beard, my old childhood friend and love of humour and my speed of thought.)
I don't know why so many of the characters in the book ended up being so nasty and unpleasant.
I don't know why the character's mother was a puppeteer and her father, as I had dreamt of since Kafka in The Coast (Murakami), a sculptor.
I don't know why both parents are so psychotically withdrawn and distant.
I don't even know, after all, why it was so bad in December. Does it snow here? In Lithuania?
* * *
Now that I've written a novel... And so I've finished the year with challenges... I feel like I've lost another purpose in life.
Throughout all these challenges, I didn't think about what I was going to do when I finished them. And here it is, a year later. A year of adventure, love, challenges and trials. Suffering and self-torture. Victories. Lots of bloody freaking amazing victories.
Without a new goal, I feel strange. It's as if I'm floating in the middle of a flood... Um... I don't remember the rest of this fast-talking line. See for yourself, here's the place:
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
* * *
By the way, when you have three blank lines, do you normally write on the top one or do you put it between the first two?
* * *
999. That's how many words I wrote in this letter. And yet I don't even seem to be halfway through what is usually going on in my head.
The devil would get a grip.
* * *
I know you are busy. I know you're still in pain. So I don't feel compelled to answer this letter, just as I didn't feel compelled to answer the previous ones. But it would be a pleasure.
* * *
"With you, Danielius Goriunovas and Labas rytas, Lietuva!"
I never dreamed of hearing such words. But it would be fun, maybe.
* * *
P.S There are no secret messages in this After Writing.
Writer,
Daniel