Monday 4 March 2013

378



"You don't strike me as a person who still believes in romance, living in a fantasy bubble of pink air."

Winter makes me more cynical and rational, but these past days the sun has been shining over this grey city and has settled in my heart and body again. My stomach flutters and my mind drifts. I dress myself in clothes with colours of candy.

Picnics in parks, bicyclerides in streets full of castles, cold pancakes coated with stolen sugar, dancing and cleaning in a sunsoaked room with the windows wide open, a new friend, pretending to be somebody else and blending in with the tourists of the city, watching out over the harbour, thinking of flying and sailing.

"This is the last imbiss before new york".

A white handkerchief, kissing a sailor goodbye, dreams of waiting in your underwear for clothes to be clean. Longing for summer to come through even more, feeling the wind on your bare legs, blowing up your dress.

"It's fine, I'm wearing my pretty underwear anyway."

This strange state of mind as you have just woken up, but are still half asleep. Inbetween dreams and reality.
This is how I feel these days in Hamburg.

"You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons where the coyote would ran off a cliff and keep going untill he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?"

"Yeah."

"Well," he says, "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear, or security, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to go back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter." 

(page 146 from The book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper.)

A book I read in a the first month here in Hamburg in a cafe where I could crawl in a big chair with a coffee and wait for the dark to come so I could go home again.

Trying not to think; trying very hard not to look down, but keep running and keep looking forward. I keep running running. Looking down. Falling. Climbing up again and running running. Looking down. Falling. Climbing up again. etc etc etc. It's natural.

Sometimes I just wish I could just run for a bit more than three weeks and fall a bit less high.

I guess part of growing up is learning how to run without looking down all the time. But maybe also knowing how to grab hold of the sides of the rock as you are falling down, so you dont hit the ground completely.

"Does it bounce?"

Yesterday we saw a movie. There was a building burning down and people jumped out of windows, one by one you saw them crashing into the ground. They dont bounce.

I dont want to end this on a sad note. This morning my downstairs dönershop-friend nicknamed me "the sweet neighbour."

"A Club Mate for the sweet neighbour!"

A big smile.

These are all merely observations. I am unsure if I should post them. But when you are reading this, I obviously did post it. There is a lot of thinking these days and it helps to write things down and put them out. Distance yourself from it. so you can look at it again at another time and see things in a new light maybe.

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