Anelan

“You are a good person”, she said.

I don’t know why I wanted so badly for people to stop such thinking. And why some stuck to it.

“Help this boy! They are beating him!”, she shouted once. “You will have my eternal gratitude”.

Silence.

“I’ll give you my heart! Body! Whatever you want! Only...!”.

I don’t know if she was that pretty. Certainly, the most fun was asking people for promises that they did not want to keep. Torturing them or breaking their will wasn’t as fun as watching them force themselves to do something they didn’t want… because they promised! Although I didn’t squeeze her skinny neck tightly, she didn’t run away.

“Rest your hands”.

She retreated to the wall. A simple posture broke in half with one strong movement, the dirty street got filled with sounds. Blood from my crushed with a bat head stained her dress. I can’t remember if I managed to cum before I lost consciousness… God must have loved me very much if he allowed me to live through something like that.

“You’re not a bad person”, the Asberian boy also said.

I regret that one blow to the stomach. I cannot say why. Maybe I liked that lively young boy. He kept being beautiful even naked and tied up. I tried to push him to his limit, but I never managed to get him to give up on his dreams. And it was even stranger when he came back for everything all over again for a little conversation with me, to learn from me. Perhaps I regret that the Asberian boy did not stay with me, that we did not start a family and did not warm ourselves by the joyful heat of the home… Who knows whether he considered the untying, handing him a handkerchief and leaving him alone for the rest of the night an apology.

“Tell me about your family”, he asked.

“They are wonderful people. You will see nothing about their upbringing that would make me who I am now”.

“Don’t you regret leaving them?”.

“I miss them regularly”.

There was some joy in the short answers when the kid tried to uncover my secrets. Not quite a kid, he was at least two decades old, but to me he was still a tiny brat. I wasn’t quite reluctant to answer. Sex and then questions were an interesting combination. He always chose one thing he wanted to know.

“So why did you leave them?”.

“And you? Why did you leave all the mentors who wanted to help you and your beloved to lay with me?”.

“Do you love this life now?”

“This is another topic”.

He hugged me with thin hands from behind, leaving me with the impression that I had a mistress. His character, his tone of voice, could change, as if he was several people at once. If what he said was true, there were reasons to feel sorry for him.

“Tell me why you don’t trust people”.

“…When did I show it off?” Blue eyes were waiting for an answer. “Learn from my mistake. People will leave you in the dirt when you think everything is going well”.

“If they were to kill you in moments of weakness, it wouldn’t be much better”.

This time I heard the voice of my favorite aggressive, proud personality. The manner and pace of his mood swings was incredible. Sometimes he presented a tearful and compliant girl, sometimes a boisterous fool. Sometimes I saw a third person – an apathetic thinker. He most often disappeared when I touched him, sometimes he allowed me to talk to him, but only from a distance and when I did not use either mockery or sarcasm. When I was mean, the little philosopher would shut himself in and be silent or disappear.

“I would prefer them to learn to live their lives and stop having a problem with me for their own misfortune. And I say this for you to remember. You are not made of rubber to bend your personality and behavior at will for the sake of not touching one of someone’s sensitive area. You knew perfectly well what you would be getting when you came to me, and long before you came my pretending to be good, so that someone wouldn’t feel sad, was over. If you ever have a problem for that, I’ll stop liking you…”.

“Why do you like me?”, my little philosopher asked me another time.

On his cheeks you could still see the path tears took from the depths of his heart. I was tempted to lick off those salty marks, but then I would lose him.

“I like most people”.

For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t ask any more questions and that was the end of his part of the deal. That would be disappointing.

“Why do you not dislike me?”.

“That would be telling too much on my side”.

“After what you did to me? Tell me. Otherwise, I won’t just leave. I’ll create a worse problem than the blaming you for my pain. That is: why was my body found in your room. Now you do you dislike me?”.

“And at the same time I’m in love with you”.

One person was not able to fill my life with meaning, just as I could not make anyone’s life meaningful. I wandered, as if holding tight to my beliefs, my being myself and giving up on unnecessary courtesies, on the other hand, regretting that I would not die mourned by all those who liked my courtesies. And yet I have not given up on my path. I don’t know if I’m completely happy with it. On the other hand, is there a person in the world who is completely happy? Writing was supposed to be more interesting…

I once was a teacher for a pretty amazing girl. She wanted to become someone great, she read romantic stories about strong, independent women and their influence on the course of history, she disagreed with her family, who wanted for her to marry well and enjoy healthy babies.

“You’ll agree to it anyway”.

“Why so sure?”, she asked proudly.

“Because you’re a woman”.

She was offended at me for a few days. She was even more annoyed by the lack of reaction to her theatrical sighs.

Sometimes I am afraid of loneliness. I have read about many people who died for their idea because the world turned against them. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to hold to my believes so tightly. Probably as long as they stared at me, I would dance to their music. Would I hurt or kill a man if dancing demanded it? A difficult question. I’m not an idealist to politely deny it, but sometimes I feel the need to be stubborn and put my head under the axe just to stay myself (and pissing off the other side). Even if I am not on God’s side, I know that I am not on the devil’s side either. I think I could have met this evil figure (and I don’t mean the creatures from the Silent Mountains) and it was a really unpleasant character. And I hope that he will give me peace, otherwise I will have to stand on the side of God, which I really do not want. I like this state of suspension, that the part of me that would like to fill itself with an idea, a deity, a God remains eternally hungry. Being myself is supposedly an idea, but it doesn’t really help me when I put myself in a difficult situation, by asking the questions above. I said that sometimes I was afraid of loneliness. Sometimes I tell myself that I’m sure I’ll find someone with whom I could kill boredom. Sometimes I tell myself that in the face of disaster, there will be people who are as fascinated as I am by the idea of the meaningful life. Sometimes I believe in it, and more than once I have managed to survive a damn difficult time thanks to the magnetism that my convictions gives me, and sometimes I keep my enthusiasm in check with the words: “Don’t be so sure”.

“He’s an idiot!”, she said without context after days of silence.

“He is just naïve and lost. And that’s why I’m trying to make you understand you should get along with him. I’ve seen people who are really dangerous, I’ve seen them laugh, and they’re not the kind of people you want to mess with. He is not like that. But if you don’t stop being afraid of him and get married, I can’t promise you what will happen”.

“That’s why we won’t get married”.

“Don’t talk nonsense. Otherwise, you will cause a storm that you cannot deal with. Instead of standing against your parents and fiancé, find the strength to stop being afraid of them. The feeling that they are all terrible is natural for your age”.

“You are terrible! Why can’t you just understand me?”.

Did I like her that much, or did I have no idea where else to go? I met a gardener, on a stroll. He told me about his life, his job, his son, his life here. It was quite pleasant.

“Am I supposed to pretend I like his jokes? Be nice when he annoys me? Talk to him for hours when I would honestly like to go?”.

“And after all this, do you like him more?”.

“I’ve had enough of him”.

“I think it’s better for him to feel a small heart stab that the conversation ends so quickly, if you could enjoy the conversation more thanks to it”.

“No”.

“No?”.

“Everyone wants me to be polite and not offend anyone. If I made his heart feel a needle pain of rejection, then I would be the bad one”.

“Try not to do anything you don’t want to do, and if it gets really dangerous, you’ll just artificially apologize and go back to pretending”.

“How do you do it?”.

“If you told me you didn’t like me for something about me that I wouldn’t give up on, if you told me to stop speaking so carelessly, or I might not speak at all, I’d stop talking to you and walk away. True, I don’t talk to quite a large percentage of people that way”.

“Should I take it as a compliment that you’re talking to me?”.

“Despite your naivety, you’re pretty smart”.

“Dear Mr. Anelan praised me”.

Silence.

Why did I try to get her to agree to be someone people wanted her to be – a wife and a mother? I don’t think I believed that she would be able to cope alone in the world, that she will never dream of marriage and motherhood. In other words, one: I’m not convinced that being yourself is safe, two: I believe that sometimes you can get benefits from adaptation…

I couldn’t be at her wedding, too many of her relatives looked at me crookedly after just a few moments of getting to know me. Further knowing me, they would probably hate me more. I promised her to look up at the sky that day, at the hour when she was to take the oath. Which was stupid, because if the wedding were to be postponed by even an hour, all the pathos would die, but whatever…

“Imagine a child in an unreal amusement park. He knows that he will not be able to try everything, but he will still try to delight himself as much as possible. He absorbs smells, music, colors. He watches the swans move up and down, taking the children with them, gets on a big wheel that lifts them up to the sky and lowers them to the ground again, gets into the wagon and rides through the darkness, where various monsters try to scare him, but he is only a little scared because he feels the wood of the wagon under his fingers. And he will cry out in a healthy voice “I want… I want…”. He will be delighted with the warm sun hiding behind the rungs of the great wheel, feeling at the same time an unspeakable sadness that the day is inevitably coming to an end. And he will hope that he was a good boy and his mother will let him stay in this park for another hour, minute, a second longer and experience. I am just such a child in an amusement park”.

“Big, spinning wheels… You sure have a big imagination”.

“Indeed…”.

I got married once. I was quite old at the time so getting bound didn’t feel so bad. She was a fascinating woman. The goal of our marriage for her was to find out what would hurt me. She tried to grasp on various topics: my unusual preferences, moments when my head refused to obey me and I couldn’t understand what the hell someone meant, my sensitivity… Did I mention that I’m quite a sensitive person? Any normal person would tell me that I say bullshit, but no… I don’t. I get excited and attached to things very easily. I almost never can predict my reaction to a potential version of the future, which honestly pisses me off, because when preparing for any confrontation, I had to be prepared for a heart pounding without my consent, a broken voice, and a blank mind. The composure that I can boast about now is not thanks to my hard work. Of course, I tried to explain to my body more than once that approaching the situation emotionally is not beneficial, because then I do a lot of stupid things and hurt more, but it didn’t do anything. The next day I went out on the street and I was stupidly happy or stressed again… A few betrayals changed my body. I have to thank my betrayers for that. Without them, I would not have been able to reach such maturity. My body has learned to stop looking at people with a degree of interest that could allow them to take the ground out from under my feet. I wouldn’t thank them if I was unable to be interested in another person after that, but surprisingly I still could. I just stopped feeling the need to show up in front of them in a way that was untrue, tell them private stories, look for affirmations, and involve myself in their lives more than they wanted me to. I am extremely grateful for the disappearance of these needs. The second thing that made me mature was to meet forces far more powerful than I will ever be. My boyhood life was based on worrying about who likes me, who doesn’t like me, who is good, who is bad, who is worth paying attention to and respecting, who can be ignored, desecrated and hated. I began looking at the other things, things bigger I was…

Perhaps I liked that she didn’t tell me I was good. She said I was terrible and I nodded. Perhaps it’s because I don’t like people to be delusional about me. I hate the disappointment that I’m not who I was supposed to be. I look like a hero because I look aesthetically pleasing enough, I walk straight, I don’t speak up too often, when I say something, it’s because I’ve been asked, and that’s why I usually sound smart, even if I don’t answer the question directly. The moments of excitement when I appear like an ordinary mortal happen mainly with people as nuts as me, which is mostly not the same people who think I am a hero. I’m certainly far from a bookish, boyish hero. If I were one, I would probably be doing something useful for society, fighting demons, and not slacking off writing this nonsense.

I remember how God got to me some time after I killed that rich man for fun with my Asberian boy. I’m not a big fan of irreversible changes, (that’s why I don’t have tattoos) and that’s why… I don’t kill on a whim… On the other hand, I thought that in this world there are such motherfuckers that no one can regret. A punishing force must have acquainted me with the son of that rich man (otherwise I don’t know how we could have met again) – energetic, full of hatred for the fact that his mother broke down after losing her husband, that he had to grow up alone, that his younger sis never went with her father feed the ducks again. “I know what you want to tell me and it pisses me off”, I whispered to the sky. How many times have I heard legends about motherfuckers with a good heart. I asked for a perfectly killable motherfucker. Eventually, I gave up and resigned to allowing everyone to live unless they forced me to make a sudden decision. (I can’t promise not to kill for the sake of clean hands and conscience.) Apparently nothing big, although I was left with a slight feeling of regret after this promise… Funny.

I used to not understand how you can like someone just for who they are. When I risked to live openly and in my own way, people shortened the rubber cord that bound me and them. I could take a step forward and let the rubber loosen, but I went backwards and let the tension-thin rubber tear. I discovered the world without complaining. Annoying behaviors swam past me like silverfish and I didn’t stop their flow, they even began to arouse my interest. You see, firstly complaining allows you to confirm the compliance of the complainant’s lifestyle with the rules of the recipient, secondly most often it touches on matters that the complainer would not want to say about themselves. Which makes sense after thinking about it… Why should you care about something that doesn’t concern you at all? How uninteresting it is compared with what is in your head. Since I started thinking this way, I feel sorry for those who complain about others a lot and constantly. Although I don’t know if this thinking is correct… What do I do when meeting with such people? Funny assumption…

…Fighting for someone was never my forte. I had a friend – a very intelligent young man, far more capable than I was, but he let the world overwhelm him. I understood his arguments. Life is fragile, all the time tragedy poisons individuals and nations… I think it is more difficult to understand how, being aware of the cruel nature of the world, one can want to live in it (although I myself am one of the people who love this world). Every conversation with him went in one direction, ending with a monologue based on “rational reasoning”. But I liked him anyway. Or maybe I speak so well of him, because I feel a little sorry for the way I treated him. I wanted the action to save him from fatal helplessness, but he always refuted my proposals, explaining how much it would change nothing. Finally he came to me:

“I came to say goodbye. There is no way a human can live in such a cruel and senseless reality”.

“So you’re going to kill yourself and make your life even more frail and miserable?”.

“I will choose my way of dying. Don’t try to persuade me. I just came to say goodbye”.

“All right. See you on the other side”.

I never saw him again. Even if he survived, I understand why he wouldn’t visit me. I hope he will meet someone better than me. Not that I cared about anyone afterwards, even if I felt I should. Isn’t it so human?

Perhaps I should have died. The longer I write this, the more I realize what a prosaic idiot I am. I hoped that I had discovered the secret of the world, that freeing myself would eventually show me a way to live. Even “freed” I am an ordinary, prosaic, insensitive son of a bitch, unable to fight for someone or something, unable to make someone feel good, not ready to give up my life for an idea, ready to give up temporarily on it for the sake of gain… And yet I like myself like that. I used to hate the world, I complained with you about the shade of tights poorly matching the collar, I fretted strangeness missing the delight, I looked for confirmation of my worth in people. I don’t want to go back to that world. I love the amusement park and I don’t want to go back to the box. And I don’t regret being the son of a bitch.

Only… I would like to die for something beautiful, although I don’t believe I am saying that.