Ghosts in Brussels

I was in one of those periods of absolute uselessness, I no longer knew what I wanted, why I wanted something and how I wanted it. I was looking at the most mindless movies, I was on pills for a cold that wouldn’t go away and at night I amused my neighbors by ping-ponging against the wall.

Pok, pok, pok. They shouted: stop! Pok, pok, pok. Stop! A moment later I was sitting, tick, tick, tick, listening to the ticking of the old spoon clock on my dorm. This one ran asynchronously with my weather forecasting movie clock. Each time it was as if the ticking of one was going to overtake the other, but just at that moment, everything fell back into the same rhythm as before. 

Bong, bong! Hit the clock twelve times, the hour the spirits awake. I still had my eyes wide open; for a whole day I had been sitting there, in my red cloth seat dressed in white boxer shorts, a Greenpeace T-shirt and over it a red and white university jacket. The blood was flowing but no longer knew how to find the engine, the body was alive but didn’t know where the mind was, that’s how I felt day after day, as if in a never-ending loop, a dead boring civilian life.

I didn’t want it but I also didn’t hate it, that everyday life without too many challenges. I do hate boredom, “boredom is an unfollowed frustration” William Burroughs claimed. Too much frustration, yes that is possible. Maybe I was looking for my own kind of life, an ultimate free life, free of complexes, but how does such a life look like? 

Maybe writing about it would help me. But wasn’t there a danger that I would write what I became and become what I wrote, creating a dramatic form of myself on paper and beyond?

I didn’t want to believe that, though I am becoming more and more aware of who I am, on and of paper drawings, I just have to accept it. I am not a hero who stands on the barricades, not a handyman with claws on his body to make things great or a daredevil who starts a business and attracts money like a magnet, I am just passionate about stories. Stories I picked up from a grandfather who lived through the war and kept a record of everything. He told me all about it, when I was little and looked on admiringly as he fetched streetcar tickets from Dresden in the early forties, where he worked in a prison camp not far from Dessau, and to survive he was an interpreter for the camp doctor, “luckily I was good with languages,” he said. 

The buzz in my head was broken by the soft sonorous voice of Leonard Cohen 

“Dance me to the end of love”. But my desire had become so great that it also destroyed what should bring me to dance. I finally made up my mind to break with that feeling and took my last 50 bucks, looking for that vanished dance.

Thus I enveloped myself in my black robe, following Lord Byron and the moon. I wandered around, toward the city, empty streets, chilling wind blowing through my boxer shorts and shrinking the testicles, the lights grew brighter, the city, even here, enlighten the empty and soulless streets.

Through the windows of some cafes sat creatures trying to stay straight, raising the glass to the mouth. I did not want to dance this evening with the bottle in my hand. I walked on as fatigue gradually rose to my head from my stone-cold toes, as if my feet had become one with the paving stones. I began to dazzle, the cold making the dimples in my face crack. 

Under one of those streetlights, I stood still, I decided to continue the evening here. This pillar would support me. I could see the tinkling of the stars. I allowed myself to stand while coughing, I kept coughing.

Then I saw her, she seemed ideal, she was not a man, not a woman, she had no shape, no lips, no buts, she kept circling around me. I started laughing out loud, started dancing under the street light, I was not alone, I danced with her, danced for hours until I fell down and the muse whispered to me:

“I will help you, if you dare to give.”