Sunday, June 12, 2005

Juliana

12.06.05
Kfar Masaryk
Israel

I do no longer remember the last time when I heard you, or when I stopped hearing you... and the same goes for David.. such intense friendships, a young endeavour lost in time as if it did no longer matter. I guess it should have been some time near the beginning of the century, as meaningless as it should sound. The trees were standing anew in the courtyard of your house and we used to wander beneath their cold shade in those procrastinating days of April not having any other concerns; we were both in the middle of our teens and back then it seemed as if time was never going to run away, as if time was never going to escape from our hands and sew itself in an endless thread that would conduct us exactly to the same places where we're standing upon right now, to our current beings.

I wonder endlessly if you will ever read these lines and whether it has any meaning at all, whether it matters at all or it just does not. As meaningful as those clear days and their skies seemed to us back then nowadays they tell me how worth it was living them back then, and how precious of a memory they constitute in these darkening times, although summer sprang and the shades of melancholly and sweet divagation have abandoned us already in a bygone murmur. Those days tell me nowadays how afraid we were and how happy we were, how innocent were our lies and how careful were our attempts to make our lives better, to make of our world a better place and how well-constructed we were, such radicals! It also seems as if of today those odes would be long bygone, and lost in the precarious senses of adulthood that have stolen from us the light we struggled for in those precious days that back then seemed to have been in store for ever, waiting to be taken over for a million years, daring to be taken and yet waiting.

It was your birthday and we were both nervous, I arrived to your house as we had agreed and the portico welcomed us with a river of smiles and contemptuous faces that would lead us into impersonal conversations, that kind of conversations you can hold only with those long forgotten buddies that have been in the most recondit and hidden thorough places of your mind, of your soulless thinking, of your radicalism, of your existentialist constructs. No more philosophies were needed and we escaped the noise produced by the social conventions and the friendly conversations of your friends and relatives. The sweet smiles of your girlfriends avoided us and led us altogether into that long and cold conversation beneath the tree, we both had just started smoking and the filthy smell of the wet wood combined with our breath and those clouds of smoke seemed to become one with ourselves and give place to the most intimate conversation we could have ever had. A conversation about nothing, a conversation without meaning. A conversation that was rather a dual monolog, each one of us seemed to have learned his lines thoroughly.

Until then we had been separated by screens of purples and greens, by a superimposed modernism and a sad teenage longing for a more interesting life, for some lost meaning, for some never found meaning. The streets always seemed familiar to me ever since although I was never to return and lay in the darkness beneath the trees, whose species I no longer remember. I do remember your mother and your father though, even though I cannot tell what they looked like, probably it's only your mother's voice on the phone calling you to the line what I remember. It was late already and we burnt the pop corn trying to avoid the radiation of the microwave before that movie we never watched, before that intimate conversation we simply never had. Your were slightly taller than I was, and back then much more prettier... and I doubt if nowadays you're still as happy and insecure as you were in those days. I'm myself pretty different so that you know, more beautiful and less happy, more tranquil and less idealistic, devoid of constructs.

With difficulty I remember the country itself, although the road to your house and the adjacent streets are clear to me as if I had seen them yesterday. They were of some candid ochre and the walls of the golf court surrounded the opposite side... all the houses in the neighborhood were of some refined country antique and we could barely see the cars passing by. After all I was a man, a grown up man for my age and hence I was allowed to cross roads and avenues until I made it to the pharmacy so as to buy cigarettes as I had promised you. We returned to the trees and smoked beneath'em. One day many months later I returned there with my aunt, I believe there was some famous patisserie, to which I do not wish I had invited you once... it seemed not as the most appropriate place for a un unkindred heart like yours and mine. We preferred to stand up smoking and dressed in leather beneath bridges or in noisy shopping centres where our intelligence would enable us to criticize the provincial manners of our country, after all we both belonged to a different social class, in despite of your having a problem to accept it. Oh! the home country, I wish I could remember it any longer.

Not remembering how or when I am simply somewhere else, somehow else... and paradoxically beneath the hideous summers I remember those streets, I hear the rain as it falls in my cap, as it pours some sense of intellectual burgueois on my sights; you know... I used to be always dreaming, now I'm trying very hard, very hard... to dream, to fall asleep and to daydream. It doesn't mean I'm bitter, I'm just different, I'm just someone else. In the middle of the most meaningful of lives, in the most interesting of lifes, in the most paradoxical and anacronistic chapters of history; amidst all of those I can think of those days, can't I? It isn't precisely longing, but more of a sweet memory. One of those meaningless moments of your childhood suddenly turned into precious chapters of memory when you're far away, when you're cold inside, when you're in need of some justification, of some redemption. Specially when you're done, when you've grown.

The TV is on tonight, American series, endless glasses of waters and nicotinamide, I'm not particularly depressed, nor thoughtful you could say, this isn't what once was, this is not. It's just me trying to find a way not to forget that there were some days, when we were happier than today, that there were some days, when the sun shone, when the night ended, when the Aurora came. Unlike these days, mid the summer, in the Land of Israel, as yet we haven't seen the sun, not even in the Galilee, have we as yet seen the sun. I wonder if you've ever been to a place like the Galilee, like the Land of Israel. I wonder if it even interests you or if you're really a student of history as you promised. Maybe you just became a businesswoman, like your mother, like all of them, like those "them" of your stories.

I did keep my promises though, and strived barely as to live a reckless life, like those Tolstoian lives that made up the whole range of intellectual aspirations springing from the frustration of our upper-middle class sense of boredom. I became a philologist or rather never stopped being one, until I became postmodern, awfully. Then became a linguist and on my own right a writer, being more of a writer than anything else, a writer that barely writed but undoubtedly a writer. I wasn't so happy though, hope you were, I so much do. It's not a big concern, for we're still as young as time, but unfortunately not younger than we were, back then, oh no. It's all beautiful here though, just strange, I wouldn't even want to discuss it. I guess it's my private secret, a secret I kept even from those days, an unfaulty companion, a default companion. I wish I had written these lines before, but oh well you know what it boils down to, guilt. Your favourite word.

I haven't forgotten myself these days, quite the opposite. Home is still far, and late is tonight. The endless lines that were written between those days and now form an invisible thread that only my suitcases can see, for thus I left, so henceforth I came. A certain winter day, I denied those pasts, I denied those presents, I denied everything. In a bag I packed my sort of memories, and those letters you never wrote me, for after all we had never been in love and letters you had never written me, or I think once you did, but it was stranged on the way. I remember how it happened and I'm not going to tell it to you now for it's not pertinent, my life hangs on a wire and how unsorted I am, oh girl! You go and get yourself some benzedrine tonight.

I never called you again, I never wrote you a line because I didn't remember your address, because I never remembered you up to this very day. Back then everything was forbidden, feelings were forbidden, the world of existence within itself contained in itself. It was all so poetic and philosophical, so well-mannered and idealistic, so well constructed. I don't know about you, but at this side of the ocean it doesn't exist no more, and even with the clear blue sky we still yearn for some light, we look forward to a day, when it'll be indeed day. I don't want to attack you with questions from those days, for silence was beautiful and was sacred, such as those faces we no longer remember, you obviously shouldn't remember me at all.

But I do have something to say, how are you? And I'm sorry I hung the phone on you that day. You could never imagine it would be the last time, not at age fifteen. Could you?