i / will

i was leaned over a wide windowsill, propping myself up on my elbows with my head and shoulders sticking out the kitchen window. three floors down i could see the dirty old tiling of an amazingly crooked and narrow alleyway. it was the middle of the night, i could almost swear it was sometime after 2am, and vilius was giving me a haircut with his electric razor. there were two other people in the kitchen and both of them kept repeating ‘this is a bad idea’ and ‘you’re insane’ to me, because supposedly letting your new friend touch up your pixie cut out of boredom was not an appropriate pastime activity somehow. one day, many days later, vilius told me that his dad used to cut his friends’ hair in the army; i always thought that analogy was charming, somehow.

and then vilius dropped the razor, and it fell all the way down, all three floors, and it hit the ground with an unpleasant crashing sound. the two of us rushed outside to retrieve it, or what we were still expecting to find left of it, and once we were stood in that same dark, smelly, crooked, narrow alleyway, examining the razor, we saw that it had sustained only one very minor injury, and it was still working perfectly. that was how i ended up getting a haircut in the diagon alley. we both agreed we’d call it that, and that was how i knew i wanted to keep this person around.

the first time i met vilius i ended up drinking hot chocolate at his place in stupidly wee hours of the morning; he used to add grated coconut to hot chocolate. the second time i saw vilius we were at this guy’s birthday; his name was pranavan and i still have no idea how old he was turning then. we were at this guy’s birthday party, we were standing in the kitchen, surrounded by happy, intoxicated faces, and i remember someone asking if vilius and i had come to scotland together. i remember that clearer than a lot of things that happened in between then and now, because in the meantime i’ve grown to understand that our sharp edged jokes and polygonal remarks somehow bent and softened to better fit each other and the first time we talked on the phone i could have sworn i was talking to a friend and not someone i’d known for two days, but i was too immature to value that. i took too many things for granted.

vilius was a bartender at a casino and everyone called him william for convenience purposes; sometimes he’d call me at 5 or 6 in the morning, right after his night shift, because he knew i was always hanging out with my aunt insomnia, and so we would go for walks together, breathe in the coolness of the world together, smoke cigarettes in little gardens surrounded by university buildings, or just talk. about nothing. but together. i don’t think he ever had any clue as to how calming that togetherness was to me.

we’d have movie nights a lot, sometimes. vilius had a projector and we would get a bunch of friends together in a room and drink cheap beer and make dirty immature jokes and eat junk food and complain about university and chain smoke and watch movies. and when i was around vilius, i learned to sit unnecessarily close to people because i was 19 and i had just made a million new friends and that’s what i was supposed to do; i learned to let hugs linger and slowly stretch because i still had all the time in the world, i learned to pay attention to how people feel in the moment instead of afterwards, i learned to not be afraid to hold hands just because we felt like it, i learned that if four people try to sleep on a double mattress, chances are they’re going to end up eating cookies and complaining about how hot it is the whole time.

vilius would sprinkle compliments on me like glitter and i would still find them sticking to the ends of my eyelashes or my fingertips even days later; i must have not had very good friends before, because i was only then learning to be okay with that. first be okay with it, and only then appreciate it. he would validate me with his words and his time, but he would always balance that sweetness out with sarcasm and pinches of brutal honesty here and there. and honest curiosity.

he had the biggest collection of incense oils i’ve ever seen (or maybe the only one i’ve ever seen) and he used to keep bottles of booze under his bed; he wore skinny ties and he used to do parkour; he quite possibly had the biggest arsenal of inappropriate, offensive jokes out of everyone i’ve ever met and he would always whip up a cocktail for me whenever i came over. if he stopped talking for long enough then he’d start playing with his tongue piercing. he had a tattoo on the left side of his chest and even though he’s not a hand talker he’d sometimes start gesticulating way too much. he had little wrinkles around his eyes from every time he smiled and he always carried himself with dignity that i haven’t really witnessed in that many 20 year old guys, if any at all. and sometimes he was so crystal clear it was almost too confusing to bear.

i always catch myself thinking of vilius when someone mentions the lord of the rings; he once made me watch one of those films, and that’s the third most annoying thing he’s ever done to me. the second most annoying thing he did was stopping to talk to me for two weeks once. because of some stupid little fight. that i was just as responsible for. and then he called me one night from work during his smoking break.

‘so… what are you up to?’ i remember him asking. and i remember being silently scandalised by his casualness and total and complete lack of any acknowledgement of that being our first conversation in two weeks.

‘not much.’

that particular phone conversation might have been one of the shortest yet slowest i’ve ever had; i remember feeling offended almost, as if he had no right to just call me and completely disregard us not talking and ignoring each other. but then i learned that friends sometimes do something strange – they talk; they push words off their tongues if they have to, they labour for it.

‘okay, i gotta go back to work, my break is over,’ he finally said after a few forced, quasi-friendly questions and answers that made up that conversation.

‘okay.’

‘look,’ he clicked his tongue and sighed. ‘we haven’t talked in ages and it’s stupid. i just wanted to say i’m sorry. but understand me too…’ and then he explained his point of view of whatever we had fought about.

for some reason that’s a memory of him i don’t think i’ll ever lose. i don’t think i’ll ever forget the feeling of learning that someone with as much pride as vilius would be willing to swallow all of it for me. not only that, he also probably wasted his entire cigarette break on me.

for some reason, life was always happening crazy early in the morning with vilius. or rather, life was always stopping crazy early in the morning. this last memory might have no significance to it at all, but i remember sitting in a wicker chair in front of a big window facing the tay the morning after vilius’ 21st birthday. he was sitting on one side of me and his then co worker noro, who i’m pretty sure was from slovakia, was sitting on the other side, and everyone had either just left or scattered around the apartment and fell asleep, but we still sat there smoking cigarillos, and i was listening to the two guys talk about facial hair. come to think of it, this memory really does have no significance at all, but i’ll hold on to it for sentimental reasons.

it’s been more than a couple of years now since i last saw vilius, but i’ve met him in my dreams a handful of times since then; and it always picks at the strings of my heart somehow, it always does. and i feel like i shouldn’t even be saying that out loud, i feel like some rights and privileges are lost if i keep my eyes shut while friendships slip right through my hands without so much as a tangible ‘goodbye’. and yet, here i am.

life seemed a lot different when i thought i was infallible. i hope someday it’ll make sense to me. i hope you found your sense, too.

do not read this

the worst part isn’t the darkness. on the contrary, the worst part is the light. the worst part is when you have the lights on but you can only see black shadows trying to creep up on you. the worst part is when you’re fine, you really, really are, and then all of a sudden you’re paralysed with fear because you know it’s going to come back. you’re not numb at all, you’re very much alert, so you can feel its breath on the back of your neck, you can catch glimpses of it limping right behind you when you see your reflection in the windows of a bus going by. you can feel it slithering up your throat, demanding to be acknowledged.

i’ve written a few drafts of this entry; one was way too bitter, another one was too light-hearted. thing is, it’s really hard trying to talk about your least favorite person, someone who disgusts and scares you equal parts, someone you’re ashamed of, someone you never introduce to even the very closest of your closest friends. but here i am, i’ve been talking about how i wanted to write an entry bashing someone instead of continuing to endlessly glorify everyone i talk about on this blog, so here goes.

she’s 23 years old and she’s terrified of bad news, so she never asked anyone to tell her what’s wrong with her. she once lied to her school secretary; the secretary made her promise she’d get help after watching her cry for half an hour. she promised she would. truth is, part of her is stupid enough to think that nothing and no one could ever help her and another part of her doesn’t want help because sometimes there’s mornings that last for weeks or even months when the sun rises and she can feel its warmth on her skin, and she can feel things and it’s beautiful, but between those weeks and months of bright mornings she forgets who she is without the knife sharp melancholy, and so when they do happen she wants to go back because she doesn’t know her way around the good parts of life. the dark of the night may feel like it’s filled with hardening tar that she breathes in and can’t breathe out, but the light of the day makes her invisible, as if she doesn’t even exist like other people do, as if the particles of dust that you can see in the sunlight are floating right through her. she’s afraid of the dark but she’s afraid of the light too.

she’s afraid of admitting that she’s afraid. she’s afraid that if she does, people will stop loving her. she’s afraid that if she lets them know there’s a black hole in the middle of her chest, under her clothes, that then they will realise there’s significantly less of her to be loved than they thought. so she has to keep everyone at arm’s length.

how very cliché it is that she kept pushing people away in high school until she couldn’t even remember their names anymore. how very tragicly-misunderstood-protagonist-of-a-shitty-coming-of-age-movie of her. she gained too much weight when she was 19 because she spent the entire winter break lying in bed, day and night, barely talking to anyone and barely sleeping. she needed to get shitfaced to keep the panic at bay and somehow tolerate a new year’s party in her own apartment with her own friends once, and she quit dance classes that she loved. she watched the entire x files series in two months, only ever leaving the apartment to go to work and sometimes to buy food, sometimes. she has secretly cried in almost every single public bathroom within five mile radius of her home at the time. she got really good at making up reasons for turning down second dates, like ‘he’s too short’ or ‘he has too much hair on his arms’ or ‘he just thinks he likes me now’. she was standoffish and mean to her friends time and time again. she stopped wanting to be alive and sometimes she started wanting to die. she accumulated a million secrets of all sizes when she could have talked. she is stiff and she is transparent. she’s tricked me into thinking that i’m helpless and hopeless and forgotten and weak and useless and unimportant and defective; she’s a mean coward.

she once asked a friend if he ever felt as though his skin was a costume that was both too small and too big for him simultaneously, and when he said he’d never felt like that, that he had no idea what she meant by that, she felt as though a bucket of cold, dirty water had just been poured over her head; like a practical joke that she didn’t get the punchline of. but it was not his fault, that’s just the kind of person that she is. she won’t be happy until she’s unhappy. she has this costume in her closet, one that doesn’t fit her at all because it’s too tight around her ankles and too loose around her wrists, but she can’t go out naked, so she keeps wearing it instead of asking someone to help her get a new one, a better one. she’s so annoying in her misery.

she has pages and pages of side notes – and then you see all these people wearing perfectly tailored suits. sure, some of them have a stain on the end of the sleeve or a missing button (everyone gets sad sometimes, everyone’s heart is susceptible to breaking, everyone’s faced with pain and impossible problems sometimes) but other than that, these suits that people are wearing are sewn impeccably and they fit like a glove. and if you dare to ask someone where they got it, they look at you as though you just fell from the moon and point you into the direction of a building called ‘you have people that love you, you have your family, you have a job, you have a good life, you have a healthy body, you can function without anyone’s assistance, you are so privileged and lucky’ and you look at where they’re pointing and you do see that building, but you can’t find the entrance; you walk around, you circle it over and over again, feeling every crack in the wall with your palms, you knock and scratch and kick, but you just can’t find the fucking entrance, so you thank them for directions, but don’t tell them that there’s no door, because it doesn’t make any sense. – she is so annoying in her misery, i cannot stress that enough.

she’s away now and i don’t miss her, but i’d feel bad if she asked to see me again; i could never turn her down.

and now, the weather: