you know / you never know

i’m a little short-sighted, just a tad; but you have to be pretty close for me to be able to make out your face and your expressions. that’s why sometimes i don’t like running into people i kind of know. it’s not a big deal, but sometimes it takes me a moment to figure out whether i really know the person walking towards me or if their blurred out facial features remind me of someone else.

so i was riding a trolleybus home the other day and i just so happened to look out the windshield a minute before it halted at a bus stop; and as i did, i saw one person standing there, waiting, and i didn’t need his face to come into focus to know who it was. i’ve known this person for about three months, and maybe sometimes three months isn’t enough to get used to someone, but other times it only takes that long to map someone’s aura out and imprint it in your mind like a tattoo, and i got so used to this person’s leather jacket, or maybe his long legs or his blonde hair, that they’ve become a dead giveaway of his presence.

sometimes i feel invisible; not in a bad way, it’s more of a feeling of being impervious to other people’s observing looks, as if only i can notice little details about people, only i can see the world, but the world cannot see me. but sometimes the world turns around and sometimes the world looks me right in the eyes when it talks and sometimes the world wants me there. so this is an ode to my world of the past three and a half months; this is an ode to the people i never looked for but still found. this is an ode to the people who might not think about me anymore after another trimester, but this an ode to the people who don’t have to either. this is an ode to the brief affair between me and them and work that kept me sane, or just the right amount of insane, and that will always stay with me, into infinity.

aistė’s father was born on the same exact day as ozzy osbourne. she told me that one day when one of black sabbath’s songs came on the radio at work. she said she’d always been into their music, and that genuinely surprised me. but she’s exactly like that, i soon found out. she’s incompatibility; she’s collisions between the power of positivity and deadpan humor. she is the very definition of a mother and a child, all rolled into one. she’s a tiny human being with a pair of the biggest eyes and a heart as large and deep as the ocean. it always baffled me how happy she seems; not quite happy go lucky, but happy in a more fundamental sense of the word, somehow. she’s all grown up, she has a husband and a kid, and i think sometimes she worries about not doing something wrong, about not being a mother correctly, and that also baffles me because her dedication and her care and gentleness and love grow like creepers all tangled and hugging even her most sarcastic words. aistė speaks her mind out loud and clear, but she’s not afraid to not know something, she’s not afraid to be curious and to learn. and she’s one of the most zen people i know. she said something to me recently, she said, ‘i’ve had my fair share of misery in my life but at some point i decided to be happy,’ and it sounded to me like the key word there wasn’t happy, it was be. the kindness that she’s thrown my way could only be measured by light-years, if at all. and the light in her; i think  that that’s what that light feeds off.

marius worries about my coffee intake and the first thing i remember learning about him was that he had a toothache around the time i got hired. he always looks people in the eyes when he’s conversing with someone and sometimes he ends up standing real close to them too, but it doesn’t really feel like an intrusion. it’s always more of an exorcism; he’ll listen to you until you run out of breath, really listen, and then all that’s left for you to do is inhale anew; there’s no more room for the exorcised words and thoughts. i gave him a spiral shaped apple skin months ago and he still has it, and we joke about how i’m gonna check to see if he still has it in two years from now, and i really think he might, and i really hope he will, but even if he  won’t, he’s still got a little bit of me with him forever. last time i saw him we were smoking together and he penciled my name on his cigarette before lighting it; that’s what he does. we bicker sometimes, but then other times he tells me i’m the only thing around he doesn’t hate. i’m glad i trusted him with so much of me because i never once felt judged, and he always made me not want to judge anyone else either. we have this deal – if i badmouth someone he slaps me across the face. it’s never a real slap but it’s always enough, and i love that he’s never afraid to confront me. he’s very in tune with words and meanings between the lines, as if listening is a way of thinking for him.

ieva hates to be hugged and she might look like the most serious person in the world until you let her make you  laugh. and she worries about her future a lot but i think she doesn’t need to, i think she’s gonna be just fine. better than fine. she’s got a very sharp mind and she’s not afraid of hard work, and i think she wants to seem tough, rigid even, but she’s still soft in her actions towards people. she’s in love and she’s hopeful, and she’s funny too. she would make me gasp for air during our shifts together; she has a way of making the most  boring, mundane things sound like the most hilarious jokes. no matter how tough she wants or needs to be, she’s mostly just really beautiful inside and out because she makes people smile, and she heals people too. she’s got ingenuity for days, she’s ideas and she’s plans. and she’s a person whose approval i really felt i wanted; if she does decide to hug you, you can be sure as hell you’re doing something right in your life. if she lets her guards down, even if just for a split second, it’s like finding the end of the rainbow.

paulius hates warm tomatoes, and he casually throws in all these ridiculous, archaic words when he speaks. him and i play this game where we keep making up different names for everyone but they all have to begin with the same letter as people’s real names. him and i play with words a lot, and when i would work with him everything seemed more light-hearted  somehow, even on the hardest, busiest days. he likes trains, and i love how he just smiles and shakes his head at me sometimes; when he does that i know i’m about to cross lines i shouldn’t, i know i’m about to stuff a foot in my mouth and he saves me. he’s the one with the leather jacket and the long legs and the blonde hair, and i always joke about how we’re supposed to get married, and he shares his fruit with me and puts flowers on the table when we eat sometimes, and he laughs at the same joke about strange looking cats every single time i make it. and sometimes he plays it off cool, sometimes he acts as if he doesn’t care or feel too  much, but i think there’s thunderstorms inside him, the good kind. i think he’s gonna have enough adventures for three lifetimes when the time comes, because he’s got a mind too unique and strange to not. and he takes real nice pictures of the world, he does. 

and i don’t really know how to put it into words, i could talk about these people for eternity and still not know how to put them into words. but here’s one: myliu.