Day Four
You could hear rust grinding against rust, leaving a red trail behind the bus as we drove down the mountain. As the bus jumped we put our hands on the ceiling, supporting it, holding off the implosion that would inevitably lead to us to be crushed against the cliffs down at the foot of the rock. The collective thoughts of fatality fueled the engine. Houses sprang up sporadically in the landscape, all empty, hollow, with their innards spilled out in front of them. They gaped in the direction of the vibrating bus windows as they rushed by. The optimism of things left unfinished colored the landscape, penetrated my chest. Roaming the streets at home every building would look at you with stern eyes of glass, measuring your height and weight and the shape of your fingers, and filing the information in the invisible corridors of filing cabinets that stretches themselves behind the buildings. The people, who stumbled upon the slight materialization of the lower drawers of these systems in their yards and on the sidewalk, would know of their existence, they knew about the unseen world, as it reminded them that it wasn’t fictive with every email it sent from the other side. It seemed that the hills of Armenia had gone free of its reach. I calmly enjoyed a candied walnut in an improvise party tent next to a small hostel, and let the homemade rakia flow from my mouth and into my system. The blur set in. I saw old women throw bread on the side of the walls of a fire well, I laughed as I reached for the next glass, and my eyes shone in the light from the fire. Something real had snuck into the tent. It had been led there by the lights, the heat, the smell of homemade food, and the laughter from around the table. It crawled up my leg and sat itself on my lap and stared up towards my face as I kept on drinking. I hardly noticed it before I tucked at my t-shirt with its small, pudgy, and hairy hands. We made a deal that it could stay in my pocket on a temporary basis, so I let it crawl in there. It immediately tore through my pocket lining and merged with the flesh of my ties. This, however, unfolded completely unnoticed by the other people in the tent, and they gave me confused looks as I jumped up from the bench with a scream. I promptly calmed myself by proposing a toast slamming down even more rakia. The blur intensified. Whatever had transpired in that tent was soon to be forgotten.
Only the faces still remained, hovering free of their bodies in the dimly lit tent. And they too
disappear, as did the light. Nighttime blanketed us, and the world shrank with our ability to see.
just the burning sensation in my throat I knew that I would fall all the way from the village to my
kissed the matriarch of the hotel and her daughter on both their cheeks and climbed aboard the
Returning to the hotel we sang Queen in somewhat unison as we bumped our way through the
Armenian night. The sweet sickly smell of vomit crept up my nostrils. I turned my head and found Cream silently expanding a grocery bag. I laughed the rest of the way back to the mountain hotel while the backseat screamed for Galileo to show mercy.
Day five
Exhaustion had settled itself in my body and was now using me as a blanket to keep warm, so I skipped breakfast and reached for the white phone next to my bed and called room service, begging them for a pepperoni pizza, hoping they understood what I was saying. The voice from the other end answered ‘pepperoni, yes’. The exhaustion complained and dragged me fully back into the bed again, grapping hold of my flaps of skin as it rewrapped itself with me. I felt stretched out. I know my head had expanded, as I could feel it bulging, and growing slightly with every throb, but now even my hands and feet felt huge. They weighed me down, and I slowly sank down into the core of the madras, my descent fueled by the newfound weight. I fell into a comatose state among the springs until I heard the door knock. It was Cream who had wondered where I had been. She closed the door, another knock; it was the pizza. We ate it in silence looking at the white top of a mountain.
Day six
Fitting in a place where all the molds have been made you can easily experience a shoulder going over the edge of the form. You might experience your legs, being too big, bend and squash against the aluminum lid as they cover you with it. It’s no wonder people make a run for the hills hollering and laughing. It’s not so much the system itself that makes you feel like a foreign object in conjunction with your surroundings, it’s a vague sensation that is born within your chest the moment you encounter the expectations of what constitutes as being human within the system. It’s something, much like yourself, that lurks in the perimeter of the build. Once it sneaks up on you, you understand in an instant that something doesn’t fit.
And they laugh and cheer, your friends, your family, but you always find your mouth being ever so slightly askew when you try to mimic the noises they produce. It can be hard to be sincere. It can be tiresome to project yourself into the world, when the image always seem to clash with the canvas, looking like it wouldn’t belong. Once it gets a hold of you it digs in deep. Even in your most private of moments, when you’re hiding from the world, you can feel its claws. Do you ever wonder why people become afraid of living? You know why already. Look at it. Look at it. It frightens you as well. It’s sitting there in the corner of your room as I type these words, looking back at you. You catch its gaze and it smiles at you with a mouth filled with crooked pointy teeth; almost human.
I took a breath and looked up from the keyboard.
Being away, being out ‘there’, seemed to work like a balm on my skin. I drank it in, the whole ever expanding vastness of it all. The limitless potential of being in the world was ever present out ‘there’. I could taste it, and I breathed deeper than I had done in many years, letting it seep through every pore of my being. I placed my computer on my nightstand. I wondered why these monsters or figures always found their way into my reality.
I had a smoke on the balcony with Ovav, my roommate from Belarus, and we talked about his village and his family. He was and altogether good guy, with genuine concerns and genuine complexes. He would always lover his eyes when we talked, never looking upon my face. The burden of things unknown to me made him slouch. The world seemed so small in his company, and it seemed to me, that he didn’t need much to be happy. He was truly a person whom one could aspire to be.
There was a party being held in the evening, giving us a chance to say goodbye. I went with vodka, and danced until the taxies arrived 2.30 in the morning. In the cabin of the cab gazed at
that in the distance, which I was leaving behind. They would persevere in my absence. The
comforted me, and I leaned my head back on the seat.
Day Seven
Traveling home sort of happened unfolded to me in a vicarious manner. My body moved in and out of lines, I said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the right time, and chomped down on an airport sandwich, drank a juice. The shops and the people moved past me at the same speed. I blinked maybe one or two times when we landed in Poland for the three hours tr ansfer, and my eyes were dry when I reached the cabin of the plane bringing me home.
EDITOR'S NOTE
The conclusion to Lasse's week in an apparently shadow ridden Armenia. Be sure to read the whole story - you can find the first installment here