7
On the 19th of August, I’m still writing this patchwork post. Since I started, I’ve been jobless for more than a month, two of my childhood friends have come to visit me from abroad, one person approached me on the street, one paper letter from my friend reached me, and 368 swallows have flown over our garden.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
5th of July.
I’m not sure if it makes sense anymore.
I quit my job. Moving forward. Rather, becoming overly self-conscious in the moment of free fall. Is there a hard reality waiting for me at the end of it?
Something about ritualistic suicide makes me think about the symbolism of it all. The honour of overcoming one’s weakness by overcoming the body.
I feel free and frustrated. Liberated and enraged. Fired and anxious. Fierce and scared.
Weird things you will experience as a human. For such a fleeting existence, I think it is too much and, critically, not enough.
I’m walking now through the long tunnel of the city train station, listening to Bob Dylan’s “… but don’t think twice, it’s alright”.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Few days later.
There is lavender blooming in the garden on my way home. Surrounded by fuzzy bees and small whites. Every time I pass by, I think about them dreaming. Collecting sweet pollen from oily, fragrant lavender blossoms. I think about them dreaming of lavender bushes while being born and while dying. Their lives are dedicated to that beautiful dream.
And then I think how easily we impose egos on those who do not have one. We say, ‘Here ends the flower, here the butterfly begins,’ and we move on as if slicing nature into meanings were an obvious thing.
I like that, in the first book of the Bible, God asks a man, newly created in his likeness, to bestow names upon each creature God has created, in order to rule over them.
Ego is a graspable construct. You can deconstruct it into particles that shape complex connections and collect back into a working synergy that we call a person. We say that if we can deconstruct it, we can play with it as much as we like. Yet somehow its reconstruction rarely upholds the intended complexity.
So we reduce it. We reduce the world to particles because they are explainable, usable, manageable, applicable. They are building blocks with which to operate reality through logic and prediction.
The funny thing that happens later in the same book is the aforementioned man falling out of God’s grace by embracing the knowledge of good and evil.
We learned to make logical judgements, fuelled by our capability of operating the defined, isolated components as if it were an obvious thing. Grasping, holding, analysing, predicting compulsively. Attaching names and labels, followed by evaluation. In God’s likeness.
So here I walk, thinking about lavender dreamt by butterflies and bees, and us naming a flower — flower, and a butterfly — butterfly, and how the world wraps around them. Neatly, accurately. Just as we put it in books. Word after word. Paragraph after paragraph. The Book of Life indeed.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Tuesday afternoon [16.07.2026]
Here I am. Sitting in my bathtub. Cooling my head. Typing on my phone. Word after word. Once more.
I think one of the reasons why I love Wes Anderson is the way he shows bathrooms. Personal forts to retreat to, to smoke and work and contemplate in nauseating longing.
I always loved our old bathroom with rooftop windows, heated floors and a nice, tattered armchair. I remember hiding there in the morning, reading magazines and books I sneaked from Mum’s library.
So, circling back to the reason why I have to cool my head.
Last night I woke up from a sharp pain, as if something had gone really, very wrong. The pain went away quickly, but now I’m thinking about the fragility of humankind.
I haven’t been to a doctor for several years and I’m not planning on going. I’d rather die than let myself be operated on again. I really don’t like the whole idea of saving lives by opening you up and cutting away malicious or malfunctioning pieces of you and throwing them away. Something about it is deeply disturbing to me.
I don’t know if I’d thought so the first time I was operated on. I would have been dead now if I hadn’t been.
That’s a strange, crippling feeling.
The whole idea of dying is.
Choosing to die or choosing to struggle for life.
It is so easy to start stressing over the feeling of powerlessness. No, that’s not right… more like the feeling of losing power, the feeling of control inevitably slipping away.
Exchange of relevant experiences is what I expect of a conversation.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Sunday evening. [02.08.2026]
I’m on my train back to Bern. Weird feeling, very particular to the beginning of August. My magazine deadline is on fire, I’ve just parted with my childhood friend at the airport, there is Courtney Barnett playing in my headphones.
Yes…
There are some people who are particularly adored by magic. They walk carrying miracles, very small, mostly mundane, but still miracles. I love such friends. They are like paradise gardens full of colourful birds, like carry-in oases.
One of such friends was asking me today what I consider “love”.
— Is love by itself enough?
— Enough for what? I ask back, already frowning.
— Just enough. I want to hear your thoughts, she answers, lighting her cigarette.
— Oh well, you know… the scarcity of language limits us to lump a lot of things together, obliterating many distinctions. How could one speak of something so sacred yet so lost and washed out? Love, art, self. All those are drenched in water murky with never-ending definitions.
I shrug my shoulders. The shadows of the tall, leafy trees were dancing on the glass screen of the tram stop.
She told me that she loves me while we were parting.
She told me that she would miss me.
The sunlight was melted gold today, vibrant, flaming yellow-orange gold, lighting up the large arched windows at the train station, dimmed with layers of dust. They felt like chapel stained glass during evening sermon.
Almost a month ago, I quit my job. I let everything go.
‘Strike another match, go start anew.’
Oh, I do…
I love partings. I love letting things go.
Sometimes I get scared.
But just for a little bit.