– What I have to do? Help me… You should know better… – I speak, and every single sentence is new, and yet worn out Dйjа vu: I know the words even before they reach my conscience mind. I just don’t know whether the answers are coming first – from inside, or outside of my ear. Although that’s pointless – any more. Meaningless is my middle name now, since a long time ago…
– You know, I’m not going to quit. – who ever said that the meaning is necessary? I would laugh at his face, if I knew him. For a Homo Sapiens, may be. To bad that such a thing doesn’t exist. And I would laugh at its face also; if such a thing exists.
‘Cause, at least I taught my tears to shed inside. Towards a within.
***
Silence.
The shadows, again, are writing my attempts on the ceiling; like when a convict marking the days in his cell with a dry spittle to a mortar on the wall. Even that lasts longer than any talk I make to her.
Another night. Another failure. In the night, anything I may say, vanishes into the dark. In that beautiful, all-spread darkness, which was the beginning, and will be the end. Just take out the light; put out the Sun; then, only darkness remains… It isn’t a colour. It’s an absence of colour… It’s an existence by its own. Sufficient for itself.
At the end, everything comes to it… Black. That’s why I love that colour. Even more than I love Her.
And if She come alive, maybe I’ll reconsider.
***
– Opening your eyes isn’t enough to rouse from the dead… – I fondle her with a hand with fire burning within; fire to weak for the ice I want to melt with it. – You must get out of that coffin so cosy that you are settled in. Think. Feel, and – live.
My foolishly-stupid look instantly melts, meeting hers, hidden under her fallen brows.
– I do torment you, I know… – I apologize, though I don’t know why.
Again, my lighter falls down – three times in a row – until I succeed to light my cigarette. That always reminds me of the uselessness of such escapes from reality in sequels.
Rescue by installments…
She won’t come out of that coffin she’s in. She won’t come among the Living…
– Is that it? Is it – all what you have to say? – I yell at her face with anger – That you aren’t dead? That everything is O.K.? – my cigarette is coming to its end – You can’t even imagine how death looks like! Nor – how it feels! … You don’t even know what death IS! Have you ever FELT it? HAVE you? – My cigarette’s ash falls down on the white sheets of hers. I smudge it with brief move of my hand. – It’s more terrifying than the REAL one…! – my “speech” was severely stopped by a vision of the Shape I saw on the sheet, there below: Hers…
Ashes!
The ashes on the sheet is laughing at me – with HER lips…
The cigarette burned my fingertips. I endured the pain with some strange, dark pleasure, and then I violently squashed the fag into the ashtray.
– Look… – said She, looking at the ashes on her sheet – You smeared it again…
And I… To me, nothing remains any more, but to look at her. Through my tears, and through the bars of her coffin.
To look at her.
Into the ashes. Grayness.
***
“When one’s drowning, he would reach even for a straw in the water…”
***
I remember… Yes…
I remember very well: I told her that our pride doesn’t last longer than ourselves – when I meant to tell her that the Word can heal. At least – more or less – while you’re listening at It…
I only wanted – to warm her up. I wanted Her to Live:
The straw I extinct my soul with.
Skopje, June 1994
Translated by the author