 
Paranoia

Plamen Chetelyazov

Copyright 2011 by Plamen Chetelyazov

Smashwords Edition

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Introduction

Paranoia is a personal life story. Memoirs in the form of short essays. The novel reveals my primitive complexes, inmost emotions and cracked dreams. It is a tale about an escape from the elemental impulses and social clichés through a journey. The emotional path meanders between the unbearable hypocrisy of the stony-hearted society, a self-destructive self-denial and an awe of the natural insanity. I like to think of my text as a hiking route – one must climb really hard and subdue every peak in order to face the roughness of the mountain thus feel its beauty and appreciate the cosiness of the hut.

I experienced Paranoia when I was 20 years old. Maybe the teenage style is rough and the novel is inspired by primary vanity and some clichéd depressions. But I believe that the real challenge is to write impartially and honestly. And I can assure you that Paranoia is truth. If nothing else it is still my revelation!

The Bulgarian publishing house LiterNet published the novel in 2007. Nevertheless I have decided to translate Paranoia in search for understanding and sympathy. Because I am curator at a Bulgarian museum I have time to attend to this project but don`t have the money to invest in it. I know that my English usage need quite an editing for the market and the novel is indigent of a professional introduction with faultless sample writing. Unfortunately these are services I cannot afford or provide.

Chapter 1: A Spiritual Blast

They say it is the New year`s eve... But why? In every moment, in every single second the Earth completes one full lap around the Sun. That is of course if you compare it to the previous flash when it flew into the Big Bang after party rhytm through this very location of our solar system. Besides there is the theory of matter`s continuous expansion. It basically says that despite all liposuctions of the Bulgarian pop-folk stars, every single second their early aged, because of the vanity and the sex amortization, bodies grow by thousands of miles in space. Of course they can not detect this growth despite spending hours in front of the mirror, wandering what clothes and cosmetics can hide the cellulite`s furrows exposing their faded butts. The matter increases proportionally you know. So anyway. If we prove this theory we can use it as an excuse for men`s rounded wine-skin stomachs. The prove will also mean that the New year`s eve does not exist because the Earth never crosses the same location in space which means that it actually has rushed across that matter of time striving to it`s end. And if so there is no New year nor end of the fiscal year nor taxes – so there is more for beer, vodka, synthetic experiments and all kinds of porn. Right now I am surrounded by these goods, the master achievement, the masterpiece of millions, billions of years of evolution of some proteins due to some sort of radiation. But the only thing I care about is that the New year`s eve is a fucking illusion, an absolute lie – just an abstract system created by people to watch over their own lives which are constantly slipping out of control.

I can dimly hear that a digitally degenerated voice is counting-back with the Death`s heavy timbre from the Terry Pratchett`s novels.

\- 5,4,3,2,1...

Here comes my favorite moment. The lights fade, the music subsides, the madness of the absolutely intolerant of their own emotions and vocal chords crowd melts into the darkness. This takes only half of a second but thanks to the shock my head received when I fell from a pear tree in my village as a kid... Or probably due to the chemical compounds that my heart is shooting through the boiling and gurgling blood, spirit bullets that affect all nerves and create real brain diversion to blow up the mind... So thanks to something right now I do have the gift to slow the time around me. Maybe I can stop the sense of proportional growth, I manage to escape from the prison of these dimensions just to distinguish the matter of time from the matter of existence. As a sun beam that I can obstruct by hand. Right before the digital chaos explode in the columns with hundreds of lasers and spotlights, just a few seconds before the people start to roar eagerly, appeased because they have a reason to be primitive, at that very moment I can feel how the Earth takes a deep breathe. I feel the warmth of thousands human bodies around me – those, the insane who sheltered their minds here at this party in the winter night. I hear the falling of every graceful snowflake just before the snow makes it impersonal. I have enough time to fly, I can go up to the mountain, slip in a dark den, curl up on the wet moss next to the huge hairy torso of a hibernationed bear just to watch the white steam that the animal is exhaling with its powerfull lungs untill I dissolve myself to touch the stars. We can do all of that just for a second! We have all the time in the world, but we are unable to spend it because we do not realize how to obey the no physical matter to us.

\- HAPPY NEW YEAR! BOOM! And BOOM! And BOOM! And BOOM! And BOOM!

And then savage shouts, screams that are tearing the universal harmony, twisted outpouring of the human`s passion. Bright light blasts my eyes. I do not need my adequate consciousness any more. It is time for it to sleep, to rest. My head recoils because of the explosion`s wave wiping out the hall. My body stutters in an attempt to read the message from the digital genius behind the DJ`s console. This murderer of my moments of timelessness, this ephemera prophet, this fake Buddha! Some people wave hands and honour his greatness, others embrace each other inspired by the samaritan love imposed by the digital and synthetic substances and there are those who just drink to celebrate the moment when everyone really yearn for an illusory new beginning. No – I don`t need my adequate consciousness. It dreams, dreams music, sings in its sleep Peace orchestra`s "who am I?", roams with the phlegmatic super rumble of the frank sadness, absolute personification of the human helplessness. The arms are like disconnected, the head tilts, the feet stagger willfully, my body shakes with fire rage in native pseudo dance but even behind the tightly closed eyelids I can still see the crooked shadows of the others existing near me. My autopilot suggest to them absolute pleasure thoroughly soaked but my mind is no longer here – it is silently dreaming nonexistent memories of some happier reveries.

Chapter 2: Self-determination

The earliest childhood memories are woven by shadows. And some of these shadows are woven from fire. I was keeping the clearest in the drawers of my dreams for a long time. And when I was asleep they were sending me back to the town of Ivaylovgrad.

We moved to my mother`s birthplace when I was 3 years old. This was not a wish of my parents. See the year was 1985 – the insanity of the ripe socialism was consuming people`s lives the same way as the ruthlessness of the greedy goons is consuming lives today. Ivaylovgrad is a small town on the south side of Rhodope mountains. There the Mediterranean breath tumbles the shaggy slopes of the Orpheus`s mountain and the summer whispers to the winter. Moreover Ivaylovgrad is a magical place. At least for me it is. Many others consider it cursed because there are only urchin kids and very old men. The young people in this town immediately collapse from old age or dotage imperceptibly. Those who are good are aging because they can taste the beginning of the human`s circle, they can sip from the emotions of the lost innocence and eventually they just wither in the utopia like the shriveled mulberries from the Belopolene village in the late summer. Those who are bad are dotaging because they are immuned from the emotions and think only about mischiefs. They drink, cheat and fight all day long because there is nothing else to do. And that is how in the town of Ivaylovgrad the people are very old or just kids.The grandmas grow potted lemon trees on the stairs of the old brick blocks – buildings with the smell of wine barrels in the basements and roofs made of black asphalt. The grandpas sprawl their stiff bodies on the lazy benches under the pomegranates shadows, they rest together with their walking sticks and sip thoughtfully from the homemade rakia. And the children, not the bad adults but the real kids... For them Ivaylovgrad is a paradise, a Wonderland. In this place the worms of time have bit off the space, and now the huge holes are actual passes between the dimensions. The local kittens, true magical creatures, boldly lead the kids through the tunnels. From place to place, from time to time. The fresh voices of the shorties curl the leafs of the town fig-trees, and then, barely a minute later, the sticky scent of resin engulfed these sounds in the slopes. Their radiant laugher bathes in the water of Arda river and afterwords it flies with the wind, who lives across the steppes near the ruins of the ancient villa Armira. By the way from the vineyards you can see Greece, the land where the white cottages are scattered among the burned stubbles. I wonder how our adobe houses look from over there... I wonder if the Greeks take a gander at all. But I bet that above them the star`s scurf sprinkles just the same. You see – when the daylight drowses during the night, its dreams are projected in the sky over Ivaylovgrad.

This is how I remember the town, this is the place in my world. I guess the reality is quite different – a languishing location in an isolated area of a poor country, limited village where nothing happens except the primary and eternal complexes of the locals. But I don`t trust the reality. She was the first who insulted my ugliness.

We were back in my hometown Plovdiv, I was 7 years old, the magic of Ivaylovgrad was far far away and was unable to protect me. May be the old portmanteau is also to blame – he is a dark cyclops, a butler, who is still stalking the front door of my parents`s flat with his unblinking mirrored eye. Now I miss him of course, but then I was too little – I stood before this mirrored eye and didn`t like myself. I guess the complex inspired the sluggish awakening of my ego and the first timid attempts of self-determination. This is how it worked for me. For others it follows exactly the reverse direction. Just imagine those little and innocent girls, whose crystal clear look caress the mirror – where the ribbons, as blue as the iris are woven into the sunny ringlets. You imagine it, it is a difficult task for me. I always ran over by my reflection – it was so ugly that it annoyed me. And while some were observing their physical metamorphosis and were marking their height with scratches on the steam pipes, I was busy with the painful exercise to deny myself. Just have in mind that I was a kid and the deliberate denial was impossible. Instead I choose to falsify the facts and from this very young age I dedicated my life to the doomed struggle against the reality and the things that can not be otherwise.

Chapter 3: The Hills

Gloomy, rainy and fresh – my favorite weather...

It was drizzling softly and continuously for days.

The sun came with its fiery kisses and the life blossomed.

I like when the smell of spring is stronger than the smell of dogs`s shits. I like when it is April and I lie on the wet grass somewhere in the hills. Usually I stare aimlessly at the stars until the evening chill drinks the alcoholic intoxication of my burning body. Sometimes, when I`m less drunk, I remember the hundreds of syringes scattered all around and the diseases that always stalk for a prick, lurking in these thirsty and cold needles. Another time, when I am as sober as judge, I think of the kids who quite deliberately stick the cold needles in their veins, the children who every night mix the synthetic and greedy oblivion with their own blood.

Right now I am sufficiently soaked and prostrated on the grass just watching the cigarette smoke which always dissolves before it can touch the stars. Too far away... And it is OK. So slow, calm and beautiful. The huge moon and its silver spray are painting brilliant cobwebs on the grass, ivy and the leaves of trees. The birds`s song is mixed with the muted town rumble. And all my dreams are hidden from the vanity of others and mine own complexes.

Is it happiness? Or rather it is freedom...

Whatever. It works.

Chapter 4: Good Morning

I open my eyes sharply emerging in myself. Startled and confused, breathing hot air in panic. The parched throat is tearing by constrained cough. The hands are holding tide the creased sweaty sheets. I am trembling faintly. It is quite normal and I am used to wake up like this – suffocated by the darkness of the dream which presses every fragment of my inadequate consciousness right before the brain is fully awake. At first I thought these are nightmares that can squeeze through the gap of the incomprehensible stalking behind the tightly closed eyelids... There was a time when I placed a notebook with a pen by the bed. The visions of sleep are most vivid right at the moment of awakening. Then you can still catch their fiery threads, slide on them and scroll back your existence in your own puzzling consciousness. With a pen and a notebook by your bed, every morning you can describe this second life. And I was describing it. I guess my passion was driven by the strong love of life. I did not want to lose even the shortest moment of existence even in the unreal. And I was enjoying my strange hobby but was not paying attention to the burning tension in my neck, caused by the brain strain to remember. I no longer keep a notebook by the bed. It is senseless. My dreams are melted and gone. The aspiration for describing them rationally banished them. I don`t dream. When I am asleep there is only darkness. Heavy darkness, the crushing blackness of nothingness, which suffocates me with its clinical absence. Sometimes I think that nothing has color and it is dry black.

The sun beams are bursting of waves at each wind shift of the azure curtains. The whiffs are slipping through the half-opened window, bringing the calm hubbub of Plovdiv. The engine rumble, the voices of the people, the birds that are welcoming the spring with their song – a hubbub so relaxing with its infinity. I am stretching slowly staring at the ceiling. In my mind there are fading meaningless shadows. I rise and sit in the bed with folded arms.

I enter the bathroom but let the light off. The twinkle of the burning electricity cuts my sleepy nerves like the razor blade cuts the fresh but dead fish fillet. I leave the door ajar so I can enjoy the pale daylight creeping from my room. The bathroom is humid and muggy. I outstretched my arms and freeze. Sweat droplets are erupting to the surface of my skin. They are mixing with each other as if they are alive, forming streams that are gliding on the sensitive receptors of the epidermis with maddening tickle. The shower is broken again. Perfect chlorinated drops are breaking off the spout, sweeping silently into the darkness and ploping on the wet floor. The asymmetric water shrapnels are spraying my feet. I flush the cold water. The jet is spilling over my body which is still maundering in the nothingness of the sleep. The blast cripples the hot brain, tightens the chest, refreshes me with pain. I start the warm water, adjust temperature to enjoy the pleasant cool waves which are filling my ears, nose, eyes and throat. It is dark. The cool twilight of the bathroom is so different from the clinical darkness of nothingness I am so afraid of. I cast down my head with open eyes, waiting for the water to drain. I can see clearly the wet smoke. It is winding through the half-opened door. Microscopic splashes are climbing the pale light to merge with the thin air and disappear forever in the circle of all. I stop the water and take the soap in my hand. I am spending it slowly on my body, enjoying its scent in the darkness. This is not a habit but a ritual. Every morning it refreshes my entity, plucks me from nowhere and throws me in the morning of the reality. As the water vapor I disappear each night to reappear each morning, just the same and yet another.

And yet the same...

I sank into the dark corridor, standing naked in front of the old portmanteau`s large mirror. Gaping my big green eyes, waiting to see who will cast down his head first – my reflection or I. I am not so stupid nor so crazy, I know who will be first. The foolish game is livening me. My mouth is stretching in a light ironic smile. With hand I remove a negligent strand of hair from my forehead. I freeze like this for some time. Slowly sinking into my own pupils. My eyes could be so distant. The tar darkness is sucking my paralyzed being. The face is becoming gray. The vague ironic smile is gone and together with it the lips lost their color to a close-fitting bleak ash. Darkness has replied to my eyes. The absolute darkness that lurks deep within my pupils wants me. The adrenaline is bubbling in my muscles but the instincts can not break away from the hypnosis of my own mind. The hands are trembling. Droplets of burning sweat are irrigating the forehead. I must focus on something different from the darkness if I want to tear out and throw myself back into reality. I will succeed, it is not a serious crisis – just a morning greeting from the madness. I just have to clinch the colors, it is easy. My iris – crystalline green treacle. At the bottom there are pale beige and brown graffiti with shining blue sparks. As a splash of flare these sparks are heating, melting the brown, beige and green. A mandala of colors with perfect proportions that no man can draw – an explosion of life that will cause my eye muscles to shrink the black pupil. I wink and close my eyes breathing. I re-surface myself. I cast down my head first, underlay my forehead on the mirror. I am smiling again – it is not ironic nor relief smile but a crazy one. I look again. There behind the sweaty and wet mark of my skin it is me. The reflection hides it`s selfish triumph, but I feel it`s unhealthy joy.

\- Hmm. Good morning yourself.

Chapter 5: Take the Field

Finally...

I gave myself to the downstream and now I am flowing back. It will take me where I have always been. The mind is free. An avalanche of memories was unleashed, memories I have never experienced but have always felt. I look at myself. It was a difficult task before but not any more. I can`t find even a trace of doubt or regret. There is only sadness with roots deeply plant into the quiet rage. And a little pain. But they do not interfere. I am used to them. They soothe me. Wrapped in a cloak of depression, woven from the melancholy threads of the reality, I take the field. My first and last crusade. I will follow the steps of my own destiny. My shadow have already passed there. The path is not completely unknown. This time the direction is final because I can feel it. That is why I will follow it till the end.

Each path has a beginning. Even this one. I am the beginning. The end is in me. The road must be traveled. And it starts here. In this small and tidy room. Beautiful and quiet. Love it. So many times I stood in it`s protection and comfort. So many times I hid behind the door the bitterness and the despair provoked by the present`s absurd. This room saw my agony. It is true that at the beginning I tried to resist. I was not aware that I can revive only after collapse. How was I supposed to know that everything is so banal. Quotidian life. The very existence is a cliché with some strange hues. Nothing more... This room is a cliché too. Everything around is so usual. The walls are light tan. There are posters of Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara – symbols of the commercial battle against the commercial. Symbols so tainted and deaf. The aluminum window frames are obscured by the expensive blue curtains with scattered unequal yellow squares and gold spirals. They are a cliché just like the Buddha statuette, the big fragrant candle, the shell, the decorative kerosene lamp and all other souvenirs, amulets and pictures in silver frames on the usual wooden shelves. The objects are carefully dispersed to create the banal creative atmosphere of the museums or the antique shops. Next to the large wooden bed there is a bureau. On the bureau there is a quenched monitor which is gazing at the nothingness. I do not want to run the PC. Just a few weeks ago I stood in days, staring at the irradiated banality of the digital.

Everything has changed. Everything is different. Finally... But not at the end. This is just the beginning, the start of the path. Will I see these walls again? Will I remember these posters and souvenirs? Do I need to know where is the start of this trip? After all I am going back rather away from home.

Chapter 6: Between

I am at the bus stop standing among dozens. They are all the same – gray beings with blank look. Their frustrating eyes are staring at the nothingness. Most people wander there until the end.

I must never lose myself. Never!

The bus appears in the distance. The air roars because of the tension. The crowd is pushing frantically. They are all looking for a place, a better position which will help them to get into the cram-full vehicle. It stops. The doors are open. The real battle begins. People are shouting, jostling, striking, tearing, cursing. How pathetic they are, tucked in the rusty bus, stuck on the dirty and sweaty glasses. I close my eyes. I can feel how the temples drum pain in my mind. When I look again the crowd is gone. The bus took it away, leaving black clouds of exhaust spreading slowly before me. There is no one around. The wind is playing with the torn posters stuck on the old and rotten shelter of the bus stop. The place looks divorced from reality. Forgotten, somewhere far away.

I will go on foot, welcoming the loneliness. She is an old acquaintance even a friend of mine. There was a time when I was avoiding her. Now I am constantly seeking her. She is easy to find. The loneliness help me to feel that I live.

I walk slowly along the deserted "Lauta" park. My thoughts wander in quiet disarray. I refuse to think. Now I will only observe.

The trees are still naked. Their silhouettes look somehow grotesquely crooked impaled with the bright sun beams. The spring is not fully arrived but the winter is already leaving. The mud near the alleys is drying. The air smells like earth. I look up. Black crows perched on the trees. They gather here every winter and stay until early spring. The black birds are croaking quietly. I like the atmosphere. I stop my walk and stare at the sun through a tangle of branches.Hello light! You are gently touching my face again. You make me calm, you give me confidence at the beginning of my quest. You have always been there for me. Even at night when your reflection in the moon fills my eyes with tears. Hello light! A current of life streams from you, a life I somethimes touch. You are intertwist with my extinct dreams.

My thoughts stop their wandering. I am here again, calm and sure of my feelings. I am watching my breath coming out of my mouth as a little foggy cloud. It reminds me about the time. Is there such a thing at all? The past does not exist. It is gone, lying in ruins into the abyss of irreversible. The future does not exist. It originates in the infinite probabilities but it is not true before it is ripe for the wind of reality to harvest it. We are creatures that exist only in the present. But what is it? A moment frozen between the irreversible and the endless possibilities. So insecure. So surreal. If there is no future nor past then there is no present as well. Isn`t it possible if they are one whole – a common energy flow, spilled like paint on a canvas of all that is. I wonder whether it is spilled with meaning. I wonder if there is a God who paints on this canvas the fate of the universe. I do not know...

Chapter 7: The Street Organ's Artist

The workday`s afternoon is gloomy. Heavy electrified clouds hang over the Old Town of Plovdiv but I am rambling along the "Syborna" street, moving towards the "St.St. Constantine and Elena" church. I know that there, in front of the temple, leaning carelessly on his heavy street organ, will find Uncle Dancho.

I remember that colorful old man since childhood – he is always at this place, embraced by scent of figs in the summer, covered by grayness of clouds in the winter.

And there he is. The eighty-seven years old man recognizes me, he greets me with friendly wave. I photographed him some time ago. Now I`m carrying the images. He looks at them, likes them, enjoys them as a kid. He decides to thank me with his art. While he is tuning the street organ, he is babbling, explaining that the instrument can not create music without soul.

Everything is ready, the artist turns the handle and magic is flushing from the street organ. The sun dissolves the clouds to enjoy it. The cats on the stone walls shake off the spring`s nap and sharpen their ears with purr. The strangers drop their daily care, the problems roll down the steep cobblestone and disappear around the corner...

Chapter 8: Where Are You God

I am at the entrance. I open the heavy iron door and freeze. The time is slowing down. Almost stop it leaving the seconds to crumble like drops of a quiet autumn rain. I want to enjoy the moment. Want to capture every passion, every feeling, every impulse. My life clings to them. They are my meaning. I live there not behind. Behind me is the world. Confused. Fast, severe and false. Behind me is the roar of our civilization`s collapse. Avalanche of wasted human potential mixed with vanity. The chaos lurks behind me in the kingdom of lies. Behind me is the sneaking society. I will leave it to watch quietly but I doubt that it will see or feel. I am at the entrance. I understand and remembered the feelings that passed through me. Now I will leave them behind. I slip off the chaos`s cloak, it falls to the door-sill. I lift my hand slowly and touch the rough iron surface of the old heavy gate. It is a barrier between everything that is not and the things that can not be. I jog it timidly and step inside.Plunged into the sea of darkness – blue darkness, cool darkness permeated with the smell of incense. The door is closing behind me with quiet creak. The last scared sun beam melts in my legs. No more noise. No more chaos. The cold, heavy iron is separating me from the world, an iron wrought from another.

The hours are passing slowly but I don`t have a sense of them. I sit on the old wooden bench. So many people have sat on this worn wooden bench. Now here I am. Alone. There is no one inside the temple, they all have left. My eyes got used to the darkness, my look slides smoothly on the heavy icons whose frames are showered with beautiful metal ornaments and wood carvings. Soft red and gold lights are tinting the faces of the saints. The flickering flames of the small candles make the halos look so vivid. The silence here is grand and complete. I look up. The church dome is wrapped in a bluish haze. It is so high away! In another reality. There the white pigeons flutter nervously their wings. Long chains descend from above holding enormous chandeliers frozen in space and time. I hear the crackle of the burning wax when a flame flares brightly before fading again. I look at the tangle of cracks in the walls and the columns. The iconography is darkened. The paint is mixed with dark brown and green colors of the shelled walls. There are silhouettes. The figures of saints and sinners are dancing with the shadows.

God – Here I am. Here I am mighty painter. If you exist I want to welcome you in your home. Touch me! Just for a moment. Show me that I am not alone! Hold me with your soothing wisdom! I am losing the sense of purpose that leads me. Please! I am suffering! Just for a moment, just to feel your breath on my burning forehead. Hold me with your exalted glory! Just for a moment...

I am on my feet with outstretched arms. I am staring at the unattainable domes, where the lone pigeons flutters their wings. I do not feel anything. Do not touch anything. Nothing is here except the loneliness – my old friend. This is not the home of God but the kingdom of loneliness and silence interwoven with bluish twilight and smell of incense. That is why I like it. This is how it calms me. But here I can not find you. You – the meaning. You have never been here for me. Goodbye. I do not want to search for you anymore. You do not exist neither do I.

Chapter 9: Society

The crowd is all around me. So many people. They look like carps in dried breeding-pond – glazed, squelching in desperate and instinctive battle for the last sips of oxygen. A cup of coffee is getting cool at the small wooden table before me. The table is an island surrounded by the vast and lapping human sea. I am sinking slowly, without a flinch, completely hypnotized. I am suffocating. And I am just the same – a fish out of the water. Wrestling for the last sips of the stuffy and polluted air.

The crowd always succeeds. It breaks open my mind and rushes inside to overwhelm the moribund senses. In moments like this my impulse to run is so strong, I barely repress and control it. In fact sometimes I fail. Then I just look down below. I do not want to meet their eyes. They fix on me, they can burn me. They watch with piercing mockery the nakedness of my madness. The pulse quickens. The cold hands sweat. My eyes wander nervously behind the tightly closed eyelids. Confused I move quickly, I search for a quiet back-street and dive into its uncomely darkness. There I lean back on a dirty, dilapidated wall, re-surface myself and breathe thirstily.

Sometimes when I am scared, I look for dark corners where I can hide from the light. Corners where I sit, lean back on dirty walls, wait for the darkness to hide me from the outside world. I set my hand on the knee and touch the sun with a finger. Somehow this action distances me further from the others because I can touch them but I do not want them.

What is my fear?

I am afraid of what I hate because it is so mediocre, because it reminds me of me. I want to be different, to be strong. I want to be a saint, to rise above everything that connects me to the banal matter. Such a rise is impossible if it relies on cultivation of will-power. I want to realize my emotions, only these feelings can show me the true direction. But I am a mediocre fan of the saints instead and it scares me.

I am a creature woven by my complexes. Each person is. The complexes lead me forward and guide my life. What if I was raised by another family belonging to another culture? I was going to be different of course. But what about the core of emotions guarded by the grid of feelings – the main thing that makes me who I am? Would it be different? What if I am free from my complexes, if I am invulnerable and complete? Will such a catharsis leave me the same man? And who am I right now? These are the thoughts that scare me because I can see the answer and I do not like it. I hate myself, I despite myself but the worst part is that this is a lie!

Everything comes down to the humans. Maybe it it normal – I am a man right? It is a prison, a life sentence without reprieve. Is there a primal truth? I guess there is. There, through the whole shines something. Inaccessible bits of meaning sparkle interwoven with the drift-net of chaos. I do not have the strength to catch them. Not yet and maybe never.

We are primitive beings with censored life. Our genes are primary carriers of the existential restrictions. Healthy or sick, beautiful or ugly, slim or fat, talented or talentless, brave or cowardly... The genes determine whether we will receive shits or valentines, whether the party doors will open or close in our face. These enormous efforts for self-improvement are not of great importance. We expend so much energy making the weights of the status quo out of balance but it does not fight for the long term. Everyone has a destiny. You can not find it on the pages of a thick book in heaven or hell. Our destinies were embedded in our bodies. The initial tool of censorship are the parents. First they teach us what to eat, when to bathe, sleep, laugh and cry. Then they determine whether we are Bulgarians or Macedonians, Christians or Muslims, communists or fascists. Mom and dad distinguish bad from good, weird from normal, scary from useful. And so the parents dress the primitive human nature in social adequacy, they stitch the kids in it. The uniform assimilates the human body and we can not feel it. That is why over the years most of us never take this costume off, not even to wash or patch it. All our life we hide the emotions and the impulses in the deep pockets of this garment, embarrassed by the nakedness of our minds. Like any dress this also becomes small, goes out of fashion and eventually stops suiting us. But the parents will always like it – not because they dressed us in it but rather because in their eyes we remain kids forever. The next red pen is the reality over the ether. Do not underestimate the reality over the ether! In the very moment when a baby look at the aggressive monitor right up to the end the human seeks these images which are teaching him how to get pleasure. The reality over the ether defines concepts like looser and leader, cool and shitty, beautiful and ugly. It indicates to us what we should strive for and what we must shun at any price. The media tells us what a good life is and how we can buy it. It explains us what love is and who is not worthy of it. Then we find a job. The job censors our freedom, inserts it into a schedule, consumes it through the workdays so we can chew the cud of it during the weekend. And here we are today – blind, deaf and dumb slaves, least common multiple of the primitive instincts, musty education and vicious media reality. And our time is running out, its trail will stop when the glitter of the Death`s scythe censor our very existence.

The winter is leaving. Only the slivers of dust around the broken streets keep the memory of the fresh snowy whiteness. I hate these cafes so much! The tables laid on the main pedestrian street. The chairs are arranged so that each cornerman can calmly monitor the river of passing people. I am glad that it is not summer. Then the hot sun beams pass through the fabric of umbrellas and awnings dragging the suffocating smell of melted rubber. Now the weather is cool but my breath is heavy again. I am staring at the people. My head reels as if I am riding a carousel. The crowd`s roan kitsch is painful with its colors which are bluring my eyes. The people wear what is believed to be fashion and every single one wears what he or she believes suits best. This does not mean that a dress will suits other people`s dress. A mandala of irritating artificial colors is boiling my dazed look – desultory colors, without layout, so pointless and wrong.

The lazy human mob is creeping through the main street, overloading the escalators in the malls, heating the coffee machines of the kiosks. The thermometers show twenty degrees Celsius but many of them have thick winter coats over the matted wool sweaters. This proves that they keep alive the legacy of their ancestors or at least that part of the Bulgarian ethnic lifestyle associated with the fear of water and the uniqueness of the spring bath. Young girls and boys walk with feigned arrogance. The usual definition for them in Bulgarian is "gazar" which means something like vainglorious asshole. A boy can be just gazar or gazar that also is "mutra". Mutra means as strong as a bull and nearly as smart. The "just gazars" have casually tousled hair with some blond locks, an earring and a tattoo which as if accidentally appears from the sleeve of the fitting body shirt. They wear expensive jeans shoved in ridiculous imitations of boxing boots. The "mutra gazars" adhere to the same style but they are much more hefty. They deceive themselves that the absorbed chemistry is fitness. They walk with their chest thrown out and their hands clenched in fists. Their gaze is so funny – inciting, searching for a derision to punish. All gazar boys educate themselves in casual and arrogant manner of behavior. Their eager eyes quite deliberately glide on the female bodies. Their mouth is slightly bent – ready to curse or whistle vulgarly to the girls. The variety is typical for the "gazar girls". Each one desperately needs some advantages to excel, to stand out. These advantages can be thick layers of makeup, unnatural hairstyles and carefully chosen clothing – a mask that disguise the weaknesses and focus on the sexual benefits. Skirts like belts. Fitting blouses that emphasize rather than conceal. High heels or athletic shoes of short duration. They all have the same look. Cold. Almost Indifferent, as if completely cruel. But deep in their eyes there are flames of great desire and strong hope that the right HE is out there admiring them. Besides the gazar type there are few "spoko" representatives. "Spokos" are those who pretend to understand everything hiding behind the confidence of very intelligent. They perceive everything that sounds different and right for absolute truth. They repeat it with stupid conviction, ready to argue. Most spokos are doomed to struggle with the stifling upbringing Mom and Dad gave them. They pretend to have an alternative lifestyle with their alternative clothing and "I don`t care" appearance. Actually the spokos just conceal their defects which don`t allow them to evolve in gazars. Most of the adult boys and girls are always in a rush, staring at the ground. The gray, crushing daily round has deleted their ability to enjoy life. It pursues them and they are very quick flinging into death. The audacity is gone. The adults tote their bags bulging with washing powder, cheese, bread, lettuce, onions and toilet paper. The nylon of these bags chokes the youthful impulse. In their eyes I can read the conviction that everything is wasted in vain. Well there are exceptions. There are adult "mutra gazars" adorned with gold chains which sparkled on the black silk suits, masking muscles turned into fat. There also are some aunties confused in their critical age. They are with funny allegedly instigating clothes, they wear skirts as if they are in their twenties but the thick tights hide the cellulite and wrinkles of the faded skin. Few old people are hobbling slowly. They are lagging behind the world but continue to exist in it. They are all so similar. Gray-brown with white hair. They look with contempt as if they are angry. The audacity has returned in their eyes but this is not the youthful impulse. This is the frustration of all the pain and all the joy that finally proved to be pure illusion. It is an audacity that will help them to spit in the face of death telling her that they do not care what she will cause. Little dirty and barefooted gypsies are begging near the tables. Their hands are stretched out imploringly but the children`s eyes miss the innocence. There I find only the annoyance of bored people waiting for the end of the workday.

I close my eyes, concentrating on the beating of my temples. I can hear it. A cacophony of human voices. Laughter, words, screams united in a brutal sound wave that bites into the brain, tearing the tangling nerves. I want them to shut up, to keep it quiet just for a moment! I want to feel the absolute silence. I want to delete this blunt splash, I must escape from here, to get out of this sound river in which I am drowning. I grip my head with sweating palms. The sweat is trickling, sliding through the temples, tickling the jaw with teeth clenched in pain. There are people. So many bodies, so much hair, skin, nails and human flesh. All that is piled around me. Heaps that I smell that I can see even through my lowered eyelids. It is tearing my brain.

Who are we?

Welcome to the planet of liars. Of the violent hypocrites. Of amoral creatures whose only purpose in life is to satisfy the selfish hunger. We are a society built by units differentiated from the environment in which we live. Everyone here is absolutely alone in his idea for existence. We see the world and others as something that happens there, beyond us. We believe that the title role is ours and assume that everything else must serve and help us. We see no benefit in the action to understand and realize beyond the benefits. The usefulness is what supports the society and prevents it to collapse. We conquered the land and enslaved other living beings. The absolute technical progress came as a result of the mankind racing with itself in a silly effort to go on top. The human history is a heroic story about creatures that commit suicide in absurd wars. Even internet, the global symbol for freethinking, was established as a military system, aimed at optimization of killing. We hate and love depending on the benefits that one would find in another. The benefits unite us. This is how we developed the commercialization. The commercialization`s top weapon is the marketing. It focuses on the primitive instincts of human nature with the only aim to touch them and slide along them to the human`s mind and wallet. Advertising does not see people as such but as consumers. We are public entities absorbing the litter belched from the global network of mega corporations. We are doing it because we let them go alone in our unique but primitive minds – if it is primitive it is quite easier.

The globalization of the world is killing something. A foundation upon which rests the whole of humanity. I do not understand it. I can not explain it. I just feel it. We breathe air in which it is very difficult to detect any oxygen. We eat cheese without milk, sausages without meat, vegetables without taste. We drink wine that has nothing to do with grapes and vodka which has everything to do with synthetic experiments. We modify our appearance with silicone boobs, ceramic teeth, plastic hair and do not care about the hemorrhoids that are exposing our stunted bodies. The medicines in the pharmacies are fake. We pay for the most expensive fuel prices in Europe and buy the lowest quality. We pay for the most expensive education in Europe and receive a diploma without any practical value. The Bulgarian labor market is looking for a variety of specialists but the only thing it needs is support staff for money laundries. We pretend to work, the employers pretend to pay. We distort our material wealth with expensive phones and fake branded clothes costing at least two salaries. In Fridays we pretend that the shiny bars meet our miserable lifestyle. Losers identify with gangsters, whores with pop-folk (chalga) soft porn stars. We say that we love but the only thing that turn us on are the viagra pills. We sniff shits, smoke shits and in the morning we shit blood. We pretend that we communicate but do not even hear the sobbing of our own children. We pay with enthusiasm if a gipsy is pretending to be gay. At the same time we are not willing to donate a dime for the abandoned gipsy boys and girls and successfully pretend that they do not exist. Our politicians lie that they will make things right for us but they just fuck us. They say that they are serving the people while they are waiting humbly for the salary that the foaming at the mouth oligarchs will pay. The Bulgarian society is condemning the politicians but secretly they want to take their place, to put their hand in the honey to feel it on their tongue. And all this time, just beyond the Mediterranean Sea, millions of people like you and me are dieing of hunger, AIDS and bullets manufactured in the town of Kazanlak. Their children are black wilted flowers and the flies are drinking from their huge sad eyes. And yet in Bulgaria we blame the global conspiracy for our troubles, the conspiracy and the neighbor who definitely is a yap.

The society is depersonalizing – an expressionless avalanche. A mass of wasted human potential, bitter, unable to accept the world differently than what it is suppose to be. We are exiled in ourselves always looking for a way out. Out of the hypocrisy, of the lie of so called reality. Out of the pain we inflict to ourselves living in ugly prefabricated prisons, depersonalizing, destroying the differences because reality simply does not accept them. We live in a cell searching for an exit without realizing it. The global conspiracy does exist but it is not imposed by anyone. It is a part of the human nature. We impose our own limits pretending that they make us suffer . Actually the conspiracy is equal to the evolution – everything changes just to stay the same, maintaining the status quo of absolute disequilibrium. We are fighting for this state because it is our base, embedded in our genes. Whether someone lead us, whether someone follow us or sweat us – we voluntarily accept all this, someone simply take advantage of wholesale although he is no less fussy.

All answers are within us. If we know how to ask a question then it must be part of us. It exists in our vision and this necessarily makes us the carriers of the answer. Truly difficult are these questions, we are not aware of. For us they are absurd untruth because they are very different from the human nature. How can we answer when we do not realize the truth and do not strive for it. We do not know what truth is. We live in an ocean of lies. For us truth is what we have built as an idea. But the ideas can be influenced so easily. Because we want it. Because we are ready to fight for it. Even to die for it. To give life to the absurd present that does not really exist. There is no good nor morality. There is no bad nor cruel. Here we are – us and our benefits. Welcome to our planet which we will soon destroy. Welcome and fuck you!

Everything is guided by our humanity and the main thing is our absolutely physical nature. Past, present and future intertwine in our genes, defining the forms of the tissue constituting the body of any person. The apparent – all that surrounds us, this constant flow of information is brought into our consciousness through the eyes. Our eyes are woven from human genes and they reflect the apparent. We are set to see a thing but around there is so much interference and background noise that our limited consciousness stubbornly ignores. Just like a TV signal. Before we manage to tune a particular channel we pass through the infinite ocean of information disruptions. These disruptions crackle in the speakers, they visualize like curves and dots of chaos in the monitors and annoy us because we are not designed to extract their information. The universe constantly speaks to us but we remain deaf to it. The meaning runs into us but we let it pass through soiled choked by our genes. What do we see? What do we hear? We perceive only what we are programmed to perceive.

Our reality is a little island, a land touched by the light of our limited perceptions. We crowd to this island – an illusion bit, black and white frame from the chaos sequence, carrier of the universal sense. A fragment of existence beyond which the madness is lurking. The madness is the keeper of our consciousness, reality and ability to understand. The whole is not for us. It is inconceivable, incomprehensible. It makes no sense as regards the way we understand sense, it has no form as regards the way we perceive form. I am on the island touched by the light in which we manage to put our illusory meaning. I am on the edge and the others are hustling behind, fighting for breath for whiff of human sense. In this struggle I find neither purpose nor comfort so I will soon be pushed out over the edge. There I will dance with the madness and my insignificance will dissolve in the unthinkable everything.

Who am I and what are we?

How can I say "Hello life!" when I am not born yet...

Chapter 10: Abstract Thinking

There are people but the crowd is scattered among the quiet greenery of the Tzar Simeon`s garden. Here I will manage to suppress my madness. It smells like mowed grass. I look at the trees awakening for the summer. The ivy has enveloped most of the thick stems with its calmness and covers the ground. Only the asphalt lanes stand out white in the vegetation. Along the paths there are silent and empty fountains still awaiting for the warm days to return. At their bottom lie dead leaves shaken down in the autumn. The accidental breezes play with them – the blows lift them up, whirl them before laying them on the earth again.

The dried leaves are beautiful but dead. They rot, turn into food for the plants which give birth to their new leaves. But these new leaves are different from the old ones. Alive matter absorbing the organic energy of the dead matter. The life takes care of the mass, the person is not a priority. Even if there is God, he certainly does not report only on one man. So God definitely does not wait for singular reports. A human reincarnates as an energy but not as a personality or consciousness. What I feel in this very moment, it is here, now and for me. "After" will never exist. So am I obliged to be responsible or I am supposed to be an greedy egoist? If indeed there is no justice after the death... Then the fear disappears, the morality is meaningless and the good loses its illusory value. The saints turn into fools and laughingstocks in the eyes of alcoholics like me, drunkards stammering incomprehensible in the bubbling ditches of life. A man can not be of full value to himself during his lifetime. A man disappears after death. In a man there is no sense at all and the circle of life is even more greedy than us. Fear or happiness... Parenting or impulse... Primitive stupidity or vain self-destruction...

It`s getting dark. The Sun has already disappeared. The garden lamps glow gentle in green and blue. They are illuminating the trees and turning them into ghostly and unreal silhouettes. The stalks are distorted in their spontaneous movement towards the sun light but they look so motionless and eternal in the eyes of a human of short duration. I am walking between them. Just a shadow walking slowly along the white asphalt alleys. A black spot blending into the coming darkness.

In my memory emerged a dream of mine. Strange dezhavu with meaning that I did not understand at that time. I was walking through the garden again. The park was as beautiful and desolated as it is now. Only the peering sky was different. The darkness was quietly embracing it but the last sun beams were crawling on the shabby clouds in a hurry to get the sun which had already gone down. The blood red heaven was burning to dark purple. The night was coming. Suddenly I saw it. Dark shadow of a boy, aimlessly walking towards me. When I approached enough I saw a young face lost in thought. Worried wrinkles were weaving into the high forehead. The skin was as yellow as wax. The eyes were roving elsewhere buried in shadows which were darker than the evening darkness. I wondered what was happening to him so I decided to ask. It was my dream and although I was not realizing it I somehow was feeling it. So I stood in front of the boy and bowed to him slightly. This action turned him aside his deep thoughts and even cheered him up. Ironic sparks flashed in his look, his mouth twisted in a understated smile.

\- Hello, I said.

\- Hi.

\- I found you interesting so I decided to stop and talk to you.

\- Do you talk to anyone who gets you interesting, do you always ask strangers about one thing or another?

\- No. Actually it happens for the first time. I am very sorry – maybe you are in a hurry, maybe you are in the middle of some important work and you do not have any time right?

\- I have all the time because it is a whole, completely independent of here and now. So I am everywhere at any time. You bowed to me when you decided to attract my attention and I found it strange. Why did you do it?

\- Frankly I don`t know. I don`t often talk to strangers. I am not experienced in these things. I decided that if I am about to pull someone out of his deep thoughts, bowing would be the most polite way of doing it. See – you looked so distant as if you are not from here.

\- Oh, I am from here but maybe not from now as you understand now.

\- What were your thoughts?

\- I was not thinking, I was just feeling. I was with open mind, trying to find this old garden in myself, trying to feel it much more powerful and true.

\- What do you mean to find it in yourself?

\- The garden in myself or I among it – it is the same.

\- Yes I understand. Because everyone are and everything is connected right?

\- No. You are wrong. If everything is connected there must be fragments requiring soldering. Everything actually is one... Or at least it was before.

\- What do you mean?

\- It is not a whole any more. You do not understand and I can not explain it. But I saw it. Everything – the time and the matter, everything is torn to pieces and disarranged. Do you want to see it?

\- I would entrust you with my mind but I am not so sure that you are with all your savvy.

\- Are you with all your savvy? Do you think that you are not going to get mad if you suddenly awake in your whole consciousness and mind? I didn`t expect this from a man who attract my attention with a bow. To answer the question I must say that I am much more adequate than any man on this earth right now. This is exactly why I am going crazy. I am just a human. I do not have the capacity to store all the emotions inspired to me. All the savvy – this is the whole universe, everything – do you understand – absolutely everything! I can feel only a bit and I am suffering together with it.

\- So you mean that the universe is suffering?

\- Actually yes – it is! The whole is sick. Its core is slowly rotting. The infection is in its veins and now the Universe is trying to cope with it.

\- What kind of infection are you talking about?

\- Come on – isn`t it obvious? I am talking about the plague of incompatibility. Can`t you see that the people are suffering from it? We must kill to eat, each one stands in someone`s way because of his very existence! We are not compatible with each other nor with our earth. We are one – a whole human civilization! But our entire progress, our enormous technological storm is due to this silly race, this absurd ambition to leave ourselves and our nature behind. All men are alike. Their every decision, all their conscious and subconscious actions, all that the humans are – it is locked. It serves the priorities that the incompatibility forces upon us. The people think of themselves as if each one is the one, thus they choose separation. Our way through time is an absurd path through the madness that we deny, the madness that we violently are trying to mark off us.

\- What then helps us not to collapse and fall into the dust of the mindless madness?

\- Oh we must thank to our strong instinct for self-preservation. This instinct has developed our abstract thinking – a creation we must be so grateful for. The abstract thinking has inspired to our minds the feelings of love and hatred. They are one, they are exactly the same! You just realize them differently in different situations depending on the priorities of your human nature. The abstract thinking has helped us to overcome all the difficulties of the hostile environment in which we had happened. Now we possess our planet and rule over the rest of the animal world. That is why we have the confidence of being the only creatures that experience emotions. But the claim that humans have unique intelligence is so stupid! At first the mankind was an absolute vassal to the earth elements. The scientific progress was so primitive that it was not satisfying people in their questions: "What is the sun?", "What are the stars?", "What are the clouds and the rain?". Every human, however, feels primary fear of the unknown. We are designed to believe in absurdities instead of jumping into the incomprehensible. The worst part is that we create our own absurdities. And so we started creating deities. Whether we are talking about the christian Jesus or the Muslim Allah, the proto-Bulgarian Tangra or the Slav Perun – God is a creation of human striving to explain things. God is an incomprehensible higher power right? But usually it has a face, body, even a sex. God feels love, sadness and anger. An universal truth which renders the consideration of the incomprehensible. This makes our existence so much easier. And because we like it to be easy, now the faith in God has been replaced by the faith in the scientific progress. Eventually people have always preferred to believe in whatever gives them a visible and real product satisfying some particular need. The scientific progress gives answers to lots of the incomprehensible questions of the past. This however can not simplifies things, it only creates conditions for the setting of new issues. The people are replacing God with the science. An explanation that replaces the magic with the rational, the spiritual with the material. In science there are no problems without solutions. Such sums do not exist. People do exist so according to our science a man is a mathematical problem with a solution. The equation contains the human`s genes and the solution is the human`s destiny. This is how I summarize the contemporary theory of our origins, meaning and future. If there is an wild animal which has reached the half of its life cycle and you catch this beast and put it in a cell it will most likely die. It will die even in a spacious and clean cage with plenty of food and water. The freedom is characteristic for the wild animals – even if they are grown artificially in a zoo without having taste the wild, they do carry the impulse to rush to it. If a human being who has reached the half of his life cycle is captured and imprisoned in a cage, he will most likely live. Even if the cell is small and dirty hole, even if the amount of food and water provides only the very physical survival. So why do we have the strength to survive adapting so well to almost any conditions? What makes us different? Many believe it is our unique intelligence. But few have thought about what it actually represents. Some think it is a gift from a God. Others say that our intelligence has occurred during the evolution, uniqueness caused by certain physical changes in our brain provoked by radiation or other yet unknown reactive. I think that our intelligence is an unique ability to experience and realize feelings and emotions generated by our primitive instincts and at the same time controlling our actions with adequate and rational reasoning. The only difference between us and the rest of the animal world in the course of the evolution is that we have succeeded to develop a madness, a schizophrenia, an unique advantage called abstract thinking. The ability to think abstractly helps us to develop visions. We are able to create visions of things that did not even exist. We can think of the impossible and we can dress it. In our minds we can build images of things that are, to put it mildly, absurd. Clearly this ability is based on our primitive instincts that are not different from those of animals. The ancestors of the modern man have fought with appalling hostile conditions. Their muscles were weaker comparing them with the other predators. Their bodies were highly unsuitable for the climatic conditions that were changing rapidly. So the abstract thinking was our last spurt and the instinct for survival grabbed it to keep us from total destruction. But we are not unique! The animals also exhibit different levels of abstract thinking. It is just that each species has developed whatever was needed for surviving under specific conditions. We`ve just got lucky. Right now the humans are absolutely nowhere and we are doomed. We are following the path of natural resources exploitation knowing that eventually our nature will exhaust and we will fail! We try to understand things but only if we can use the knowledge. So few are trying to get to the crux of the matter without searching profit from it. We distinguish from the animals fanatically but we are just the same. The animals also use all the resources until complete exhaustion. They often eat all the food they can get even if they are already full... I often think about an idea that goes by the religion of the proto-Bulgarians. They believed that their God – Tangra, had embodied part of the divine, primordial, cosmic energy in every individual man, animal, plant or even object. So if someone does unworthy affairs he denigrates the energy inside him thus he denigrates everything else, even Tangra. Isn`t it possible that everything, the whole universe, is indeed connected via common energy flow running through each one of us? And if it is so, everything that we do, feel and think, all our actions influence the entire universe because we are miserable but still part of it. So many people give up trying to understand the human destiny and originality though they have unique ideas. The majority do so due to the inability to be heard and understood. If the religious theory of the proto-Bulgarians is true, then the ideas of any person always become available to all of us, even if the concepts are not published or broadcasted. An idea do so not like a voice in our mind, not like hallucination. It is more like a vision, feeling, trend – like a breath of mental. Memory of a suggestion that anyone can perceive and develop. So everything we do or think makes sense and counts. This charges our every action with responsibility. The biggest crime that a man can commit is not trying to go deep in things, escaping at the thought of life`s paradoxes. People demand of the easy exploitation. Their justification is that everyone else are doing the same thus they live painless life. This is a fallacy! Everyone has the real power to change everything around. You just must not accept and reconcile with it. Each one of us has been chosen because everything, and even the time, are one. But the choice is personal. Or at least it was before because right now everything is collapsing.

\- I can understand everything that you said – it is so clear, everything except the collapsing universe.

\- I know you got me because I am you – said the boy whose aimless stroll in the park I had interrupted.

Suddenly I was no longer with him, I was him. Alone, frozen on the white alley under the trees and the sky still weaving its bright red and dark purple. All this talk I have I wrestled with my own self. I have answered all my questions. Therefore I realized what was going on with the universe. It was trying to restart, deleting the virus of incompatibility, removing the illness possessing universe`s decaying core. All the time, everything that was, is and will be, even all that could have been – all different dimensions were inwrought. The trees were no longer trees – simultaneously they were seeds and saplings even gone. The park was a park and a town and a desert. I ran down the alley. I had to hurry, there was not much of, what we realize as, time left. I was not aware what I was supposed to do so I rushed forward. My soul was grabbed by the quiet horror of the approaching end. I was flying over patches. Moments of other times and parallel realities, scattered in one. There were spots touched by the warm summer sun beams and a moment away from them there were other spots with snow pouring down from a cloudless sky blinded by massive bright stars. I felt tickle, creeps were crawling into my brain apparently refusing to accept what was happening. There were people. Some of them – whose minds were trusted to the physical reality, were unable to see what was going on. They were just walking, talking and laughing. At the same time others were wallowing on the ground whining eagerly – they had seen clearly what was happening and their brains were refusing to accept it. Their eyes were glazed crazy and their lips were splashed with slobbers. It was the madness. It was coming for me. I was running but it was impossible to escape from something that I was carrying in myself. I saw a young woman. She was running and screaming desperately. In her cries there was pure insanity. A note of madness, a superhuman sound suggesting the final collapse of the consciousness. She stopped then toppled over her knees and fell silent. She was trembling. Her clothes were torn, turned into muddy and bloody rags. Her beautiful face was scratched. Here eyes were looking frantically right at me with a resigned request. Then I saw the gray shadows behind her. They were five or six sliding silently on the surreal darkness. Then the teeth flashed and I saw their bloodshot eyes – a pack of wolves were after the poor girl. I was unable to move and was just watching in slow motion how the first of these big beasts shot up in the air with agape maw. The huge hairy torso was spreading slavers and the smell of carrion. The yellow teeth sink into the neck of the doomed victim. Her dying cry returned the normal speed of the motion and time but it seemed too fast. The other ruthless predators come upon the wretched woman. They were taking large violent bites from her flesh scattering blood and rags on the snow. Her last scream choked in grievous and guttural growl. Two beasts, these who arrived last at the feast, surrounded the corpse and rushed wildly to me. I was stunned, unprepared, unable to do anything about the flying gray death. I just stepped back and suddenly the cold darkness was gone. It was a quiet spring day. Next to me there was a gypsy with gold tooth, smiling and playing an old fiddle. Few small coins were shining in the hat on the ground. There were no wolves nor the ugly corpse of the torn girl.This was another patch, another scene of the chaos, another time and another reality. I was hearing screams of death agony that were strangely merging in the creak of the threadbare bow scraping the rusty strings. I looked at the gypsy. He also was not just a street musician. He was a baby and young boy and young man and grown up and grizzled old man and nothing – a bunch of a lifetime. I rushed again. Now I was fleeing from the song of this fiddle, running on the grass. Through the trees I saw people in strange clothes. They were in armors with swords and other weapons. Some were eagerly fighting while others were whimpering destroyed by the madness which had thrown them so far away from their time and reality. Then I saw a man with glasses walking a little white dog. The ancient warriors saw him too. They had been transferred here along with their battle so they were absolutely frenzied, confused and scared. The soldiers reacted as always. They attacked the modern man sunk in bewilderment and disbelief. They were chopping his flesh with the cool blades of their paranoid rage. The guy was so surprised that he died without a cry. Just dropped in the dust and covered the little white dog with his body. My throat tightened up, I ran again, I was stumbling over the ivy, I fell, got up and rushed again. In a minute I reached to the huge fountain in the center of the park. Breathless I fell over a bench. The end was near. I felt it inside me. I saw a man in waders. He was carrying a long pole to clean the fountain. It was hot. The midday summer sun was burning from the sky. The man was wading slowly and lazily. There was no surprise when I saw the black fin, the row of sharp teeth the jaws and the enlarging red spot. The shark was flapping in the shallow fresh water. The giant was bouncing and spanking – like a small tame fish jumped off the aquarium. Then it died, turned to one side, shuddered and disappeared. There were still screams but it was ending. White light was devouring the universe. Or maybe not light but the nothing itself. It was not absorbing but simply erasing the sick reality. Slowly but inexorably. The nothing was good. It engulfed the entire park, the fountain and me. I felt warmth as from a gentle caress. Then I woke up. I stood up in bed on the shabby sweaty sheets. It took several minutes to realize where I am and what actually had happen.

Strange dream – the strangest I have ever had! It was so real, so true. What if all this had happened? What if I am in another patch right now? I don`t know, I can`t tell.

It is completely dark – the night has came. I am walking through the park, I am going to the quiet bar at the end of this alley. There I will drink. I am thinking about the reality, about life, about everything around me and for me. I Just feel it because my eyes see things too closely. I can not see the picture as a whole, only individual fragments, vaguely suggested ideas of its meaning. At the end of my path I will see the picture in its entirety. I need to. I must...

Chapter 11: The Raise of a Beast

I am not a humanist. I do not like people. I do not believe them. They are squits and so am I. I am part of them – right? We are miserable particles of infinite chaos, stared at our own dreams which we experience with closed eyes. We are blind men. Always ready to attack, to offend, to humiliate. Searching for someone`s weakness, eager to sink our teeth into it. Willing to deaden our own insufficiency burying it under others pain. I am not a humanist! I hate people. Ultimately I hate myself. I am a human. Weak beast, ready to fight for my own illusions. But there, far beyond the tears, there it is. The truth. The whole. The unrealized which we will never be able to glimpse due to our limited and programmed minds. But it is inside. It leads us. We are part of the conception. And at the same time people continue to be so simple. We can not see the puzzle assembled. We will never try. We do not even realize our own fragments. There is so much that we do not understand and for us it is a lie. The irrational is the enemy. Enemy of what? Of our normal existence bordering the madness. Madness... Where is the border – the place where I am wandering. Is it more like here or more like beyond? And where is the truth – there or here since they are one... I am burning, the inexplicable pain is consuming me. It is surrounding me with ashes and I can`t see anything. Everything is gone. Only ashes and fire flowing this hateful difference into me. I am not you! I am not myself! Here I am – me and my attempt to touch the heavenly fervour. Here I am – burned and lost. I am nothing – just a black coal guarding the memory of the truth that is above. This however connects me with you. It makes me part of this reality, the only reality that we understand. What is my striving for? Is it a struggle or simply a wish to survive? Am I like all the others or all the others are like me, or I just am unconventional, or maybe not... Shout, tear, pain, madness caused by a silent dream. Ideal melted by burning rage. Look blinded by rational nonsense. Breath stifled by fear. Fear of the touch. I am stretching my hand with tears in my eyes trying to reach the darkness beyond... I am flying again. I am floating so fast with outstretched arms thinking about the end. Thought, memory, a sensation of a dream that is nothing more than a nap suggestion. Vision quite different and contradictory to our everything. A landscape of beyond, a background noise of what we can not see. Hate, love and it is a whole leading to chaos woven of nothingness – our only beginning. I drop back. I am falling slowly. I am melting quietly and I hate the world because I love what is not only a notion of it. I die again, I born again in order to die again. I will cry mutely with my head covered in the mud. Then what? How? Where? It is a bit funny because it makes no sense – that is why it is so true. It is a bit sad because it is true – that is why it makes no sense. I am so small – quietly wailing out of pity. Then what? Unconscious start of an endless road leading to incomprehensible end. This destiny is not for me nor for a man but for embodiment of a God. Not for me – I am small and pathetic nonentity. And even this is more than all I can dream of. I am just a human.

I grab another glass and drain it.

The life is too strong. The life is within me, it is me, and it is so hard for a man to renounces himself. What do I have? I realized that the only thing around me is the reality and that is how I lost the last meaning. So what do I have? These suicidal thoughts... I think about death, it horrifies me.

I grab another glass and drain it.

I live on autopilot. I am climbing down the self-improvement following after the degradation and self-destruction. I replace the sense of illusory life with sense of real pain. I am addicted to melancholy. I am sinking slowly into this sucking black hole. It is swallowing me deeper.

I grab another glass and drain it.

They say that one day the sun will become a black hole and will swallow the solar system. So many things in our life can turn to black holes – love, hope, short joy and false happiness...

I grab another glass and drain it.

I discover the true taste of existence at night. I look for the darkness to hide me. I want it to hide me from the obligation to stand myself.

I grab another glass and drain it.

I am addicted to the adrenaline, it provokes the animal in me. I go around desolated places. I am addicted to drinking. I live because I am not ready, because I do not want to reach for death.

I grab another glass and drain it.

I do not know if the self-destruction is an exit. It rather is a painful deletion of my nature. And no one can squeeze me out because I do not want it. I prefer this to the delusion and dust at everyday life`s dictation.

I am alone at the bar. I like to stay right here on a high chair in front of the arranged bottles of alcohol. They flash calmly into the neon darkness. There are others behind me but my back is turned on them. I am hiding into the fog of the cigarettes smoke, lurking as close as I can get to the alcohol glass and the loneliness. I fire another cigarette with concentration. I am looking at the flame. I am admiring the fire. It is drawing small and scorched engravings on the tissue-paper before turning it to ashes. I am observing the movement of the bluish smoke carefully. It acquires various gracefully broken forms which are slowly melting in the air. I exhale the smoke into rings. As if they are alive. Sometimes some of them lower slowly then stop for a moment before raising rapidly up to their death. I am gazing mesmerized upon the burning tobacco. The color is yellow and orange and soft. My eyes freeze. The tints are surrounding it, they are possessing the mind. They are taking me far away to the place where I am flying without memory among the heat of the flames.

I grab another glass and I am draining it drowning into the liquor.

The bartender is a bored shuttle behind the bar. I order. I feel sober but I also feel that I can not rise. As if I am falling again and again and again... My sense of the material is slowly dulling. My sense of me is slowly stripping off. This is the last glass. I look at the bill and throw some bank-notes on the wet bar. Their paper is absorbing the spilled drops of liquor the same way as I am absorbing the spilled drops of aggression. I push back from the bar. I am cutting across the filled with smoke room. I am making every step with admirable concentration. My gaze is fixed on the exit. I am out.

Soon I will free it, I will allow it to guide me tonight. Oh, yes. It is here again mustering its forces. The beast. It is drowning, trying to break free from the tight chain around its neck. I can hear the guttural growl. I can see through the bloodshot eyes. I am covered with its rabies. I am looking calm but I am changing. Each glass brings me closer to what I am not but can be. The alcohol is making me dizzy. The world is turning. The colors are changing. Everything is dark and bluish. I am down in a hole, in a dark hollow. Now I am the beast. My muscles are tightening up, my breath is getting quicker, my mind is modifying, the anger is coming, embracing me with its gentle calmness.

Chapter 12: Vital Insanity

The music in the club is a rumbling thunder. I am completely soaked. I feel the burning taste of the strong alcohol in my mouth. The first impulse of my resisting organism is to return the liquid back but I am swallowing it. I am smoking. I am sucking the poisonous smoke of tar in my lungs. I want to cough it out but I am keeping it instead. Again and again. My organism surrenders. My mind is blurred. I am embraced by dull and unsubstantiated joy. I am flying. It is another step along the path most likely leading to the bottom. I close my unseeing eyes. The reduced consciousness is powerless now...

But this is not me. This is the madness. I come here night after night to get another vital dose of insanity. The very craziness that prevents the disintegrating of the society. I am taking final leave of it. This false life is an insult. So what – I know the reality is in possession of me. Tonight through the alcohol I will turn its property in a wretched, whimpering, gelatinous something that will cost nothing.

I am holding another vodka. My hand is shaking and the liquid is spilling. It so so hot. The hair is clotted due to the sweat streaming down. It is entering my eyes, moistening the savage face and the wet t-shirt stuck to the burning body. The music is pushing my skull from the inside. It is roaring in my head. I die and born a thousand times with it. The music is conquering me, invading my whole body and mind. I am running wild embraced by this momentary madness. The speakers are pouring out heavy, depressing electronic chaos. It is clanking like an iron chain knocking on my soul.

Suddenly I freeze. The music is subsiding – only a rumble turning into a distant echo. Soon the muffled whisper fades. The closed eyes sting of cigarette smoke and sweat. I am alone. It is somewhere high. I hear an eagle`s screech. I am slowly opening my eyes. The club has disappeared. All those people are gone along with the alcohol dizziness. My mind is crystal clear. I am on the edge of a high cliff. The tips of my shoes are beyond the end of the rock. Tiny pieces of stones are crumbling away and falling down hundreds of meters into the deep. I can hear the roar of falling water. At the foot of the cliff and all the way to the place where the merging of sky and earth is called the horizon – everything around me is covered with pine trees. The air smells of resin and life. It is so pure, so cool, so heady. I am the first to set foot in this place. It feels too real, undefiled, loaded with so strong energy. A parallel reality, primary, untouched by humans. This is where I want to live, a place I do not want to lose, a place that unfortunately exists only in my imagination. I hear an eagle`s screech again. I wink just for a moment...

Someone pushes me. I open my eyes. I am in the filled with smoke club again. I am drunk more than ever. My head hurts. I feel violent spasm in the abdomen. The hot toxic liquid is rising in the esophagus. I am throwing up on myself and all around me.

Chapter 13: Howling in Pain

Sometimes the madness comes and brings fierce choler. It is a sudden rage, unexpected but fully capable to take possession of my whole being. An anger that leaves me breathless. It draws me down and down, and down until I reach the pain and start to drown in its fatuity. I fall down with a crash, collapsing in my own abyss. The aggression fascinates me, it leads me. The agony... The desire to destroy, crush and hurt. The wish to obliterate myself. To see my blood streaming down my own impersonal face. I want to look into my waning eyes, to feel the burning pain in my lungs...

What am I searching for? Why am I doing this? Where did the last drops of meaning flow out? Who woke up the beast that will stay here forever? An animal howling in pain. Its long death agony will destroy so many beautiful memories that can please the lifeless human. This creature is digging its claws into the despised life. I am asleep, locked deeply into my own nightmares. I am waiting for someone to release me. Actually not for someone. I am just waiting...

Running into the night. I do not feel the cold and the fog. I am sprinkling my jeans and my back with town`s mud. I am confused. Lost but fallen into strange euphoria. Can I feel anything at all? Dull but painful shocks in my brain. Can it be the pulse? My heart... The blood gushing out the nose. The fog is embracing the streets or maybe it is embracing my mind. Am I insane? The aggression is unleashed and now I am running. I do not have a direction. I am hysterical and grinning, drowning, searching for breath of air. How far can I get... Death? Where is the beginning of death and where is the beginning of life? A hysteria? Yes please... And the death... It does not start when you die. It begins with the day of your birth. You do not live, nor grow, nor evolve – your life is your dying agony. I hear screams. Maddening moaning and whine. I am trying to run away straining my final strength. The time is stretching into infinity. But it is my whine – I am moaning. I am trying to outrun my own groan. The mouth is cricking into a crazy smile. Am I still here? I am shouting. The roar is painfully tearing my tight throat. Like an animal. Like a beast. Like myself.

God is everything. God rules over the kingdom of heaven and earth. We are his likenesses. God is in everyone. Everyone is God. God tests someone. God tests himself. Someone has lost the meaning... Someone suffers. God suffers. Everyone is a part of God. I desire to destroy every single part of mine, to watch it squirming in agony. It will make me feel a bit alive. Is God different?

Suddenly I stop. The head is throbbing painfully as if the skull will explode. There are tears in my eyes because of the cold wind and the running. My chest is burning. I can hardly breath. The blood from my nose is still trickling down, its taste is in my dry mouth. I feel sick. I kneel. My body is trembling. All muscles and veins are stretched in pain. The pang explodes in the skull. The returned consciousness and unnecessarry senses are swept away. I collapse senseless over the cold stone. I am sinking into non existing darkness, stared at these small red dots recklessly galloping to and fro...

Chapter 14: Re-surfacing the Present

I re-surface the present. I come from the deep unconscious labyrinths. What happened there I can not remember – maybe nothing. That is why it helps me to rest. I am afraid to open my eyes, I am scared even to move. I am still too stuporous. I am still a little bit there, although I was spat in the reality. My body is awakening. More and more nerves are reminding me that they do exist, delivering information containing my miserable condition. I have a splitting headache and the heavy electric pain in the skull is increasing with every breath. My throat is burning. I do not know what have happened or where I am, but I do not want to open my eyes and destroy these forceful jiffs of uneventful confusion. Moments of quiet and conscious amnesia. I feel nauseous.

So I have drunk. Of course I have. I took the road yesterday and I had to take a final leave of the madness. Sometimes I allow it to be master of my body and mind and wander at large. And so I did last night. I remember the small bar, the club and after – when I disappeared and made a room for the harmless beast. Stupid beast! It draws power from the alcohol, then hides and lurks scared of the light. The brute is strong and mighty at night trying to erase my personality forever. It finds this cause praiseworthy and quite fair. Poor creature – just one of many human faces, dancing with each other, changing their shape, gurgling in every human soul. So useless. Sometimes I am this animal with gusto, convinced that the rage is correct. Sometimes I slack off the chain and let this tied up to the awareness pet to entertain itself of its free will. But it is wide of the truth, it is false. This beast can hurt nobody but me. I was obliged to say goodbye to it last night. After all I will kill it soon and I doubt that I will see it again until this very moment.

I open my eyes timidly. There is colorless light above me – the night is leaving and the dawn is close. Before my gaze, on the sky background, the russian soldier appears. He is staring ahead, frozen in the middle of the step which every day plunges him into the future. His look is rushing at the east. I welcome him quietly. Hello stone statue! You were with me so many times. You know me so well. I know you too. A lonely soldier on his post, guarding a collapsed ideology. You are useless though so beautiful – do you realize it? Why are you in such a hurry to enter the future – it does not want you. My back and hair are soaking wet, my body is ice cold. I am lying in a slop of rainwater and dirt. The scruff of the neck and the ears are still under the liquid. The thuds that are reaching me are muted rumbles. And this faintly whistling – low but constant sound that is driving me nuts. The madness has chosen to throw away the useless body right here, but not before she had possessed it and sated with it. I find this ironic thoughts funny and try to smile but the intense pain stops me. My lips are dry and cracked like a desert land. Two streams of blood jerk out. I must stand up! I strain my muscles sharply and sit among the slop. The world turns. I close my eyes. I am shaking hard, feeling how the strong weakness is streaming through the veins of my whole body. The head is pulsating, it is so heavy that I have to rest it on my hands. I have taken an overdose of the self-destruction, one final general anesthesia. The waist hurts, it holds the numb back upright with great difficulty. Freezing streams of water are trickling down from the soaked hair. It is so cold! I open my eyes again and standstill. My breath stops for a moment, a long moment in which the physical pain is melting away because of the magic that is spreading before me.

The night is slowly fading. Some stars are still peeking – distant and bright. The coming day is altering the colors of the small clouds with ease. First they wear the dark blue of the night. Bit by bit it is changing to deep purple. The feathery contours will soon become pink. The sunrise is approaching. It is pushing the indigo of the night far away to the west. The deep red is pouring from the eastern horizon into the pink clouds and the purple sky above me. Everything is so smooth and at the same time so irreversible. It is beautiful. My eyes are eagerly drinking the greatness of the nature. The conflagration of the sunrise blazes up. The red, purple and pink are burning in soft orange flames. The quiet fiery element of eternity is raging in the sky above Plovdiv. The sun is coming out – just a bright glow in the beginning, an explosion of light. It is growing, forming a huge brilliant disk which is blinding me. I look down below. The town is waking up in the light of the coming day. The car engines`s hum is coming to my ears somehow drowsily, dull and unreal. The urban smog is merged with the light fog adding strange purple hue to Plovdiv`s veil. Only the other 5 hills are rising above it like lonely islands of rock. The brick houses around the center blend unnoticeably into high slab blocks while the eyes are sliding to the suburbs. The majestic silhouette of the Rhodopes darkens to the south like a huge wave. Small, white villages huddle up against the foot of the mountain.

There is a legend in Plovdiv. It tells that sometimes Orpheus came from the mountain just to visit the place where the statue of Alyosha stands today. He was watching the sunrise while singing of his lost love and the whole nature was suffering with him. I close my eyes. I dream to go back in time where the thracian forests are still uncut – a verdure lake, splashing along the fortress walls of the ancient town. I dream to hear the lonely song of Orpheus – so sad and beautiful, the same as the surrounding hills. Or have I already heard it?

A friend said that I like places that are victims of the communism. One of this places is the Alyosha hill. Desolated ruin, lifeless, smells like old utopia and sadness because of the wasted time. I came here in the winter. It was snowing heavily – those big white rags... The snow was deep but I forced a passage up. There were no other traces of cars or men. The sky was strange mixture of gray and purple with ghostly leaded shade. The strong wind at the top was whirling the snow. The statue of the russian soldier was telling of loneliness... It was getting dark. The town was under, the street lamps were burning it into red and gold. I wanted to close my eyes and hear the song of Orpheus. Then I closed my eyes and heard it. At first the voice was timid, muted by the snowstorm but it was gaining power gradually. It became deep and orotund. I was unable to understand the words and I am unable to remember the melody. It was not a song – it was a gentle moan dancing and weaving into the storm. It was one with the nature, one with the beauty and pain. I felt as if I was lifting up. I wanted to fly up into the sky, to fly higher and higher until I melt and merge with the snowflakes. Was there another stranger? Was it a whiff of the past where Orpheus grieve inconsolably? Was it me? Or maybe it was the storm...

I have to go. I have to leave Alyosha behind. My luggage is waiting in a locker at the station. It will follow my path. I must change my clothes, I need something hot to drink while waiting for the bus. But not now. Not yet. I am unable to wrest from here. This place is too strong and above... It makes me feel. It touches me. I will try to keep the memory intact somewhere deep inside me. As it is. Lonely and detached. So true. So mine.

Chapter 15: The Faith in Love

I am walking towards the bus station. I will leave the hill and the high stone statue behind, lit by the beams of the drowsy sun. I am searching for an exit, but why? Maybe because I still dream... Because I do not want to see the world as it is but as I want it to be.

Right before falling into a heavy sleep – my eyes are closed. I am wraped up in warm blanket, I am relaxed. The casual problems are slowly melting away in the blurred consciousness. I am quietly settling in my own world. I am traveling in myself. The imagination – repressed and crushed by the grayness of the painfully real life – it is forcing its way through. It is seizing me, embracing me and I surrender. And there, inside, I feel really free, because even the most senseless longing seems infinitely better, correct and beautiful comapring it to the meaningful life.

I am thinking about the people`s faith in love. We are clung to it. The love – yes, it has prompted me to take this path. Because of love I was suffering but only the suffering can teach a man how to see and probe deeply into. In the beginning love seemed like chains covered with rose leafs. My affection was a cell woven from the beams of the setting sun. I was a slave – the biggest proof how weak a human being is. I was ready to do anything. Even one word was enough to follow the Orpheus path to hell, to spit in the face of Lucifer and all his dukes. To swim through seas of lava and boiling tar and then, covered with deadly wounds, to spot a single smile. But while I was dancing with the love it was sucking me dry. Love is like a carnivorous flower... It is beautiful, irresistible and deadly. Cruel, treacherous, terrible... All these movies teaching us that the good has the best of it, that the true love always finds tormented happiness, that if you give all you got you will demand your right... It is all a commercial trash leading to massive rust. It is a rosy picture of the world that makes us totally unprepared to confront the reality. I was a fool falsifying the truth because I needed to... In a day everything collapsed. The castles of sand torn down in dust. Dark veil of storm clouds covered the celestial azure in black gall. It was the thick fog of reality. The love remained deaf and perfectly indifferent to my sobbing because my affection had possessed me – I had been in its cruel embrace. I was turned into a miserable and funny creature. Chewed and spat on the ocean-shore where the ruthless, cold waves were gnawing at the naked flesh... But she remained so enchantingly beautiful and true... I screamed inhuman guttural sounds, meaningless questions asking how and why. Love sure is a madness, a mental disease. This grand passion is not the sweet craziness of the vital delusion, it is more like the insanity of beating november rain falling from leaden sky. Love is a bitch! Sometimes it is kindly disposed to someone tossing a couple of crumbs and the man is ready to worship this delusion as goddess. On someone else the love has no pity and this other man will curse it all his life, maybe even beyond – in the eternity. You become dependent on it, subordinate to your human weakness, drowned in your ideals, a true maniac, fanatic, slave... I watched the stars every night. They were peering through the clouds down. So distant and cold – indifferent observers. High. Untouchable. The cosmos – huge space. Quiet and deserted. Filled with loneliness and uneventful sadness. The same as my heart. I was so surreal to myself. As if there was a thick glass barrier between me and the word. I immersed in my own black hole of melancholy and depression. Some say that the sun will become a black hole and will engulf the entire solar system – our star will break the planets down to atoms and then will throw them up somewhere like ominous gases. There are so many things in a life that can turn into black holes. All that fills you with life can withdraw it at any time. I paid the try to overcome myself – there is a bill for everyone who tries to escape out of the road outlined by the fucking destiny. I was wondering how can I continue to find meaning. I cried. It was pouring outside. I prayed for this cry to purify me but the pain was even stronger. I cried notwithstanding. In defiance of society,of those who laughed at me, of all meanness. So I reached the climax of my depression but instead free I felt happy. I became addicted to all this – to feel sick, to hate the world, to be offended at life... It is a masochist pleasure.

Finally I can see the pain clearly. The pain that is burning inside devouring everything that seems gentle, beautiful and meaningful. My pain – it is myself. It is my human nature. No man is worth as much as I wish. We are not real. We are not ourselves. The people are covered with human lies, defining a false civilization before our blind eyes. We are embracing the arrogant clichés designed to sound good but these hypnotic illusions tear our minds to pieces. We do not know who we are, we do not anticipate where we are going, we do not remember where we were. We are slaves of our own primitive impulses, believing in our own futuristic lies. The circle is closing, the cycle is coming to an apocalyptic end but we still do not know our names. We explain our feelings in cliched terms and cram the emotions into a global human matrix.

The love is within me and I can not donate it to anyone. A man loves only for himself. I loved because I wanted to love, I flew in this blessed expanse because I wanted to fly and then I suffered. I suffered because I needed the splendid misery. But there before me – there was no human but personification. There was only my idea, my dream. A man can fall in love only with his dreams because only they carry the memory of what we really are. In the reality there is nothing categorical, not even the whole. The love is an illusory medicine. You can replace it with the madness as I did last night – it will help you again. The love is a part of the whole, it is rooted in the meaning, but it is not a cliché. We can only feel its breath – it is closed in a cell, captured by the matrix of our minds... The love is a symbol. It is harmony. It is the meaning of the whole but the whole is happiness and suffering and everything else as well as nothing...

Chapter 16: Through the Tunnel

I stand the crowd more easily In days like this. The searing emptiness of their glazed eyes can not burn me. May be the quietness is determined by the night before. Of course the crowd still makes me feel short-winded, especially here at the dirty bus station. But I, so to speak, am used to it.

My intolerance towards people became my strange chronic disease. It lives inside always ready to gnaw unless I am drunk or I am there, above... Perhaps the though that I am wending my way to the heights makes the symptoms of boredom, alienation and nervousness much more bearable. After all I am traveling towards my deliverance. It is the only possible cure – it must be...

I get in the bus and take a place by the window. My rucksack is lying next to me. I am foolishly spreading out on both seats. I do not want anyone to sit near me. I hate the intrusive company. It may be completely unintentional but still – the presence of another person close to me makes me nervous. It makes me act so differently – silly and polite. My mind empties and switch to autopilot. The irritation caused by the society disappears swallowed by the education. It will still bother me even if the casual passenger does not want to talk and does not pay any attention to my personality. The presence of another somehow belittle my essence – it connects me with a world I utterly despise. At such moments the contempt inverts and I begin to despise myself. The choked education spits the exasperation. Thoughts of bloody reprisals wander in my brain.

True – I do not believe the aggression and will not let it conquer me. But I know that it exists. It is storing up somewhere, patiently waiting for the collapse of the barrier separating the ocean of madness from the puddle of recognized sense. I know the impulse well. A longing for the implacable winds that will drag me along the vast salty waves. Maybe the freedom is there and I can find its embodiment in the water and the sky. Two different inter-woven azures. Sometimes torn by hurricanes and mad storms. Another time calm and uneventful, caressed by the fresh cool breeze.

I shake off the stupor. I am here on the bus sitting alone by the window. I am traveling on... There I will dive into the ocean. I am still lurking in a muddy pool but it is slowly drying up under the bright light of the truth. I need it still but not for long...

The bus has left the town. I look out the window. Identical road is quickly going by. Kilometer after kilometer melted away. I like the feeling. As if I am frozen in defiance and the earth is spinning unable to involve me. The asphalt is flowing out delimited by the protective railing. The railing is long with hundreds of miles. A strip of rusty metal pieces fused with screws and weldings. It is made by hundreds of people living at great distances from each other. But the protective railing is one – a meandering metal band following the curves of the road. Behind the ditches there is another road. Another long and united band. It is also created by hundreds of people that do not have anything in common except the human nature. The strip of garbage. Plastic bags and bottles, empty oil containers and cigarette boxes, cups of coffee or tea... So dead and ugly. I am looking at their bright unnatural colors. I feel disgust, I feel like vomiting. Each worn tire and old filter, every piece of human garbage is hammered in the ground. They are sinking their teeth in my mind. With their ugliness and absurdity, their crushing unnatural occurrence. The garbage is too heavy for me, for my whimpering and exhausted being. The screams of the raped nature are audible only for me and the rest that are insane. I feel how the helpless earth trembles while the deaf, confined to their progress-retrogression crowd is brutally tearing it to pieces. I hate you! You have turned our existence in a tough life of homeless tramps living in dumpster. But you like it that way. Fools! Can not you see that the ocean is swelling and soon will splash you with madness? Only those who can swim will survive – those, the insane...

I take my eyes off the road, off the protective railing, off the garbage. There beyond the wide green field, marked by the roads of civilization, it rises. My goal. My reverie and longing. The mountain. A majestic but simple beauty to which I aspire, that I desperately need. Rigid in snow. Under shroud of black storm clouds that attract me so much. They confuse and frighten the corrupted and lazy civilized society. For me they are relief filling me with cold and fateful determination – as dark and true as them.

Suddenly the light goes off. The mountain disappears. There is only darkness colored with engine noise, taste of gasoline, smell of poison. Orderly logical. As humane as electrical barbed wire. It is a tunnel – the road passes through. So few will reach the exit. The nonsensical and evil society rots inside. I am so close – nothing else matters. I will try to get across, I hope to succeed! I close my eyes. I dream of the moment when I will dive into the ocean of my madness, filled with the rivers taking their source from the universe – crying for its children. It will be cool. The water will mute all other sounds while consuming me with quiet smacking. I will barely move but it will be a dance. Small bubbles of useless oxygen will whirl around me. And maybe in this very moment, right before dissolving completely, I will feel happiness...

Chapter 17: Diving in the Mountain

I am in the dumps, striding under the spring sun beams, whispering the curses suffocating my soul. If there is something beyond life let it come! I want it to rescue me from the civilization, save me from the human nature. Something inside me has twisted far too much. I feel it, it has broken my sensations, has changed my perceptions. It is modifying me by eating me away. The anger is here. The anger will guide me. I am smothering it only because I will need it further, where my strength will fail. The anger is treasured up in my heart. I wonder what is the look of my face right now. Surely a mask of rage frozen in the final determination to reach the end. I do not need a mirror to figure it out. I can see my image into the eyes of the simple villagers that are retreating out of my way with curiosity. I feel the blood gushing out from my nose. It is running down the juddering chin, dripping over the old T-shirt. I do not want to wipe my face. I am mad! Here I am completely insane, striding quickly, in a hurry towards the boundless everything. There I will merge in the liberty, I will stretch my hands to touch the stars. I will hear the silence and enjoy the solitude woven into the only possible greatness. It will grab me and my spirit will float over the covered with snow peaks, splashed with the blood of the setting sun.

The gravel of the curving path is munching under my feet. The track winds close to beige adobe houses, resting against old crooked wooden joists. The nature is reborning all around. Green and clean, purified, as new as a tear refracting the colors of the young lilac. It is absorbing the cold moisture of the snow melting high above. The nature is extracting life from the mud, from the beginning and the end. Everything that had been burned now is refined to be endowed with life. But my soul is still burning in the flames of incompatibility, of self-pity, of faded dreams lost in the incomprehensible.

I am walking by an old fountain and a bench under the lilac shade. On the bench there is old woman dressed in black. Even the white hair is wrapped in black headscarf. Her hand is stretched out to the copper spout of the fountain. The young clear water is hitting her fingers. The trickles are fondling her coarse palm, they are running down the wrist, turning into drops plopping in the dust. The woman looks up and gazes at me. I stop and look at her. Her face is scorched and withered by the furrows carved into her soul by the sadness of life. The eyes are deep and sorrowful, sunk into the black darkness of the lowered headscarf and the deep wrinkles. For a moment I think how she was a child too. How she was a young girl running across the green meadows around the small village. How she was bathing in the light of the young spring sun, weaving her songs into its beams. The old woman freezes for a moment, winces frightened and pulls her hand from the spout of the old fountain. She is making the sign of the cross thus sprinkling her black crocheted bodice with water. Her cracked lips are uttering silently something I do not understand. Only then I remember the blood on my face and the rage that has probably distorted my features grotesquely. I stretch my hand slowly and wipe my nose. I look at the blood on my palm then look again at the old woman. She remains silent but her trembling hand is pointing at the spout of the small white fountain. I take a step to wash my hands. The blood is mixing with the clear lukewarm water. I cup my hands to splash my burning face. I close my eyes and put my head under the heavy, ice spout. Something in me breaks. Tears are gushing, mixing with the water streaming down my hair and face. I am trying to mute the suffocating sobbing. I stand up sharply. The splashes are scattering in all directions, jets are streaming down my clothes. The old woman still sits stared at me. Without a word, very quietly, with only her eyes and a slight lift of the heavy with age shoulders she asks. I understand the question... I look up and rove my eyes over the roofs made of stone slates.

There is the bright blue sky. The snow-covered mountain peaks have clinged to the azure their pure whiteness. Peaks as lonely as the human souls, searching for a touch. Black clouds and dense fogs are slowly dancing over the ridge. They can always hide the light. If they decide, their shadow will swallow the regenerating world. But the shadow is also beautiful. Implacable as fate, even more real with such a heavy influence. The shadow is a part of the light. The darkness we fear – it is the shadow of the light, it is trying to show us the truth.

I am moving forward without looking back to the fountain and the old woman. The small adobe village disappears in the distance but I can still hear the monotonous clanging of the rusty bell in the dilapidated church. After a while even its voice faded sunk into the twilight of the forest.

I dive in the mountain recesses as if I submerge my tired mind in the endless sea tract – smooth, with outstretched arms and opened soul. I am crawling on the steep path. Here I am – just a lean body endowed with a short life. And the antiquity is all around me. This ancient chill flows into my being. The woodland is so beautiful and scary. It can speak, whispering with the wind that caress the old conifers. The air smells of resin. Finally I am starting to feel the life like I do in my dreams experienced far away. I walk for hours following after the trail, surrounded by the mysterious uttering pines. I am sank into a quiet stupor. The greenery is so dense. The ancient trees are interweaving their sturdy stems high above. Only few dogged sun beams find slits through the branches. Their delicate light is dancing with the pale damp haze. Bright spots are chasing each other on the mossy stones, roots and trunks.

Is it real? Is it true? Isn`t it just a dream scenery? Yes – I am in a dream. A beautiful one, wonderful, enlightened by life. I can see the shine with my own eyes. My look is slowly clarifying, it is discharging the accumulated false gall. The lungs are greedily absorbing the fragrant air. Its cool purity makes me feel dizzy. The solitude in the mountain is beautiful though formidable. I admire it and shudder with it.

I am tired but I am walking step after step because there, beyond the forest, there is the end of my path – an end I still do not know. Although frightened, though breathless, though lost, I will go following this trail up. It leads to a touch, a touch I am longing for. I can hear the song. The song of the mountain. It has always been inside but here I can extract it from everything else. Free... I am free, I will never be closed, I will never go back to the cage that I left, I will not, I do not want! And I do not care that in fact the cage is closed inside my mind because all that restricts my freedom actually is my own human ego.

I am without strength but I break into a run. There is no route only a direction leading up. I slip on the wet mossy stones, I fall but am still scrambling up. I laugh my head off with the laughter of the kid each person is. I am rampant like the immortals. A laughter coming out from the depths of my life. I am drowning for a breath. The lungs tighten up as if they will burst. The thorns of the bushes and the branches are tearing up my clothes. My eyes are frantically wandering around the surrounding greenery. My laughter is drifting away the forest recesses. Now I am like the gods. Fully immortal. Bold and strong, ready to confront everything. Let it stand in my way! But I am runing without a way. This is not an alcoholic insanity. This is the intoxication to feel the primary life.

There are no trolley wires whose net ensnare the sky drowned in gases. There are no heavy blocks crushing the mind with their overhanging concrete greyness. There are no orange streetlights and their irritating energy saving lights. A mass of concrete and reinforcing iron, annoying flashing lights, extinguished sky... Our society has decided this for their aimless existence. I am away from this lie and I can see that a man needs so little. Here is mine.

I am fiercely drowning in the freedom from my dreams. I stumble again. The rucksack weighs down. I fall in the pine prickles among twigs and foliage. There is sharp pain in the muscles of the right thigh and the back. I unhitch the bag and push it back then stretch out on the ground. My ragged and dirty clothes are drenched in sweat. It is stinging the wounds of my torn face. I am inhaling eagerly the forest air smelling of foliage leaves, litter, resin and soil. My breathing is calming down. The pain is slowly abating with rhythmic pulsation. Eventually it fades away completely.

The high black pines are shaking above me. They are again whispering and squeaking while playing with the easy whiffs of the tireless wind. I do not see the sky. There is only a green roof. The time twists and freezes. I can not budge. Even for a blink I will need an eternity. I am lying in the woods completely relaxed. My breath is passing through the spray of moist air so slowly, so slowly... Here I feel a thousand times more real than I can feel in any church down there where everything is a lie. Here I am part of something real, something that embodies the life and the universal whole. The time has no meaning, it is powerless here. I close my eyes with ease. I am listening to the quiet whisper of the wind and the creaking of the old pines. I am growing sleepy. I feel perfectly safe, embraced by the soothing eternity.

I felt life, I felt it – then my path must be approaching the logical end...

Chapter 18: Into the Wild

I open my eyes. I can hardly distinguish the pines under which I was asleep. The wind is stronger. The whisper of the forest has become a high plaintive wail. I stand up massaging my sore face. I feel dizzy because of the sleep or perhaps of the insane run. I search for my rucksack gropingly and find it abandoned few steps away. I open it and find the flash-light. I set it on the forehead and push the button. The bright diode beam blinds me for a moment. I close my eyes until get used to it. The light is strong. It is twisting the silhouettes of the trees, making their shape alien and unreal. Now, long ater sunset, the face of the forest is quite different. It is frightening, ominous, lurking in its dark loneliness. I lift up the rucksack and put it on. I am walking up carefully, I need to find a cosy nook to spend the night. Despite I am playing the search-light on the ground, my legs are triping over the slippery stones and the dead twigs. The white light is illuminating my breath, turning it into a haze in front of my eyes so I need to hold it before looking around. After a while I find small and nearly flat glade. It is almost entirely surrounded by tall trees except the upper end facing a rock wall curved like a frozen ocean wave. Thick roots covered with dead leaves and dry pine needles are overhanging from the stone crest. I drop the rucksack off. It is so cold. The cold darkness of the night is embracing me. My clothes are still sweaty from the hike so I change them with dry t-shirt, sweater and warm jacket. I clear a spot huddled up in the rocky wall and cover it with my sleeping bag. I make a flat circle fenced with stones for a fireplace. Inside I pile up litter and dry branches. I am walking away from the glade – there are enough twigs to gather but I need to find some thicker dead trees that will keep the fire all night.

I am so alone. So far. The plaintive wail of the forest is singing just for me. The song is saturated with sadness and dread. It is praising the loneliness that can engulf a human soul forever.

I am trying to move silently but the fear is too strong and I am stumbling. I find a big trunk and grab it. I am draging it down to the glade. Suddenly I freeze. With every fiber of my body I am sensing that something will happen. Then I hear an infinitely different sound. It starts quietly and throaty to become magnetic howl flying through the night, gradually gradates in a lamentation and finally melts to a moan. The adrenaline fills my eyes with tears and makes my hair stand on end. The thrill is climbing up the spine to plunge its teeth into the brain and strike the mesmerized consciousness. I take panic breath then with the exhale my mind switches on to primitive. All my senses are tuned to capture any new noise or howl. I shake off the funk and grab the tree again. I rush to the glade, I need to start the fire which will transform my nook into a small fortress of light. I break away from the trees, reach the fireplace, throw the trunk and pull out my lighter with trembling hands. I make few snaps and extract the little flame. I serve it to the foliage leaves and they flare up immediately. In the beginning the dry twigs are only smoking but soon they blaze up with fierce pop. I throw a couple of the thicker trees in the fire and lean back to the rock. I am clung to the wooden handle of the sharp knife. I wait like this until the fire kindles with its full strength. The flames are illuminating the entire glade. I switch the flash-light off. My staring eyes are fixed on the sea of darkness beyond the light of the fire. It is a lurking darkness stretching its black nails to me. A tear drops on my cheek. These are tears provoked by the fear that I can lose my life.

I am frightened, alone, surrounded by the wild... and happy. I am happy because I sense life, because I feel. Here I am genuine. I can feel every molecule of air that enters my lungs. I can notice each fragment lit by the fire. I can hear any noise different from the crack of the burning trees. Now I am aive. The instinct for self-preservation is awakening me from the doze of the civilization. Now I am real. There is no lie. Here I am surrounded by the dreadful wild.

Chapter 19: Drowning the Primitive

I am drunk again and the fear is melting.

The primitive was drowned so easily. It seems not true. It is not the reality that I am searching for, that I want to embrace with my thoughts. I have nothing left if I am unable to see the simple fragments. Nothing left...

The wind is rising I can hear it. It is an embittered beast howling from the arms of the trees that are guarding my little fortress of light. I am under the lee, nestling against the fire, drinking and staring at the dance of the flames. I dream to see my soul there. But my soul will never touch the flames. Maybe they will gulp it down at the end just like they are gulping down the twigs and branches turning them into ember.

The fiery red tongues are crawling the blackness of the coals, they are woven into the hot orange roots of the burning flames. The flames are beautiful and clean, interweaving so many colors – deep red, yellow and dark orange. But fire is something else.Its hues are elusive for the human eyes. It is all these colors turned into light. A game, fiery dance in which I am voluntary sinking my very being. I want to burn, I want to roam there into the searing oblivion, surrounded by branding flames and their kisses.

I stand up with ease and draw nearer to the hearth. I spill a little from the bottle of strong vodka on the aglow bouquet. The flames are rising in order to take the concentrate droplets as if they are alive. I take a sip and then spit into the fire. The blaze crawls the spout to kiss my hot forehead. It is a fiery kiss that soothes with its scalded madness. My being is quaking for the strong energy that is passing through me. It is a song. A burning rhytm crossing the brain like a purifying river of lava that is reducing to ashes the fear, the doubt, everything except the cool determination. I take off my sweater and the t-shirt and throw them away. I grab a little black piece of coal. With it I am scrawling over my face and body. I do not feel the cold. The cold has escaped me. I am burning, burning from the inside. My legs, my arms – my whole body is subordinate only to the primary fire rhythm that is enveloping my soul. I am skiping, squating, screaming savage whoops. I am following this primitive song which is floating over the forest without a sound.

The nestinars – fire-dancers, madness-dancers, people dancing with the frightening incomprehensible. Sorcerers with burning souls and consciousness that flies beyond the meaning in order to touch the legend of the whole.

I am devouring the voluptuous pagan intoxication that is ragin in my heart. Now I am burning. Now it is only me and the flames, the time does not exist. A fiery spiral sucks me. A power swirls me around my real self. I am trying to get away from my body, to fly there – in the expanse that does not exist and therefore can not be realized. I rush to the fiery element and almost succeed in this supreme impulse then fall down over the cold grass next to the embers, tucked under the roting leafs and the dry twigs.

Chapter 20: Benefits from Human Instincts

The morning is here. I am sitting near the extinguished fire. Thin gray plume of smoke is rising from the ashes and melting in the cold mountain air. I am alive again, the world was born again – as always and yet as never.

I remember the fiery visions of the night. Dreams that sent me into the burning maze of my own passion. Passion that led me here and will lead me forward. It is a passion for life that set ablaze my strong aversion to reality.

I am sitting near the fireplace, crying quietly. But why? Here I am among the greatly longed solitude. What now? Is the end of my path near or was I following the wrong direction? But it was the only path before me. I had no choice unless I have decided to betray myself and spit on everything... Everything composing my fortress. Everything that connects me with the light of the little island of life surrounded by the sea of pitch darkness. I look at the cloudy sky. Gray sky – dark, high, cruel. It is the sky from my dreams. I remember it from my visions. I love it like this – when its rain is dripping with my tears. You cry with me sky. But not for me as I strongly wish...

Climbing up the mounain again. Walking toward the place where the gods are staring at us. The rain is heavy. It is cold and will become colder. I reached the heights where the trees disappear. There are only low shrubs around, their crooked branches are sticking out from the snow. White snow – a purity gnawed by the cold rain. The lavender flames of the young crocuses are peeking from beneath. I stop and squat next to these delicate colors. I touch them with fingers. The rain drops roll down the leaves and flop down into the black soil. I get up and pass on. The cold whisper of the snow is gradually muting the last colors. White veil covers the rocks and the barren wasteland.

Hello snow desert! I was striving for you. I am here to see you. Here in the white nothing I will look for my dreams, my reveries, my everything. Let me infuse into you afterwards you can do with me whatever you want. You are sad too. A white desert caressed by the storm clouds and kissed by the cruel wind. I can feel your sadness, I shudder with it since I am a human.

The rain melts in quiet snowflakes that are gently touching my face. I stop with one last creak of my heavy shoes in the soft snow. I look up at the home of the gods. They do not want me. They do not want to be bothered. Who am I? Just a mortal who lost the way in his reality. How dare I touch them with my dreams?

The storm strikes suddenly. Huge white wave is descending from the peaks. It is the breath of the mountain. Inside there are clouds and fogs locked in a lascivious, savage delight. Inside the gods are dancing. I am whooping with outstretched arms, welcoming the madness of the nature. I know this madness, a piece of it dances in me. A terrible wind is pushing me back. It is swirling the snow, throwing it into the narrowed eyes. The wind is not leting me breathe. It is lashing against my jacket, deleting the footprints that I left behind. An unnecessary trace of a madman melting in the white wilderness.The darkness falls. The fierce blizzard throws a tip of its veil over my eyes. I no longer see the flat of my hand if I stretch my arm. I am bent down to the ground, shuffling my feet towards the old cabin. The shelter is hours away. I do not know whether I am following the correct direction because the storm is rushing into my consciousness and dulling my senses. Each step is slower and much more difficult. The tiredness is stunning me. I am wiggling my feet with great effort of will I was not aware of. The minutes are stretching, turning into hours, the hours are turning into years. I am melting in this narrow white where the darkness is inexorably intertwining its black fibres. I am walking but not moving. It is all the same. I am walking into the nothingness. Maybe I have already arrived at my end but somehow mechanically and out of spite I am continuing my climb. The pain in the muscles is increasing with every step but I blocked my sense of it. The pain does not matter. I am going on. The gods are giggling and dancing around me. They are mocking at me. They despise me because I despise myself. They are biting, thumping, triping me up. Suffocating me with their snowy hands, squeezing the livid with cold lips. I am hearing the heartbeats pulsating in my tremulous body. I am counting my breaths. My steps are getting slower. Ice pendants formed around my eyebrows and mouth. Here and now I can die but I am calm. I am careless. It will stop the torment. The pain in the lungs will calm down. My body will go slack, my spirit will plunge into the dreamt uneventful oblivion. I collapse, fall down in the snow. I do not feel the fingers of the frozen hands. I do not feel my legs. Everything that is a feeling is pain. The ache is slowly fading in a quiet beat. There are tears in the eyes caused by the wind and the coldness but the gaze of my mind is crystal clear. I am able to stand up. I can count to two or three and continue this fight but I do not want to. This is the end. It comes like a gentle nap, I will go to sleep without waking up. Everything swims before my eyes. For a second I freeze on the edge between the pain of the fight and the calmness of the sleep...

In this very moment the instincts grab me and lift me up on my trembling legs. I continue my crawling ahead but I do not have any power to fight. The human, the instinct of my nature... It does not want to die. It leads me forward. I am following the adrenaline trance that is boiling painfully in my muscles. I have no notion of time nor myself nor the life I am struggling to save.

Chapter 21: Save

I am huddled up on the old wooden plank-bed. Alive. Happy to feel it. Intoxicated with the insincts which gave me supernatural power.

The storm is striking the casement-windows of the small mountain shelter in a fury. The ice is painting delicate crystals on the outside of the glass. I lit a candle. Howl you wind, bite, scratch the closed wooden door. It makes me feel even better! I am in a cosy refuge, a fortress among the anger of the elements. I escaped from the reality – it is so far away from me. It can no longer reach me with its banality forcing restrictions to our society. Actually I was forcing these restrictions to myself. The flame of the candle is trembling. A tremble playing with the quiet fire light animating the stone walls covered with scratches. There are names carved with sharp objects or painted with charcoals. The names of others that have passed seeking shelter on this little island in the middle of the icy wasteland. I am nestling in the cabin, reading its history. Dates and words, so many human destinies. All these people. Where are they now? Are they alive and if so are they happy? Are they in a shelter among the anger of the reality or the society is wading through their emotions? They all have different birth years, different lifes, different recollections experienced in different ways. But every single way has led them to this little shabby hut. Here their fates somehow interwined. I wonder in which direction their way continued. To joy and pain, laughter and sadness, dream and untold curse for the human lot. But they were here and parts of their destiny appear on the ragged walls. I stand up and draw nearer to the candle. I serve my knife to the flame. The greedy fire licks it. No, you can not swallow the metal neither can melt the pertified hearts of the frozen souls. I withdraw the knife. I am holding the handle with my right hand, touching the blade to the left thumb. I push down – sharp pain and blood. Dark red, clear drop reflecting the small candle flame. I approach a corner and press the injured finger at the wall. Here is my testimony that I am here. A mark in which I mixed the human blood and the fire performing a memory of my destiny. The imprint of my own finger is much more stronger than my name, the date or the year. Even when I am gone it will stay here – an useless evidence for my life. It matters only for me because my blood lit by the flame proves that I live true.

I listen for a sound but there is only silence. There are no wind strikes on the frosted windows. The storm had enough of its rage. I go out inhaling the coldness of the fresh air. The clouds are gone, there is no sign of the fog. The blue-black ocean, the infinite space.

The stars. Here they are. Glimmering silently high above me. Hypnotic, beautiful, gentle but somehow cruel – too far away from all my dreams always connected with them. The stars look so massive – as if I can touch them with my trembling fingers. I see a meteorite. Its fire trail cuts the cosmic gloom, fades and dies. The stars are woven into beautiful light veil covering the sky grabbed by the night. This veil conceals the black chaos of space with gently flickering beauty. I collapse in the snow staring at the majesty of the nature and its calm oblivion. The blue halo, the dark purple shadows and the star flames are merging into one another. Billions of suns scattered in universal harmony among the endless area of darkness. Flickering flames – memories of heavenly light in the black night.They are dancing, an embodiment of the meaning and the eternal whole. They are presenting me with loneliness and infinite sadness. Up there is the beauty of my dreams. I am flying through this space without an end. It has no beginning, it has no end. There is no time... Only the meaning of the beauty. Collapsed to my knees in the snow I am flying there, where my eyes are drinking the unbelievable for which I am reaching out disconsolately.

Chapter 22: The End of the Path

It is the dawn of the new day and this is the beauty. Everywhere around me. Clean, unspoiled, timeless, so sad – the beauty is covering me with its loneliness. It is so quiet. I hold my breath. I do not hear anything. Even the wind is not caressing the kingdom of beauty with its whiffs. The time is gone. The snowy here is frozen forever and I am walking in the middle of it.

I am surrounded by overhanging cliffs, above them is the crystal blue of the sky. The peaks are towering around me – they seem so solid and eternal. Here I am – just an insect touching their white splendor. Huge bocks of ice are frozen on the edge of the ridge. Suddenly they detach from the heights and crumble into the abyss with roar. The rumble burst into the eternal silence. My being shivers, possessed by primitive fear. The first silent tears are filling the eyes. My mind is awakening. Now I can see and feel the truth.

I was lost down there, wandering aimlessly without having direction. But here I am, crawling out of the cosmic majesty shrouded in snow. On the crest of the mountain – so unimaginably large and intact. So powerful and real, so touching my soul. I stretch my arms again – as I did in the church down there, near the beginning of my path. There was nothing but the loneliness. Here there is something else. I am not alone. I can finally touch something, I can finally touch myself.

Who am I and what exactly am I like? Where did my beginning appear, what is my role in the whole? I had never seen even a fragment of my destiny, but here I catch a glimpse of it. It was like a quiet recollection of a sound from a song. This song is floating over the snow following the destiny of my ancestors. Its end is farther on, where my eyes can not see because it is not yet. I listen these sounds woven from the silence intertwisted with the white snow that froze the peaks hard. The subconscious melody covers me with its soothing fervor ignited by the spark of the creation. It is a song of pain and suffering entangled in endless love. This is the song of life and it is neither good nor bad. Bloody tears of grief are showering upon the ground, they are watering it so the soil will be able to produce small pieces of happiness. It is not a song, it is the energy I was searching for. I am not alone. I am surrounded by gray shadows, wraped in black cloaks. They are slowly stretching their hands to my burning forehead. I am also one of them. They are my ancestors, the ghost which I carry in my soul. Here they are. I can feel their gaze. I can see their deep understanding eyes beneath the black veils. I am interacting with generations of suffered souls, I am feeling the taste of blood and bile, of too much suffering – the only way through which we realize happiness. This is enough, I do not want any more, it is not for me, I can not bear this load... But I will, just like my ancestors – they were collapsing in burning flames in order to reincarnate free and white, in order to learn how to fly. They carry their Bulgarian song, one that is sad, powerful and true. My impulse is to follow my ancestors because their melody opens the mind and cures it. Whether good or bad, this song brings the universal harmony of the whole. It touches the soul, detaches it from the physical absurdity and submerges it in the Universe where the soul has its place and meaning.

This is the end of my path but it is not what I thought it would be because I was not...

Epilogue

And there so close to the whole everything I exposed myself. My heart shuddered and the dreamt tears streamed. They were extinguishing the lump of melted lead which I had thought would burn down my chest forever. The emotions were so strong, true and unstoppable. They conquered my mind and unleashed the feelings that were hiding in my confused soul. The tears were pouring over my hot face with their calmness.

I had walked my path but I realized that I can not end it there. The inner world of the character was a piece of my essence but only a small fraction. The light shone upon my being on the other side, just like the sun beams shine only on half of the earth. I felt the memory of the human essence which I had despised so deeply. I saw beauty and eternity, they satisfied my longing and quieted my spirit. My mind was no longer roaming in the deceitful vanity and my own lie. The pain was still there, but I was also ready to admit the feeling of the beautiful universal harmony. This feeling was with me throughout the way but I was confused by my fury and was fleeing from it. Wrapped in my madness I tried to avoid its touch. I was not ready to admit its power. I saw the light like a flash before my eyes, like a soothing caress.

The most beautiful thing in the universe is the universe itself. I was overwhelmed by a speck of its majesty, it made me cry. It was a miracle. A touch that healed my soul. A blow that changed the end of this novel because the path turned out to be completely different.

The hero of this travelogue was not me, maybe just a part of me. This fragment inspired me but I do not believe it, just like the hero did not believe the madness and the beast. I have always trusted and am striving towards harmony which I had not realized. I continue to believe in dreams and bathe in the happiness of the small harmonic particles that occur around me. The life is these fragments that are slowly painting one great and eternal masterpiece. We are so insignificant and small, we can not even see the fragment that we are. The uneventful, the beginning, the eternal whole is around us and within us, we are part of it. I can not see it, I can not realize it but sometimes I feel it, every day it touches me. Like a sun beam percolating through some intertwining branches, like the pigeons fluttering in the high dome... Like the sunrise igniting the heights above the majestic rocks covered in snow – a memory of the fire of creation. You see – we are surrounded by this pretty and quiet harmony, even the madness of the chaos is part of it. We are here wandering over the confusion of pain. But it is the pain that is trying to teach us how to feel and finally realize the touch.

What is our path like, what the end will be, how does the integrity of the picture look like – nobody knows. But I do not have the right to kill even a piece of myself though in a novel. I will let this travelogue like this, I will give it to the quiet breaths of the wind that are turning over its wrote out pages. You have to choose what to look. You have to decide what to touch. I leave you to interpret my paranoia, to refract it thanks to yourself. I experienced it while I was creating it. You will experience it differently, depending on your own self. You will see it differently, you will feel it in a different way. You will go your own, parallel path.

You all should already know and if you were able to feel it, then I am right.

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About the author:

Plamen Chetelyazov was born on November 29, 1982 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. He studied at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia and at the University of Plovdiv. In 2005 he participated in the programs for cultural exchange between Bulgaria and the United States of America and spent the summer in Seaside Heights, NJ. Plamen works as a curator and publicist for the Regional Museum of History, Plovdiv. Before joining the Museum, he was a probationer at Darik Radio, lifestyle journalist at Mylife magazine and an editor at Anonce newspaper. His literary pieces have appeared in the magazines Egoist, Kanape and the Bulgarian edition of Glamour. Plamen is the author of two novels, Imago and Paranoia, the latter being published in Bulgarian by LiterNet in 2007. In 2015 the American publishing house Neverland Publishing released Flaws of Oblivion - an anthology of poetry, prose and photography that showcases the talents of five emerging writers from around the world including Plamen Chetelyazov.

Online:

Official web: http://monkilok.free.bg/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ParanoiaNovel

© Plamen Chetelyazov, author, 2011

Paranoia

Smashwords Edition
