Difficult to like weakness

They are sitting at a table next to him. The man, in his thirties, well kept, wealthy. He has positioned his hands so that his watch is clearly visible and he glances quickly at it every now and then. She is roughly the same age, her face eager to hear what he is explaining.

He is going back on promises, some bigger, some smaller. She doesn’t distinguish, the damage is the same. She doesn’t say anything. He asks her if she's ok and she nods. Sitting within an arm's reach of the couple, Nils tries not to stare. Nils would like to hit that weak, self-absorbed man if it were only any of his business and not so humiliating to the woman. She seems fragile enough as it is. The woman is far from all right, anyone can see that. He’s just broken her and now he wants to hear there is no problem. Everything is fine. She tells him so.

He gets up to go to the bathroom. She starts to cry quietly. She doesn’t bother to hide her face. When he comes back he looks almost cheerful, in his view she's taking it well, there doesn’t seem to be a scene. He’s managed to sit down, take a sip of his drink and adjust his sleeve so that it doesn’t cover the beautiful watch before he notices that she's crying.

He’s annoyed. For chrissake stop, not here. Where then? Nils, throwing sideway glances, asks himself. Where can she do this if not here in front of him? He doesn’t console her and she is left isolated on that side of the table. She knows he doesn’t love her like she loves him.

Nils tries not to look, although he is sat at the table next to the couple - it is vulgar, this deceitful social dance. The handsome young man says he is sorry. He’s lying. He says he doesn’t want to do this. He’s lying. She cries. He says he loves her and this is true. His love is the puny, thrifty kind that takes care of himself absolutely before his lover. Nothing warm or great or protective about his love. For the woman who is hte object of his love it offers no shelter, this much is obvious even to her. She looks tired and asks him why doesn’t he just stop loving her and leave her so that she could get over it. She says his love does not mean that he would think for a moment not to hurt her. She says: "Please leave me alone."

He says nothing. At least he isn't lying. It is obvious to all in the restaurant that she doesn’t mean what she asked from him. But he doesn’t know what then, what does she mean, what would be good for her? The candles are lit on the tables, it is a warm night outside. The love affair has turned into an account book of who hurt whom more, and now they are both tired.
Nils gets up from the observers' table and leaves the bar. She is still crying silently, he is lying about his reasons. When he leaves he wants to think about something else. He thinks about cotton, about the sea, about good friends. It doesn’t really chase away that feeling of disappointment. He has just witnessed a betrayal, the kind that happens most often. The 'you don’t mind, do you' kind. The deliberate closing of eyes when after your eyes are shut from the pain of another there is no one there to see any sign of suffering because no one else is as close. No one else is obliged to look. No one else has the duty to note the woman's heartache. He has made her invisible.

Nils hates the nauseating feeling he has, the fear that he might not be so different from the Judas he was watching back there.

Why the Earth keeps turning

A young man with an evasive expression approached me asking for some change. He seemed young enough, and, although tanned, clearly of privileged European descent, not an illegal immigrant, not hiding in the country unable to work, not undergroung after a declined asylum application. I smiled meekly and moved away, shaking my head slightly as a negative to his request. He said "Your should give me something for my trouble. For a very long time I made sure the Earth kept moving, day and night followed each other and the rhythm of time as you know it remained uninterrupted." I was unsure what to say but I was waiting for the traffic lights to change and was circumstantially and momentarily stuck where I was and thus perfectly able to hear him. "I was made to pay for a small miscalculation", he said, "someone else would have just let it all stop." "Let me get this right", I said, "you made the Eart move?" "No, I was ordered to maintain the Earth's movement around its orbit as a consequence of a minor indiscretion." "So the Earth was moving before you moved it?" "Quite. But the responsibility of maintaining the motion was transferred to me - look, the Earth has always moved, and it has always been a divine responsibility to keep the ball rolling if you catch my drift. I make a bad move, you know, wrong place, wrong time, next thing I know I have to take on the role, tread the surface like a circus ball to keep on top, to keep things moving. So I do, and let me tell you, that's one job you don't get a break from. You can't even sleep. So all I want now is to find the next gin palace and drink myself to oblivion. So you got some change?" The light had turned to green so I moved on. I didn't have any change to give him, and anyway: Who is doing it now if he's free? Anyway, below the his rant about what it was like during the episode. Go figure.

--Compared to the fat dum-dum Atlas I am tall, sexy and smart. That is why I cannot believe he got the hype and I am not even a footnote in some anthology. After all, I walk the earth endlessly to keep it from stopping and all life coming to an end.
You might ask how I ended up with this task, this never-ending piddle-paddling, treading the ball like some ridiculous circus creature but to no applause or treats or bright lights. I lost a bar fight, I am sorry to say, not a battle at war, nothing grand, nothing honourable. I will not delve into the details of how it all started, suffice it to say that it was a mistake, and aroused the anger of the big Z as well as her boyfriend at the time –or one of them, so far as I know – and I wish I had not, although she was a real little lamb, sweet plum-mouthed Hebe with long lashes and the self-knowledge of a woman far beyond her years.
The way that things turned out was that I was ordained by a great and quite a pissed off divinity to perpetuate the energy unleashed by the initial grand cosmic push to help the earth spin around its orbit. I do not fully understand the rationale or the physics. Were I to be killed by another deity, or by Zeus himself, as could happen were he blind drunk, would all life come to an end, or is it something that they say to convince the world (mortal and immortal) that no help should be forthcoming despite my pleas. My queries are, naturally, hypothetical in nature, as I have no control over my fate, actions or future. I can’t stop; and I cannot be stopped. Thank you, Zeus, for this gift that just keeps on giving. As slight consolation, after I had prayed for a long time to be graced with somnambulism, my request was granted, otherwise I would never be able to get any rest. So I walk along, the reason for the seasons and the unsung hero of the mortal world. I would be grateful if my accomplishments and my burden were recorded in some way, even as a myth, even if it were then thought to be a pack of lies. I would like a fleeting thought, at least. It gets so lonely on the move.--

Somewhere to begin

To write about your own life is tantamount to a simulated out-of-body experience, attempt to be objective about something that is clearly far beyond objectivity. or a diary, verbalised emotion that is really not of much interest to anyone but the person who wrote it, and even to the writer, a likely liability some time in the future.
There is, nevertheless, something attractive about writing to the unknown, immaterial eyes, to talk through print in most part talking to yourself, as if walking nude in front of an open window - if you look up and want to see, you can. I don't care. So there we go, I shall write what I like and the abyss of internet may read it at will.
Today then, at the end of another day filled with aimless browsing, looking at things I cannot afford (flat, car, more space, trip to india) I can at least write down what i remember of Leif, and not waste the entire waking time of this god's day of 18th of July.
I knew Leif when I was quite little, we played together in the gang of kids from the estate around, six blocks set around a small hill. The hill seemed very steep when I was six. I recently went back and it has shrunk. Otherwise the estate has not changed much, which is unsurprising. For drastic change to occur, some mesure of hope and ambition is almost invariably involved. The estae where I spent my childhood does not cultivate either, and anyone with sufficient ambition moves away rather as soon as possible. Leif, though. Leif is a gypsy, full-blooded and dark, like many of the other gypsy boys we played with. There were fewer gypsy girls out, I only remember the older ones, teenagers with glossy black hair and the uniform of a young and unmarried gypsy female, ruffled white blouse and simple black skirt. When the girls grew up to be women and married, they acquired the right to wear grown woman's clothes: The heavy black velvet skirts with the petticoats, the clourful silk and chiffon blouses and the heavy gold jewellery. Gypsies are unnervingly beautiful folk, when exhibiting traces of the original Roma culture. I know we are meant to call them Roma people now but I have never thought of the word gypsy as derogatory, and the proud and quick-witted and inexcusably attractive people I knew from my childhood never demonstrated the kind of shame or wiliness that you see in the begging, slippery Romanian gypsies and that bred the connotation. I feel bad for the Romanians, persecuted and reviled and deprived of their traditional occupations, horses and music that supports their nomadism so well. It is clear to anyone who cares to see that begging is awful, a living, granted, but awful. But it is hard to be a nomad and reject what is on offer by our liberal culture without ending up lie a reject yourself.
Leif was not a particularly quick-witted or a romantic figure, quite the contrary, I remember him as quite sweet-natured but thick-featured, slightly chubby or at least heavy-set and slow on the intake. His colouring was all hues of brown, hot cocoa skin, chocolatey hair, black peppercorn eyes. He was inseparable from his older brother and protector, and therefore not ostracised from our playground elite. His brother was very clever indeed, with a frightful temper and bony and accurate fists. Years later, I heard that Leif was running the horse-betting business in a nearby small town.
A mutual childhood friend who had stayed back much after I had moved further and further away told me that there had been a fight between Leif and some gypsies from Sweden who we unhappy about losing, and that Leif's face had been badly cut up in the fight. This did not, however, dim his chances with the ladies as it seemed that the fight had cemented Leif's previously fledgling reputation as a macho fighter - something that the good-looking, haughty gypsy girls were keen on, given their own abilities to fight like a Congolese guerrilla when provoked. Leif, who had never enjoyed much success with girls who are big on the sexy dangerous dark men even if they end up in prison, piss off never to be heard from again, leaving the girls - now women, of course - and their children behind without a second thought, or die early in a fight or an accident.
I saw him once from across the street when I was visiting my old home town. He was walking with a modern-day Cleopatra who was whisking his arm away- they looked like they were fighting - and he was talking to her with a low voice (at least I could not hear it on my side of the street), lost patience and slapped her. The girl slapped Leif back, following which he slapped her again, she kicked the ground and stormed off. Leif let her walk in front of him and touched his face unconsciously where she had slapped him. A few feet on, she stopped, pointed at something on a patisserie window and waited for him. He went inside and re-emerged a few minutes later with a small box which he handed over to the girl. She did not smile or say thank you, turned on her heels and carried on walking. A few seconds later she turned a little and slowed down a little, allowing him to catch up. They looked happy, and seemed both to understand what was required of each. I was glad that, unlike his brother, he was not chasing after a white woman, he could be with someone who also spoke Roma and got it, got everything, what life was like for him. Give or take a few slaps, they painted an idyllic picture.