He hung up the phone and put on his glasses. K´s voice was still resounding in his asleep brain. Where did all that come from? He left the room and dragged himself to the living room. He put the needle on the B side. Joe Strummer started yelling about opportunities. “If they didn’t have a way out back in ’77, imagine now” he pondered over.
It was going to be another tough day.
He couldn’t even remember the last time he saw her. He reflected on how memories are such a volatile thing. There were days when he could remember every sentence of a conversation. Each scent he could feel in those summers. That would normally happen when he was doing some other things and he couldn’t think about it. However, when he wanted to remember images, when he forced them, he could only find blurry sketches. Images, sounds and scents he couldn’t manage. That made him nervous. Now he could visualize many moments. However, they were false images, sounds and scents. They were just blurry memories. Very good memories. Too distant. It was as if he would put his current self, his current mind, and place it in those circumstances. In that space-time. That confused him.
That evening poetry reading was going to be tough.
K was a poet. “She had always been” she used to tell him. She walked as if she were. A sort of Neal Cassady wannabee in the doldrums. Or a sort of Kerouac who had parked his car and had quit partying. The kind of person who brags while describing Kafka’s narrative and then writes like Gabriel García Marquez. That attitude had served her for some time but it was no good anymore.
“Back in the garage with my bullshit detector…”
He took the poetry reading leaflet. It had been around the house for a while but he had not even read it. ‘Seven love and hate poems’ by K. Published by the E.P.A. (Existentialist Poets Association). Gosh, he thought. Now he remembered that K had explained to him about the kickstarter and how they had funded a project to publish poetry. Didn’t they think that there must be a reason as to why no one wanted to publish anything by them? Did they really think the world needed another volume as this one? There was a fragment of a poem in the leaflet:
”Like all those things
that are
too important
to be hidden.
To cross
looking
backwards.
[What really matters is what cannot be seen.]
Going back
to understand.
Seeing
everything
you do not say.
[Believing.]”
It really was going to be another tough day.