It’s been awhile since I’ve updated my blog. Writing just hasn’t really been happening lately even though the stories should be creeping out of my toes given that I have this whole new city to explore and experience. So, in an effort to jump start this dying habit again, here’s a collection of snippets, small thoughts that never made it into 500 to 1000 word stories, hopefully to be followed by some brand new writing soon.

March 25, 2022
I haven’t been sleeping
I haven’t been sleeping lately, not really, not the kind of sleep that allows a person to wake up rested the next day. Instead, I’ve been tossing and turning. Sleep has been nothing but a thin see-through veil leaving my consciousness exposed at night, providing no shelter from the harsh elements of reality. Dreams haven’t really been dreams lately, but rather hallucinations projected onto consciously knowing that I’m lying in my bed, only a flimsy layer that is added to the image of me frantically struggling with my bedsheets. Instead of fantastical illogical alternate realities, my dreams have been like visions. The only one I can recall from the many I had this morning is slicing open my upper left leg with a pizza knife, it didn’t hurt, it wasn’t emotional. It was scientific, cutting deeply to the bone, precisely, just to see what I could find. Skin. Fat. Muscle. Bone. Other visions are more realistic, more mundane, they are all set in my bedroom, because apparently that is as far as my thinly shaped dreams allow me to travel at night. I wake up feeling defeated. Depleted. Empty. Alone. With the strongest desire to simply dissolve in my bedsheets.

May 18, 2022
A small beacon
I want a house that is located on the face of hill or on the edge of a small river. Not for the aesthetics of hills or rivers, but just so that it can be seen from the road on the other side of either the valley or the water. A house that is lit, not prominently the way villas are lit with large spotlights on the ground. My house just happens to be lit because an ordinary streetlight just happens to be located in front of it. I want my house to be a house that inconspicuously stands out. Not to most people, but it will stand out to me when I drive home, I’ll be able to see that little house on the face of the hill or across the river. My ordinary house, a small beacon, waiting for me to finish the drive across the valley or over the bridge, ready to welcome me home.


July 2, 2022
Maria
I spent the last few days in Maria’s Airbnb in Lagos. I needed to get out of the city for a bit. Lagos is calm, Maria’s house is colourful and welcoming. Maybe it isn’t calm that I needed, but a bit of motherly presence and Maria and her homely home gave me just that. She’s very caring, her dog is named India, India is a rescue. The family that originally brought her to the shelter called her Popeye, this is the anecdote Maria uses to tell people that the dog was neglected, because people who truly care for their dogs would not give a female dog a boy’s names.


November 29, 2022
I’m being a bitch
I’m being a bitch. I’ve pulled myself out of depressive nothingness and started this week with new motivation, getting myself out of bed and back at uni. Which is good, very good. Less good is the way I treat the people around me. I’m being a bitch. Mostly I’m just not engaging with them, I hardly greet them in the mornings and during the day I try to drown them out with music. As frustration builds and not engaging no longer feels like an option, I snap. I lash out at idiots in the elevator, and under the guise of jokes, I’m hurtful to my friends. I can’t stand them right know. I just can’t. I resent them for not being more entertaining, as though they simply exist for my amusement, as if they’re all extras in the narcissistic grant production that is my life. I want to punish them for not doing their job properly, for not living exciting adventures that translate well into 10 minute stories.

January 21, 2023
The second time around
Last Friday I threw a small party, a gathering of various friends. Friends I used to study physics with, friends I currently study with, friends with whom I listen to music, friends that I hit the skate park with, friends that I discuss books with, and friends that are just from around. Friends from Eindhoven. I threw the exact same party a year ago. I even recycled the invite, crossed out Lisbon and wrote down Barcelona instead. The exact same party with the exact same friends, give or take a few happy additions. For all the reasons this party was exactly the same as last year’s, it hit completely different this time around. I remember looking around my living room a year ago, fuelled with a deep appreciation for the people I had gathered around me and a disquiet feeling of how my six-month absence was going to affect these relationships. Appreciative as I still am, last Friday I looked around the room confidently. Because all the reasons, for which this party was exactly the same as last year’s, are the prove that these people will be there for me still when I come back again.

February 26, 2023
The metro
I like the metro. Having lived most of my adult life in Eindhoven, sitting in a metro is an activity associated with vacation, with city trips. Although every metro ride might take me a little closer to level of miserable normalcy that most commuters around me seem to feel, there’s still few things I really enjoy about it.
I like it when the trains on both platforms happen to arrive at the same time, so none of the people waiting at that point have to continue waiting looking at an empty platform on the other side of the tracks. I like how easily tricked our heads are when you get vertigo by walking on the platform past a train that is slowly pulling up. I like going into the metro around the time the sun sets, because disappearing underground for a ten minute metro ride in one place, to pop up somewhere else when it’s dark makes it seem like you’re not only traveling through space, but time as well.