Sunday, February 28, 2010

Coming Back

When I got off the bus from Budapest to Vienna today, the air was scented with early spring hope, just like it had been in Budapest this morning. Returning to this “real world” of mine after a month of being away to different places feels rather like coming back from spending half a year in a string of different alternative universes.

On this last bus trip of holiday-February, I finally finished Richard Powers’ The Time of our Singing, certainly one of the most moving and inspiring books I’ve read so far. Finishing the last chapters of this book’s fantastical journey as well as events from the last weeks put me into an emotional state that I can not put into words. A blend of feeling enriched, drained, grown, broken, sad and tranquil.

Having arrived back from England last night and then travelled back to Vienna today, university life and all it incorporates will start again tomorrow. With a chance of it being one last time. Though making statements like that usually results in something going wrong.

I have pictures and stories to tell of times in Budapest, in Tyrolia (Austria, Mountains) and in England. These will come soon. Now I need to unpack my pack back, wash my laundry, revive my flat. And among the top priorities: rejoice with the piano.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

a bird

(written for the blog on 19.09.2008 and so far not published)

this is fiction

outside, the leaves of an apple tree jiggle in the wind, like hot air rising up from the grass and distorting the vision. i sit in the kitchen and rest my head on the back of my chair, tilting it to one side and watching the light outside. sunshine.

as i sit, and think and move and my cup on the table steams lightly, aimless thoughts circle my head. the music is playing in the living room, but i stay in the kitchen and watch the world outside. for this moment, nothing seems pressing. no agenda to attend, nothing to prepare and nothing to remember and do. the simple act of sitting and watching, in this very moment, how it should last.

in my dream, i recall, there were walls covered with plants. overgrown with grass and fern, some trees even. everything sprouting just there, vertically, suspended. and i remember running my fingers along the leaves, wet with moisture.

yesterday, after she left, i noticed a big bird outside, right where we had been sitting. black and stout it seemed to linger and, turning its head from one side to the other, search for the last bits of our conversation still hanging in the air, hovering a little longer. as i watched that bird, it seemed the strangest creature to me. how infinitely different not merely in appearance, but as a whole, as a living entity. me, enclosed in my world, and the bird somewhere else, somewhere neither i could go nor it could leave.
soon after that, it flew away over the trees, over the houses, to some other place in some other world, where it might meet more of its kind, or be alone and move its head and taste the remnants of a human conversation.