By Our Selves

There is a picture on my desktop of a woman sitting on a chair, she is wearing trousers, smoking a cigarette. She is wearing no blouse. Her small breasts are free of restraint and she wears them proudly.

Another picture I have is of a grown man sucking on a woman's nipple.

I look at these images and wonder how many of us, female humans, are proud of our breasts. Their shape, size, girth, how they droop or perk, how they feel when we touch them, how aroused we feel at their sight.

I wonder how many of us would walk around our very own houses without a top on, and feel it to be natural.

Me, I would love to be naked all the time. I'd love to wear clothes only when leaving the house, and with no underwear at that. I'd love to come home to my partner, leave my outer outfit on the chair and continue my day wearing only my skin. I'd love to feel his skin against mine, all of it, whenever we hug.

What an excentric world, this one, where we hide from our very selves.

Winter is Coming

“Winter is coming” my father says.

These words always bring a painful strain in my stomach.

These words mean that good times are over and bad times are coming.

They mean that from now on there will be scarcity and want, there will be pain and I will require patience and self restraint.

My father means that this is only one winter of many, that he has seen more than I have, and that I must learn from this one and from all that come after so that I can be strong.

These words mean that there will be less sun and less warmth and less enthusiasm, less food and less entertainment.

These words mean that a test on my character is coming, and what makes my stomach ache is being aware of it.

I prefer not to be aware, but it is impossible. If my father hadn’t spoken the words, someone else would have, to the same effect.


I guess I’ll move to the tropic.


D.

Girl Talk

‘That’s what it’s like, girl’ said a mother to her child.

‘You don’t need much help in looking beautiful until you turn forty or so. Don’t waste your time striving for it, you already have it. After that, age with grace. Us women have the privilege or curse of living physical decadence very closely, more than men who don’t lose shape over pregnancies and don’t really need good shape in order to reproduce.’

‘While you have beauty’ she continued, ‘strive to gain things you don’t have: skills. If you go the other way around you’ll be wasting time. You’d be looking for things you already have, and then things you can no longer get.’


D.

Kudos

People build up too many expectations around life.

It’s made of, what? Eight decades, tops? Then everybody gets all worked up about what you are going to do with it… I really don’t get it.

If I were to plan a great deed I’d need the first two decades to figure myself out, then another two to study everything that has been done in the past and what improvements I can make, how to be original and not just do something that someone else did exactly like me a couple of thousand years early. There goes four decades down the drain, only in preparation, you got half in front of you.

But then, that half has been possibly damaged by environmental factors, so you’ll lose between five to ten years to cigarettes, drugs, alcohol and stress. Which brings me again to the next half: generally, we fall in love. There goes four decades for you, between falling in love with your spouse and falling in love with your grandchildren.

Just a simple little life, that’s what you get in the end, no big plans, ‘cuz you didn't have time to see them through, that’s for the highly lucky, exceptionally talented or extremely well positioned people.

To you and me, kudos, we get life.

D.

The Powerful Will

By D. Salazar

I read online that feeling suicidal comes from the existing relation between pain and the ability to cope with pain. If you put both in a scale, and the amount of pain surpasses the ability to cope with it, your system may shut down, causing a suicide.

Suicides start in your head.

I’m not suicidal, I’m merely dramatic and unemployed.

Nevertheless, when thoughts of emptiness and visual representations of drastic suicidal techniques appear in my head –generally while I’m getting myself from one place to another- I do tend to desire a shut down. It may be in the form of sleep or a very long vacation. It may not be death but it does require a solitude that comes close to it. Social death, complete disappearance… and then I picture myself requesting it to someone, “at least for a while, may I please? It’s only a short death!”

A number of images cross my head, Orhan Pamuk’s The New Life, Hermes, Hermetics, Morality, the Network, Catholicism, life after death, Eternity; then they transform into a blurry headache and a stomach ache.

When thoughts turn into aching, you are clearly worrying too much.

The truth is that you are going to die. You don’t realize it yet, because you’ve never been in a position to do so. Since you will inevitably die, you may do one of several things: i) despair, ii) have fun, iii) do something useful for humanity, iv) devote to children, v) search glory, vi) play golf…

There are two things that one must understand, first, that whatever you choose is fine as long as it’s fine with you, and second, that no one said you have to choose now.

I feel like I’ve been choosing what I have to do with my life since the age I could walk, but my decisions change rapidly, so I can’t really cling on to any of them. I’ve grown used to not caring about them and only go with the flow.

When I feel suicidal, I generally feel I’ve lost my flow.

My ability to cope with pain has leveled. I feel that, to increase it, I must find a purpose, it’s the one thing that seems logical, but not make it “save the world” or “cure cancer” or “devoid the world from all demons”, no, something for mortals. I thought that maybe I could just make something beautiful.

I thought about all this during a bus trip. I focused on the image of beauty, pure beauty. The image that each of us finds in unique.

I pictured that something beautiful had to begin with a falling spiral.

The image may be different now, but it is still perfect.

This little mental token started to clear away some of the clammy headache I was feeling. Now I could concern my head with more practical things than Hermetics and Morality. I wanted to find a way to bring it to life, to make it exist in the physical world.

So, humbly, wrote this article.

(It works)