11.9.18

(Not my hollyhocks, no, I can´t send you any seeds, sorry!)



I dream of just being about to board a train to Paris-Brest, I don´t in the end, it doesn´t stop at the station, the breaks don´t work or something like that, which makes sense since it is looking quite ramshackle, being built of ancient window panes, kind of like a home made hot bed. The hole dream story changes and suddenly I am a teenager and have blonde curls. The next morning, still sleepy,  I look up Paris-Brest on my phone and find out I was actually about to travel to a cake. A ring-shaped choux pastry concoction filled with hazelnut buttercream, something I´m pretty sure I would not even like.



I pick a few flowers from the garden, a thing I rarely do these days - it feels either too much or like I am depriving the bees of a meal. It is a quite intoxicatingly smelling bunch, pink phlox and old man´s beard, faded St. John´s wort is in there, too, which doesn´t really smell but I try to ease my pain by looking at it very hard - this is a rather homeopathic practice I invented myself. It doesn´t help at all so far. Stuffing stems into vases always happens on the steps leading up to my front door and this time I leave it there while collecting seeds from a redvein dock plant beneath the stairs, when a gust of wind blows it off the banister. It misses my head, splatters all over my thighs and bursts on the ground. The vase was one of a pair of hyacinth vases, my favorite, a dark green one. A couple of hours later I get caught up in a heavy rain storm, getting completely drenched despite all the rain gear I am wearing. After a bit of blow drying, we start tidying the workshop, a thing we almost never do, it looks awful afterwards, but W enjoys it so much. When I come home, I am so tired. Too tired to do anything, sickly tired. When this happens I am often so disappointed with myself, but then I get it. I am radiating with pain, pulsing with it. Pain is my rhythm.

I have started making this odd "Mhm." sound with tiny tasks, like getting on a bike, putting something in my backpack, washing my hands and such. To me it feels like I finally went crazy now, a thing I had been waiting for to happen any minute. It is almost a relief, but I really have to cut it out. 

An other new thing I am doing is stepping outside in the late afternoon or evening, hiding behind the house where no neighbors can see me and practise a bit of "wildly creative moving". Two huge spruce trees and a lot of wilderness, plus buckets full of debris, falling apart sheds and fire wood block almost everything out, but sometimes I get a few sunspots. I don´t want to make fun or too light of myself or talk down what I am doing there, so I am telling you instead that I am actually a very expressive morisco dancer. I almost look like paintings on greek vases.



The night before I am having a STORY published on a website that is not my blog, I feel like I am  loosing my mind because of loneliness. I got quite encouraging feedback from the editors that should have had me gleeing with joy, but, no. I check Youtube if there is a song called "I´m so lonesome I could die". There isn´t, it is "cry" not "die" and it doesn´t do it for me, too many birds probably. So I cry to Johnny Cash´s "I see a darkness" instead, because "well, you know I have a love, A love for everyone I know, And you know I have a drive, To live, I won´t let go, But can you see this opposition, Comes rising up sometimes?" Well, yeah, "And then I see a darkness". Crying only takes the 3:43 minutes the song lasts and my cat couldn´t care less, cleaning herself furiously next to me, sitting on a crumpled Zeit Magazin (the one with the lead article on veganism - Werbung, da Namensnennung), completely drugged out by catnip. When the song is over, my darkness is gone, sometimes I am easy that way. A neighbor calls, wanting to go for some ice cream. I ask her if we could do so the next day, that way she could also rescue me from a Tinder date, if need be.

As you can tell, I am socializing as much as I can, I go to any event where it is socially acceptable to show up alone. By now I recognize all the others that are doing the same, some numbing the embarrassment by being drunk, some of them plain crazy and I am fully aware that I am one of those lonely freaks and yes, I fit in just perfectly. By now I am completely shameless, I can´t bear it any longer, so I ask everyone crossing my path if we could maybe hang out sometime. For fuck´s sake, I am even doing Tinder. Well, no, not literally for fuck´s sake, but still. I hear this is needy and disgusting behaviour, so I will probably be known as the woman with the frown and the "aggressive jewellery" (thank you NANETTE - Werbung, da Namensnennung), who wanted to be friends so badly, because the ones she had moved to FUCKING BABYLAND. The one who started to harass everyone she knew to come to her BOOK CLUBS and asked out cute boys so way out of her league to go to the movies, even though she can´t even sit properly on those movie theater seats, her back is that broken. Her teeth are chattering with hunger and fatigue, because she just had lost 10 pounds since the pain made her stop eating.  Yes, yes, yes, even being thin did not make her less lonely. And now, now she is even getting old, poor thing. And no, she doesn´t do the sensible thing and keep all of this to herself, she is bothering everyone with it - it is highly annoying. Her sister dreads talking to her on the phone now, fearing her "condition" might indeed be an infectious one.


Following all that self help advice for lonely people, putting yourself out there, does not always help. Most times it just makes it harder, because you see what you don´t have every single fucking time and then you go home. You just go home. That´s all. Sometimes staying home would be the gentler option, not sharpening the pain some more. Also: Tinder - not a solution, it´s rather pretty disgusting all in all. That date I went on was really bad, apparently he didn´t think so, apparently I am that good at lying. Getting ice cream later on with my neighbor was a delight however and of course I told her all about the guy - un-single people enjoy those stories so much. Going home alone also felt really great that day, excellent really.


Es regnet und alle reißen schnell die Fenster auf bevor es wieder heiß wird. Die Nachbarin telefoniert, sie geht morgen nicht zum Sport, es sind Ferien. Ich seh ein Fahrschulmotorad, das bei jedem geparkten Auto links und dann rechts blinkt. Ein Narrischer hat seiner Hortensie alle Blüten abgeschnitten und auf den Grünabfall geschmissen. Wahrscheinlich hat er sie greislich gefunden.

Meine Schwester hat ein Lied für ihre Kindertanzgruppe gedichtet, darüber dass der Sommer jetzt geht. Das hat ihr so Spaß gemacht, sie ist direkt traurig, dass sie jetzt mit dem Unterricht da aufhört. Ihr könnt sie ja vielleicht anrufen, dann singt sie es euch vor. Sie hat auch noch eins über den Herbst vorbereitet.