A year has passed. I'd probably have forgotten you long ago, if only nostalgia hadn't borrowed your name; it now wears your face like a mask; it speaks with your voice; it has learned to transform your absence into a memory of your presence.

Dear Ghost, your alibis were never worth a damn. You're either lying to me or to yourself- and I can’t tell which one is preferable. Though I've painted a perfect picture of you, deep inside I suspect you're just as human as the rest of us. Still, I'd give up the world for a chance to explore your flaws like undiscovered continents.
Does that frighten you?

Such confessions are not really my style; this one is so openly cryptic it hardly makes a difference. Sometimes I sit and wonder, why can't you be here, why don’t you even wish you were here, what have I done to deserve being stuck in an unrealizable ideal…then I remember you are exactly where you should remain: in my head.

From William Burroughs' Naked Lunch:
"The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms...Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus."

And later on:
"You see control can never be a means to any practical end...It can never be a means to anything but more control...Like junk..."

Once upon a time, there was a woman who fell in love with a tree. Unable to express her emotions, she just stood and stared at her object of affection from dawn to dusk. Hours gave way to days, sunrises gave way to sunsets, until her body dried and hardened, her feet spread roots into the ground, her opened arms stretched outwards and upwards, her hair turned from blond to green, the thin lines in her face took permanent form, and only the frozen tears in her deepened eyes spoke of sorrow and longing and the ephemeral tragedies of once-live, fervent human mortality....

If I became a tree for you, would you give me another chance?

The heat. It's taking control. Standing at the bus stop, I expect to begin evaporating any minute. I drag myself to work, but only physically. The rest of me is simply counting days till I'm out here.

“You should keep your phone with you, whilst you're away” they told me at work. I mumbled a hesitant “yes”, which in fact meant “Sure, I'll take my phone with me, I might even be as kind as to bring a charger, yet I might face considerable difficulty in finding a eh.... plug. They don't normally provide them, not even on five-star beaches. Therefore, I'd suggest you employ other means of communication- a message in a bottle, perhaps? Just don't be surprised if my reply is somehow incomprehensible. I intend to be positively spaced out most of the time.”

We're a lost generation, us 20somethings, constantly fantasizing of the Big Escape. So lost, I don't even see people our age any more. The ones I meet are either over 30 or still at school. But it is summer now, and our herds of beloved students have began to make their way home- mostly back from England, where their hearts lie (together with their parent's money and part of their sizzling brain cells).

You can always tell newcomers from the colour of their skin. Those just-arrived are pale and keep complaining about the heat. The bright red ones, enthusiastically stumbling on you whilst you're trying to cross the street, are tourists. As for Athenians, they comprise an exhibition of all the possible shades of brown, from dark beige to mild types of skin cancer.

Actually, it is an urban legend that men no longer obsess with the size of their penises; instead, they focus on comparing the intensity of their tans. On weekends, they spend hours stuck in their cars- cheap and expensive ones side by side, since traffic, like death, makes everyone equal- only to secure the tiniest place on the crowded seaside, where they sit sporting nothing but their branded swim wear and designer sunglasses, until their skin melts into the sand and they need to be carried away on stretchers.

Sadly, superficial colour changes do not facilitate the necessary alterations inside their heads...

A simple chemical reaction suffices to turn tears into a smile- it only takes years of practice to perfect the transition. He said, I fear that you are soulless and incapable of love. She smiled- she could have cried, but hers was an old habit. He took her silence as a confirmation of his words. She took his words as a confirmation of the premonition underlying her silence.

Their roads parted one ordinary summer evening. So long for drunken confessions, midnight walks and far-fetched travel plans. When did people become replaceable, she wondered. Perhaps disappointment was an inherent part of human relationships. Or maybe she'd just got it all wrong again. Goodbyes not spoken hurt the most.

“We love life not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving”, spoke Nietzsche. I suspect we're not even used to loving. No, we're merely accustomed to deep words and heavy promises; to pretending we're oh-so-passionate and prone to infatuation; to faking wounds we then blame on others.

When, in truth, all we want is to be noticed, appreciated, admired; when all the real emotion we ever experience- whether adoration or hate- is for our own, frustratingly indistinguishable selves.

Accept it: there isn't- there never was- anything grand or meaningful about life. To go on, we need to invent meanings, justifications, theories. You've heard this one before, and it's got nothing to do with pessimism. Pessimism only exists in relation to optimism, which is to say, they're both just ways of seeing the world, your choice of coloured lenses. None is closer to the truth, if such a thing exists.

What if it doesn't? Do we create reality by imagining it? What happens when our fantasies clash? You paint the world green, I paint it red, till someone comes along and covers it with graffiti. How much re-designing can it take before collapsing? Will we ever run out of paint or, even worse, ideas? And what happens if you're colourblind- do you remain forever trapped in a black and white universe?