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?

I know what this is all about: you're trying to psychoanalyze me, said the statue to the sculptor. You think that, because you've carved my face, you can also solidify my spirit. But my mind is not yours to shape at will; it is not a fixed essence for you to grasp.

I change with every passing day, no body of stone will ever be able to imprison me, and when you lie frozen in sleep, my shadow dances in the boulevards of your dreams. Deep inside, I know, you envy me, for I flirt with immortality in a way you can't even come close to...

When the moon painted its silver path on shimmering seas, she could only beg for silence. On warm summer nights, no one wants to go home. Yet home was where she felt safe. Protected. Where she didn't need to pretend. She'd spend a week exchanging promises with three different men, while secretly dreaming of a fourth one. She'd spent another week in utter solitude, seeking oblivion.

People climb high on the towers of your expectations, then they jump. Sex was an all-purpose currency, used to buy impressions of devotion; it was her ticket to places she wasn't meant to see; the means to prove her love or independence; tension release more intense than tension itself; a sound loud enough to drown the voices in her head; the fuel that fed her withering flame of self-worth.

She said, give me the strength to forsake all shapes of compromise. Sex was pleasure when it wasn't necessary. It wasn't necessary
when she didn't care. She didn't care only when it was pleasure.
She thought, how can we depend on something so vague, fleeting
and indescribable? If it's best when it involves the deepest core of
your mind, why does it feel better when the mind succumbs to
the raw force of the body?

"We work n the dark -we do what we can -we give what we have.
Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is
the madness of art."

Thus spoke Henry James. Quotes like this make you want to shut your mouth and never utter another word, for everything you say will be nothing more than banalities and unnecessary additions to already flawless meanings. Of course, by you I'm only referring to myself, here. If I can be you, why can't you be me?

Don't be so quick to dismiss vanity and the fear of dying as mere weaknesses, unacceptable obstacles on your path to Perfection. From these particularly human traits spring too many of this world's wonders- monuments, texts, paintings, the melodies you unconsciously hum when you feel small and scared and lonely...

How does love enter the equation? 'Tis our love for life that makes the thought of death abhorring; 'tis our love for our own bodies behind our fruitless attempts to defy mortality; 'tis the absence of love that pushes us higher, further onto its pursuit. We yearn to be loved so that our deaths won't be without witnesses. We become vain because we believe we are worthy of love.

How much more can I say without losing you? If only I could think of something you've never heard before, a phrase that would brand itself on your mind so you'd never be able to forget me. An exercise in vanity reinforced by the fear of dying.

See, these days I don't even have time for philosophizing. My scribblings are little more than unsuccessful experiments in tension release, rivers of emotions flowing unstoppable and beyond my control; they built up whilst I was struggling to focus on reality's choirs and now are threatening to overturn me.

What will you answer me? You're casually drifting away, teaching me what it feels like to be left behind. I used to not care; then I changed my mind, but couldn't bring myself to tell you. Don't you know it frightens me when you read between the lines?

If I let go, will you let go, too?

Her heart was like a blank cheque, offered to the least approachable by-passer under some hardly convincing excuse. Again and again she took that terrifyingly familiar path, seeking to be discovered, yet striving to remain forever lost, inventing new ways to make the same mistakes, though infinitely tired of repetition.

And when the days grew shorter, the moon would always find her alone on an autumn beach, carving expressions of aggression on impersonal masks, adding footnotes of indifference to manuscripts
of abandonment, wondering which deep-rooted need was pushing
her towards a life she never wished to live, before letting the waves wash it all away…

As time's embrace tightens, our dreams run out of oxygen.