a few lies and one great truth

Smiling, positive, in harmony. Kind, always ready to help. Accepting. In control. A piano poet. This is me. This is me. Swear to God!

If I can't fool anyone else, at least I can fool myself.

I'm browsing the blog of someone I vaguely know, someone from school who went on to collect a fun job, a beautiful family and friends to die for. She always sounds happy. Well, why wouldn't she? I will not read her blog again, I sternly tell myself. Yet every now and then I return to it, obsessively, to read about her latest fun adventure and look at the pictures of grinning kids. People like that should not be allowed to keep a blog. What do you think you know about life, you who always got what you wanted? Have you ever cried a tear in all your sunny days?

I am not jealous. I have my life, my adventures, my friends, things I've seen that nobody else has seen. No, really. Swear to God.

Lie all you want, PianoPoet, even you will start to question yourself at some point. Look at yourself, with your face green with envy. The bitterness that you swore would never touch your heart, slowly eating your intestines.

Found a church a while ago. I go there, sit at the back and avoid all eye contact, probably radiating anger, resentment, bitterness. The wonder of it: it's OK. People see me, leave me alone if that's the way I want it, but still welcome me back with a smile the following Sunday. I don't have to be happy or successful or Christian. I'm OK, as I am.

Maybe God himself sits down there next to me, not saying anything. Just being there.

"...the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God..."

weird and well-known

In a foreign country, and yet everything is familiar. The road signs are weird but I understand what they mean. I stop at a petrol station and easily find the chocolate that I never tried but know will taste good, and grab a newspaper in a strange language where the news are familiar.

I stutter something in the foreign language to the shop assistant but I feel it's not the first time, I have stuttered things in this language years ago.

Later, I sink back in a café chair and sip my coffee black, with a piece of bitter dark chocolate, the way I never drink coffee at home. Yet my body recognises the flavour. I kick off my shoes and feel the heat of the sun radiate from the pavement, like it never really does at home, and look around at a new environment. And it is all so well known that my heart aches from it.

It is a comfort, to be at home anywhere you go. It is also frightening. Have I seen everything there is to see in the world?

I really don't know how to be surprised anymore. Maybe I just don't dare to.

view from a Paris suburb

Paris, France. Paris for me is hot summer's days strolling around the Champs-Elysées and various jardins, chewing on a baguette or a sweet crêpe, with the glorious freedom of being out there in the world with exciting people. Laughing with new friends as the guards of the Louvre scowled at us, daring each other to share our darkest secrets as we were leaving the magic city in a few days and never would see each other again.

I never did see these friends again but I hear the echo of their voices when I finally return to Paris years later. This time I'm colder, more confident, world-weary but not necessarily wiser. I arrive late with my friend and the taxi driver takes us to the wrong hotel. Many euros later we lay down our weary heads in a cheap hotel room. Outside our window is a roof covered in litter and pee and what is probably discarded syringes and I lock the door carefully. All I see of this sparkling city this time is the grey suburbs and the mad Parisian traffic before heading out towards other horizons. Can't wait to leave. Paris, the delights and the laughter of those long-lost friends are locked inside my memories and should stay there. Magic should not be recycled.