“First”


The first day of this particular month, for most of history up until now, stands out from the rest with its pushy display of rot, which probably can only be avoided by not sticking one’s frail head out of one’s own equally musty, dark burrow that day. Looking through the lens of the vastness of the universe at humanity’s timeline, a modest fraction of it was enough for us - after a prior act of truly laborious momentum - to develop a defense mechanism against (a merely visual) surrender to the process of decay preceded by an apathetic stance; a holiday was woven around this, although looking at the characteristics, the form in comparison to the fervor of the participants has definitely more in common with the fetishization of key parts.

On the day being the subject of the above discourse, in the morning, a popular science paper was being adored by me. This issue, from what I remember, revolved around the famous Cartesian quote about thinking, which doesn’t have much to do with my father; he was the one who handed me the discussed copy, with a cover crumpled in a downright outrageous manner, considering the fact that it had been bought by him the day before. Father justified this gift by noting in me an increased interest in philosophical matters, which he concluded based on the presence of a five on my language report card. This time his memory didn’t fail him. He knew it was the result of the latest essay on [...]. But here the effectiveness of his mind hits a wall, because he no longer remembered that for some time now my school had started using percentage grades. Maybe he doesn’t think, but he… is. In these times, that is, in this century, that’s becoming less and less common.

My reading, of course, was interrupted by its previous instigator, when he announced (though it had more to do with an order), that we have to visit mom. The paper, thrown down reluctantly, landed with a one-time flash of masterful precision in an open memory box pulled out from under the bed, which just as well could not have happened, because the only witness would have been the phenomenon itself, if it had a mind. Getting ready to leave was extremely hard due to the hopeless greyness outside, but you only have one mother, so it all couldn’t take too much time. It could even not take any time at all.

The most reasonable thing was to head to that housing estate in the late afternoon, to avoid the crowds. At this hour the Sun is already long stitched behind the horizon line, as if it was escaping from all the madness itself - luckily, years ago Edison, apart from lousy films, left humanity with a patent for lightbulbs, which now lit up the tiniest scraps of all those establishments along with the empty alleys winding between. This part of the city, on the scale of the whole year, doesn’t catch up to the rest of the metropolis in the number of pedestrians per day, yet for some reason every single property that has grown here, was marked by unusual grandiosity. The newer each building was, the more cut off from natural light the street became. Behemoths grew one after the other, and the amount of light at some point no longer allowed the human eye to notice the inconsistencies between older buildings and their additions, whose task was to catch up to newer architectural whims in the height category. My mother occupied a place that by then was rather part of the middle peloton of that race. True, for a brief moment it found itself in the lead, until the fact of taking a loan for high-grade construction materials started to overwhelm my father; when the unearthly stench no longer allowed us all to live under one roof, there was - at least from his perspective - no escape from the need to get mother a separate unit. He repeated endlessly that “this way she’ll be well off”, after which he himself was plastered in the room next door. That was his wish. One doesn’t have to think to benefit from privileges in this world. Non-being, however, is already practically a requirement for that.

While the dying lock was slowly stealing away my precious quarter of an hour, the Sun had already begun to sink underground.

On my ebony table, among papers lying in controlled chaos, barely visible is a scrap of Descartes; the ray of sunlight falling onto the mangled cover rinsed the original richness of colors surrounding the bolded “Ego cogito, ergo sum.” Due to the grotesque folds, only the first word kept its original color. I didn’t feel like digging out the relic, as it was high time to lie down on the couch in the company of complete ignorance about the parasitic being actively turning the contents of my prefrontal cortex into mush. In eight days it will be a month since my fortieth birthday.

Finally, peace.
mb