Sunday, June 16, 2013

Scale



This time they've come to far in releasing the Scale. It was dark and silent. Only knowledge of reactions of my body, that I had developed through years of work with the Scale, allowed me to tell if my eyes are open and my eardrums are still functioning. I started to search in the darkness around me: something fell down without making any sound - I think it was a box of cutlery, that supposed to be somewhere around here... as I remember. I hit a glass filled with some liquid, now spilled all over the table. A step further I hit a few pots, seemed like left here on purpose. They spread across the floor without a single sound. Right behind the pots I hit a lightbulb with my bare hand, it was hot as hell itself. I took my hand back immediately, a swear came out of my mouth - swallowed by the silence.

At last, the wire from lightbulb lead me to the knob I was looking for. It was turned all the way to the left. With some effort I started to turned it back, still swearing because of the burned hand.

The light started to return - at first it got brighter on the edges of my vison, the circle of darkness in the middle of my sight was getting smaller with every turn of the knob. At the half of the Scale I regained ability to see in black and white - I saw the lightbulb that burned my hand. I examined the round burned mark on my palm and put it as quickly as I could in the cold water. Damn jokers.

Few more turns and the light returned completely, in full color. It was morning - seven, maybe half past seven. I had a clock in the kitchen and I would find it by ticking, but my guests had left one more Scalometer somewhere around here.
Happily, with my sight returned it didn't take me long to find it - a small radio stood high on one of the shelves. I reached to it and started to turn the knob - minus 100 decibels, minus 80... I cursed one more time, since Scalometer swallowed the sounds - later I would wake up Viki. At last I crossed the 0 point on the Scale and radio stopped swallowing sounds and started to play some smooth jazz.

Things that one invents, to give people control over their senses, are immediately used by some jerks to make stupid jokes. Let me get them.


Friday, June 7, 2013

Don’t get me wrong


        - Don’t get me wrong… - these words are always a premise of something that will be gotten wrong. This is like saying „don’t take it personal, but…” and telling something, that will be taken personal without a doubt. – Don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want you to be my wife.

        I waited for a moment. Her face didn’t tremble even a bit, but I saw in her eyes that her soul reeled, trying to keep the balance. Balance between incomprehension, sadness, bitterness and anger. Usually tightrope walker has two gulfs, that he can fall into – to his left and to his right. She had four of them and she tried to keep stable on the shaky bond, that was stretched between us.

        She kept silent. She could ask „How’s that?” or ask me any other trivial question, to make me continue. But she had learned to use silence in a perfect way. Because she knew, that everything has its own time and if it is to happen, it will happen.

        She should lean back to the back of the armchair in a pose of a distant anticipation. Maybe she should have crossed her arms, raised her eyebrows. Demand an explanation. Like she had an obvious right to hear it. But she sat still, slightly leaning towards me, focused and patient, with hands on her knees, with hope, not with demand. May she knew?

        - I don’t want to call you ‘mine’. And I don’t want you to call me ‘yours’. – I stopped the silence, although I started to like this one.

        I knew what her eyes were asking me.

        - For me, you are… - I was searching for words. How can you decribe someone, but really portray him, not shortening him to one single word, not changing into a soulless noun, not hedging around him with imprefect adjectives, not floundering  in deficient symbols? How can you transpose a soul to words, not losing the real intention of its author somewhere in the translation?

        - … a hand, that I want to close in my hand for the first time. – in the corner of my eye I saw, that right there on her forearm, the hair that I had counted thousand times, raised up.

        - A mistery, that I want to be solving for the whole day, and in the morning not to remember the solution, so I can be able to... from the start... – the more I spoke, the more I felt, that I was falling into missprecision. I ran desperately between known words, trying to build constructions, that collapsed so easily, the moment they were tested for their genuineness. I felt, that I was going further from the original, in this amateur attempt of translation.

        - Don’t say more, there’s no need. – the shadows in corners of her mouth seemed, like she knew, what was happening in my soul just a moment ago.

        - But I never want to become certain, that you belong to me. Never. – I didn’t like to speak about the future. What would happen, if I change my mind? Then I would have to take back everything. Nonetheless today I decided to speak about the future, I just felt in some way, that this is the right thing to do today. – I don’t want to have you.

        - But I would like, I would want so much, you to choose me every day. Every day, every month, every year – I want you to choose me from the start in every single moment. Without looking back at the past and without expectations for the future, simply for now. I would like you to know – yes, I want him. For this man I want to take care of myself, I want to become better for him. And I want to make him just a bit, a tiny bit, more happy than he is today, than he was a month ago, than he was a year ago.

        I got an impression, that she understood what I had in mind. Or she already had known it earlier. In fact, you cannot be certain if you just understood something in a particular moment, or you always knew it without even noticing it. But now she comprehended, I realized it in the moment she smiled in the depth of her pupil. And also funnier, with her slightly flushed chick.

        - And if I left? If I didn’t choose you just once, tomorrow, in a month, in a year?

        My heart flickered. Just like it had skipped one beat and it got to the next one. Something inside the mechanism grinded, but now it worked just like before. It still measured liters, from the atrium to the ventricle, like an hourglass. But she noticed this one little tremble of my heart – I don’t know how, in my eye, in my breath, in a slightest movement of my hand, that even I hadn’t noticed.

        - I wouldn’t want that. – my throat got sore. – I don’t want that. I don’t want you not to choose me some day, some month, some year. I don’t know what then would be, who can know that? And what's the purpose to know that for?

        - It can happen this way, it can be, that you would feel and decide, that it’s not me. It can be even tomorrow and you will leave, free as you are now. Because you don’t belong you me, and I don’t belong to you. I cannot order your soul, I can just make mine work so hard, to postpone this day, that you would not choose me, as late, as it is possible.