It's no use

When I already set my thoughts freely ahead, their number began to suddenly grow. The first drew along a second one, and the second drew along third, naturally.

The first one was tablecloth, but a waterproof kind. Convenience and ergonomics combined. It's easy to swipe and after a month you can cheaply replace it with another one. There is not a single mark left of an accident, the memory disappears in a garbage truck taking it far away to the dumpster.

After this I thought that slipping of the glass can be prevented. Because, you see, I drank in a glass, mugs weren't my thing. Mug contempt. So the other day while in a hipermarket, I bought some rubber holders for the glasses. And so the slippery glass stays in one place, even if the hand is wet. Why wet? I don't know, maybe if I just finished washing the glass. Or if I held it for a long time in my hand, so it sweat. The hand, I mean.

One day when visiting family, I saw that my uncle makes a hole in the back of a carton. Brilliant. This way these irritating rushing of the air trying to get inside the carton cannot make a risk of spilling. So I began to make holes with scissors. To be on the safe side I bought another pair of scissors, which I kept in the kitchen drawer. After a week I attached it with a string to the drawer's handle, so I don't find myself leaving them anywhere else and become scissorless in a time of need.

But one other thing was still bothering me. The very lively image of stains on the carpet in the living room, where I liked to drink. In January I got rid of all the carpets. I gave away to my uncle also the carpets from the bathroom - in the end you cannot be sure where you would wander to with a full glass.

Ah, and the saucers. When I got distracted and drank without focusing enough, on the edge of the glass there remained a single drop. One, last, rolling nearly unnoticed, shabbily creeping down ready to finally fall. On the couch, for example, the one in front of the TV set. So I bought a set of saucers perfectly suited to keep the drops at bay.

In the evening I threw out the couch. Too much to lose.

Around Thursday, somewhere around 2 pm I rethought everything and gave up drinking milk once and for all. In the end I had way more important things on my head right now plucking the boards of the floor. If something spilled and got between them, molding freely... this would drive me mad!

It's fine now - there won't be use for crying over anything.

Understanding without words

Since the beginning of time humanity has been struggling with one main problem. Ancient Egyptians, people of Medieval Ages, citizens of the global world in the Internet Era... what we have in common? We have to COMMUNICATE, not only to exchange thoughts and information, but to actually UNDERSTAND each other. Sure, we have video calls, internet communicators, social media, but the interpersonal communication still hasn't progressed much from the ancient times.

Black screen is suddenly blinking with fast changing images of different people.

Lively, pompous music.

Our product is a revolution in actual understanding between each other! We offer you the most efficient solution in human communication since the invention of words! Spare a moment, put the video on the full screen and get ready to admire technology in the service of man!

Nobody knows man more than himself, right? But what does it exactly mean? Nothing! What counts is the perception, perception and - once more - perception! You may be the smartest, funniest and most beautiful person in the world, but if you are not perceived as one, it means nothing. Perception by others is what actually defines you in the social world! What is Jims view on Jim doesn't mean a thing if it's not shared by others!

The employers is interested only in his view of Jim, his wife knows him just by how she perceives him, and his colleagues have their own opinion made but what they have seen.

And this is what should be the main point of interest of Jim - how is he in the eyes of particular people. Do they think of him as a good or bad employee, caring husband and great lover, man of success or a screw-up. It affects the way they treat him, what he can expect from them, if everything is actually alright.

Music is getting more dramatic, builds up the tension.

The images are changing a bit slower, corresponding to the words of the lector.

Jim has wasted thousands of years thinking on what is the others view on him, guessing, asking, trying to solve this riddle from scrapes of hints. Do they lie? Do they act? Maybe it's just a temporary anger or affection? All in vain! It can give just a blurry image, auto-suggested delusions, wishful thinking or pessimistic guesses of people with low self-esteem, torturing themselves with thoughts that nobody likes them and everybody has some problem with them! It is impossible to get the complete view all by yourself!

Worry not! With new Mirror Reception System all becomes clear and easy!

Enormous logo of MRS appears in the middle of the screen.

Relieving but exciting music, feeling of tension goes away.

MRS uses brain activity scanner, implemented in your DataPad. It scans neuroreceptors of your interlocutor in no time, analyzes your view in his or her eyes, all impressions and opinions on you. In form of simple diagram or more detailed table - all dependant from your preferences.

Tables with statistics appear on the screen.

Soon, without troubling with questions that answers can not be sincere, you will be able to know what other people think of your cooking, driving or how good you are in bed! You don;t have to bother with guessing the opinions - with one click you have the truth right on your DataPad! Work on your image consiously and check the progress any time! Check if your efforts have an effect, start acting more efficiently!

If you enter DataPad codes of entire group of people, your device will return averaged statistics for a whole social groups. Learn how you are generally perceived in your workplace! All data is instant, customizable and exportable!

Human relations have never been so easy, like with Mirror Reception System! No faulty communication, misinterpretations, misleading impressions, words that are not precise enough or not honest! You don't have to worry anymore how to tell somebody something important - with MRS he or she will know exactly how you feel!

Big colorful motto appears on the screen:

MRS - understanding without words.

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.

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.