Tra La La

“Hector had been working on a piece he called Refrains for six months, and in [2024], he finally put the last period on it.”

 

I’m terrible at bringing things to a close. Anyway, let’s keep going in the third person. There’s a sensation of a hand that alienates even the most fragile of balances in it.

 

His father had told him. He was a man who didn’t quite live in sync with his actual age, and though the general feeling around him was like being smeared with filth, words never seemed as filthy to Hector as a human being could be, so he listened when his father spoke. His hand ached while doing so—one of the branches had an oddly sharp ridge, or so he’d say, because he could never quite grasp what people decided to call this thing. He always got his point across—if not with the sharpness of the branch that cut his hand, then in other ways. Come to think of it… It’s unlikely to be that sharp.

 

He wrote down what his father had told him on a piece of paper. Back then, it seemed logical to record the things he wanted to forget. He probably thought he could trick his brain into believing, It’s written somewhere, so I don’t need to remember it. If that were the case, maybe he could have left behind a few other things that are known for leaving a more lasting mark than mere words. No harm in the thought, of course. Everything can change, even truths. But when his mother’s voice mingled with the filth around him, he dropped the pen and rushed inside. The TV was broken—they wouldn’t buy a new one for a long time. They’d never buy the camper van either. A sad reality, but since it hadn’t quite sunken in, he went back to his room.

 

It was as if he wanted that thing to be a letter... Not because there was an address to send it to—his life had barely moved beyond the basement—but maybe because he wished there were one.

 

Maybe he was always a little needy. Maybe for writing.

 

But does everyone have something that drives them to write? Wanting to forget the story his father told him—is that an impulse too? Yet in what he did, there was also a desire to share, an investment in communion.

 

Perhaps it wasn’t about needing, but belittling.

 

Anyway, the sky was still blue for him too. Let him kill time with these simple reflections so that his life wouldn’t have enough space to truly think. But he was foolish enough to stand against the wind when a single breath could disrupt his chain of thoughts. If the story had a dark humour element, it would be his ability to talk about balance for hours.

 

If the pen were to pierce his wound one more time, it would give him a valid reason to let go of everything. His deep sigh spoke of a misplaced fury, weaker than the pillar keeping his mind upright. But at least it was a color he could reach out and hold when he extended his hand. Could it be because he didn’t think of himself a water-filled vase that his life seemed so significant? You’re a little hypocrite. And yet, even they don’t refrain from doubting: What part of the water-filled vase are we, or do we now form a whole? If what we feel is beyond our senses, do we even have a body?

 

It was us, after all, who told everyone that a vase cannot be a body. It was us who taught everyone to bring the vase closer to a body.

 

Even as he longed for the inhuman, he bore the burden of this contradiction—that was his hypocrisy. Losing the existence that doubt promised him would drive him mad.

 

But he wasn’t the one who adorned himself with this madness. Roaming lost in the inner codes of a system where the investment in commonality can gain value, in a place he did not fit in, he looked around at where the simple desire to write a letter had brought him. A few hundred thousand years ahead. Or behind. Or perhaps, he was simply there.

 

A house, a castle, a mansion; three people—usually men, perhaps demons, perhaps gods, perhaps nobodies—are sufficient for an allegory. But no matter what an allegory tells, it couldn’t exist without holding something essentially human. This wasn’t what he had been told, but it was what he thought.

 

It seems he missed the moment when the sky was blue, but at least he got part of it right.

His descent into madness was a thought that had been planted in him, watered, nurtured, and grown. His stomach ached from needing to attach one thing to another. What’s so wrong about deterritorialisation?

 

And what’s so right about calling him home? I don’t want to understand you in a way that makes you resemble me. That feels even more impersonal. But if you’re curious, I’ll try to see the sky as blue. Only then, knowing I could never find anything more genuine than metaphors for feelings, calling you home wouldn’t sound so wrong to me. If it exists.

 

But I neither want to measure nor be the measure of anything. Sometimes, I even pass beyond doubt. Just for a little meaning. Because if everything is an abstraction, then humanity is as irrational in happiness as it is in sorrow.

 

Oh—wait.

“Hector, just before putting the last period on Refrains, a piece he had worked on for six months, was granted the chance to recognize the value of the times he had lost himself.”

 

And if every moment of life is a little struggle, he could very well savor the madness.