Writing | dinaradoman

S H O R T S T O R Y

THE GAP IN TIME

short story used in a play Catalogization of Fears or the Manual for Take Off

The days are better and better, the music is great and my city is beating. Good vibrations! I feel wonderful here in my city. I feel the happiness and optimism that grow around me. I feel that the right time is almost here for us!

We are half step away from becoming a part of the stream where parties, gigs, literature and art intertwine... This is the stream where everything flows so fine and where everything will only get better! Yes my city is beside London, New York... Yes, my city is the world!

Generation little older than us is already living this flow, and we almost jumped in!

Noise from the TV

For hours I sit or more precisely semi lay on a beige, square shaped sofa and I feel that it is soaked in my despair. I dwell my days here watching the whole seasons of TV series without intermission and I thoroughly feel the nonsense of my existence. I feel that in every part of my sleeping body. I feel that everything stands still, I’m still, life is still. Pretends to move, but it stands still and suffocates me. I can barely breath. I do have the wish to move, to work, to create. I ask myself why doesn’t it move and I have no answer. It’s been so long that I wonder is there still any strength in me that knows to how to create. Does this body that is blending in with sofa, and is more furniture than life, does it know how to move again? I have this wish. But no movement.

The longer I sit here and the more I become sofa, more intensively I feel that a motion is not actually possible. The fact that life moves, that occurs somewhere else. Here almost no one succeeded. When I look around me there is just a line of deadlocks, excuses and rage. We live with our parents until we are hundred, we are students but are in menopause, some even work but the life doesn't move. Rear ones broke away. Some gave up. Turned off their channel. In this grave like swamp we live like everything is normal, with our knowledge of languages and our fine manners, not noticing that we are rotting. Not noticing is like a medicine. Unfortunately for most it is not enough so they reach for the real medicine, tranquilizers and desensitizers. I'm still holding on, drinking coffee, with friends, reading, studding. A kid from a good family. We kids from good families often delude ourselves with studding. "You just study and everything will be all right." We become uselessly educated nation. The rules have changed. We are the last mammoths that still don't get that all we were taught died at the same time as the ideals that the county of our childhood was built upon. With the remaining parts of sanity I feel that the sofa grows inside me and it threatens to concur me completely! And when the effect of coffees fades I surrender myself. I give up.

... but something inside wants to move, tells me that there is hope, that there is a way, to take off and breath in life. With tremendous effort I try to gather all my by despair used-up strength, to summon it from the far ends of my being. To pull-up even the atoms that the sofa appropriated long time ago and now dominantly considers her property. With great deal of anguish I put together these last atoms of strength and make them into a kind of movement, another try, a step, an attempt, call, meeting... ... ...

Nothing. No thing.

The life laughs at my face. No, NO! I laugh at my own face for even considering that it could work! Ridiculous! I'll fall down, a little, and when I manage to climb up again in a few month, see you on the sofa, yes? Why not? ... friends? I'll just quickly do this: the despairing, distorting, disassembling, overcoming and then I'll see you there. Yes? The sofa is good! Goood! I plane to imprint myself intensely.

Wonder what will be on the program?

Translated from Serbian by the author

P O E M S

CITY

Currents, lengths, distances

Streets, wheels

Lights

Passing

trough me

Steps

Flows, echoes

... and us, in the city.

Belonging to ourselves, rushing

Alone

We don’t see, don’t arrive

Don’t encounter

Quiet behind the barriers, in silence

We pass, don't stop

Don't give, don't offer

We just drip

SEEGASSE 21

Persistently I bring

flowers and fruits

to this room

But her walls

coldly resist

my efforts

REFLECTION

Ones

maybe

you will dream

abut fear of the ancestors

See

the flickering chill

Feel

the cold

numbness

Maybe

you will find

a point of the blockade

Only then

you will dream of yourself

Translated from Serbian by the author