Vacation

they sat around like some cloud of half-truth, that smelly nonsense which remains breezing the air for a short while after a joke. it was a bit funny but I somehow forgot how the joke goes. still the punchline was in many ways paramount for their existence and odd enough for them to stick around for a bit without any desire to be somewhere else. not even in time. i was there.

how they got there in the first place could only be told in thousands of endless stories about love and death and that’s basically what they kept on telling each other over and over again.

i mean who wouldn’t.

far in the future from now, and then again a few decades back from then, the temperature and sea levels were on rise just like today. the overall presence of chronophobia from the depths of the collective unconscious had long worn off. but still the flood didn’t stop until there were only a few mountain tops left. of course most of humanity was gone except us living on these small islands, big enough though to be the great lands we survived on. but since we never really thought we would make it in the first place, it wasn’t so much about survival as it was living in paradise—an absolute catastrophical beauty, a perfect chaos of hate and love.

there i am. old and dirty between the wrinkles. and these sand particles covering my body which i stopped washing a long time ago, sparkled at night lit by the gray moon like diamonds in the sky. i am so old that i lost my age on the way. my gender has blurred to magnificent androgynous perfection, although the skin is far past from deserving to be referred to as extra or loose. breasts and testicles dangling cross counter to almost every weary move still possible.

i have grown long canine teeth like a prehistoric cougar. unlike vampires i am real. my beard and hair white, almost translucent, covering most of my naked appearance. and because i suffer from a strange dementia, i have lost it once in a while. this time wasn’t so bad. i am angry about myself killing a fly, so i went to sleep and in my dreams i killed the lion you told me about.

my sleep was unusually shallow that night. maybe due to the perfect climate that summer and this lofty breeze blowing warm air from the island outwards into the sea.

woken up by a strange voice blabbering on and on, i rolled up my furs and walked over to where it came from.

are you hallucinating? I asked.

no i’m writing. she said.

can we talk?

no, don’t have time but you can sing a song for me if it makes you feel better. i won’t listen but i’ll hear it for sure. i might get it on another level.

this little girl really confused me once more. nevertheless i started jodeling and walked on into the woods. by sunrise i arrived on the other side of the island and kari came walking upwards from the beach with some pink oysters.

i was exhausted but not tired just like disembarking from a long flight spent on dormicum. we stared at the sunrise in a slightly tense silence until she started to build utopian structures in the sand that looked like old space stations. too nervous to watch i slurped a few oysters. i never quite got her take on architecture and I desperately needed a vacation.