Going into the writing process today, my pen is a needle, it feels that I am trying to push it through a wall. I am pissed off about the weather. It is not even today’s weather I am pissed off about. It is tomorrow’s weather which is going to be terrible and I will be flying. Fear has such power to destroy the tender joys in our hearts. This is cheesy. This sentence. I judge it to be terribly cheesy. Fear has the power to destroy. This is a better sentence. We all understand this sentence. It is simple and understandable. Fear has the power to destroy. It is a weapon of destruction. It penetrates all cells of the body and stops it all. I do not know how to write about this. It is like hitting pause during a film and everything stands still. Someone’s leg is hanging in mid air. It can be hanging like this for hours unless you hit that button again, if you hit it, if you know how to undo fear. Fear has the power to destroy. I would like to learn the following and then teach it to others: You know, when you are walking, and a piece of old spider web is caught in your fingers and it is both sticky and icky? And then if you are in a forest you find a big leaf, or a bunch of smaller leaves, or a tree branch, and you slide your fingers against it and you dispose of the spider web this way, trusting that the rain will soon fall and clear it out? I would like to learn how to dispose of fear in this same way. Tomorrow I will be flying and it will be raining hard both during take off and during landing. The rain will be cleaning away old spider webs. Somewhere. Lessening the power of fear to destroy.

I want to ground this text to a description again, to an external object, but something is calling from the inside, an overwhelming feeling that accompanies my every attempt to handle reality. A first reading of this gives me the impression that the problem lies with the external world but if I could get one part of me to stand still for a moment, I could see all the little people inside me running around, each exhibiting a different level of frustration. When people say I should get in touch with my emotions I do not know what that means. It is a disappointing truth, or maybe it is not disappointing, why evaluate it so harshly, or why evaluate it at all, it is just a truth. I struggle to access this realm of emotions, If you ask me what I am feeling right now I have no idea, unless, whatever it is fits with one of the big fives: excitement, fear, anger, sadness, or doubt. This is the story I am telling myself, that I am not capable of recognising my own emotions, much less connect to them, and as I am writing this, I see that it is all a misunderstanding, a big mistake, memories of moments start flooding in, joy, anticipation, regret, guilt, shame, gratitude, appreciation, curiosity, worry, I feel silly and embarrassed to be writing down this list, and I am in contact with my difficulty to express with my words the impact of a revelation about myself which proves how ravenous and unsatiated my self-hate is, it is always out hunting for parts of me, any part of me will do, it is out for blood, how is it possible that I do not see it, so often I do not see it, I used to think that it is trying to ridicule me, but I see now clearly, how it is trying to keep me safe, how young and misguided a part it is, deeply convinced that any authentic part of me, or any non-authentic part of me for that matter, should be eliminated, that I should be eliminated as an individual expression and be replaced by a neat and clean image that fits better into external requirements, it does not want others to see that I am messy, so confused, so wise, so full of contradictions, so tough, so tender, so inexplicable, it wants to save me from the consequences of my own complexity, and in that sense my own self-hate is not only misguided but also kind of clever, and as I am writing this I begin to love it a little bit.

The water was boiling and one egg was dancing inside the pot. I now regretted I was making only one. It was still dark outside and horizontal yellow lines were formed on the wall, courtesy of the way the blinds let the street lamp light enter my apartment. I liked to wake up early like this. I liked moving around the silence, knowing everybody else is still in their dreams, processing the events of the day before, while I was already done with that day and I was sneakily taking a peak into the next one, under the sound of boiling water and the egg jumping up and down inside a small pot. I stood with my back leaning on the kitchen counter and gazed at the lines of light on the wall across, the fingers on my right hand fidgeting indecisively with a packet of cigarettes. With the excuse to time the boiling of a hard egg, I took out a cigarette and lit. I add two more eggs in the pot and they barely fit but I make it work.

Then I forgot everything. Somewhere between lighting that cigarette and removing the pot with the three eggs out of the stove, I forgot everything. I looked at my hand and I was seeing it for the first time, I looked around and I had no idea what was outside the walls that surrounded me, I forgot my childhood, and I did not know what my name was. I was looking but I was not seeing anything because I did not know what everything was. I felt something overwhelming a mixture of anxiety and cheerfulness, someone knocked on my door, I opened, they said good morning darling, I did not recognise them, I said I do not know anything, I do not remember anything and they laughed, they thought I was joking? I did not know what to do so I was standing there, should I come in, in yes, sure, and they came in and they said how can you make it this messy just in one day, they started whistling and tidying up, oh you made eggs, what I asked, I did not what eggs were, then I noticed I was moving very slowly, you want eggs darling, I did not know if I wanted eggs and then I got a glimpse of myself in the corridor mirror and I gasped as I saw myself, how old am I ? I must have said it out loud because they answered, you are 99, do you want help going to the bathroom or did you manage yourself, I did not know when did I get so old that I needed help going to the bathroom, it was not that long ago that I was lighting a cigarette with my back leaning on the kitchen counter contemplating the future.