Hi🧚🏻‍♀️, my name is - and I live in Czechia, although not in Prague.
I may or may not have temporarily created this account in order to write to you. (In fact, this is me trying to admit that I did).
I have been updating myself on your life story through your short videos probably ever since you used to dream of becoming a foreign correspondent while beginning your studies in Prague.
With all the time having passed between that point and now, it is safe to say that that is a whole lot of detailed randomness to semi-knowingly update a stranger on. I believe the world is so awkward and weird largely due to the modernity of it mismatching our prehistoric brain’s nerve network. Perhaps I’ve made up for the one-sidedness by writing this letter. Oh sorry. A dm🙇‍♀️
Forgive me for the unusualness, because as much as I’d like to, I seem to be unable to indulge in small talk (especially that sort of American-styled), even though I know there is nothing worse than what seems like unsolicited acting-as-an-advise spam messages. I do not wish for any of that.
All I wish for is I acted up more on the impulses of sensed connection, so that is what I am doing right now. Acting up on the sensed connection I feel like I could have with you.
I gave up on social media largely a year ago, reconciling with that it is not for me, not for my brain, not for my merely-life-observing-prefering personality. (But some people kept reoccurring in my mind, and so I wrote them down on a list to at times check up on them, together with you.)
That is, I have tried to be comfortable with putting myself online, but it never worked, so I accepted maybe it was not supposed to. Something that was accentuated when I got unstimulated, started wondering what would my feed look like had I filled it with meaningful yet somewhat private pictures from my gallery, and so I did that.
But when a guy slightly begged me if he could see my Instagram supposedly just because “he prefered resending memes over there”, I warned him I only have it as a digital journal to myself, as he proceeded to breezily eyes-filled-with-discontent-glaze my feed where almost no picture had my body on it until he found one that did. There I was in the mirror, tight dress on, and heels. It was a memory of me before attending high school graduation.
Since then, I resided to keeping my digital journal on a private X with no pictures and texts no one reads. For some reason I still find enjoyable doing it. So there, I was able to bash him, and he would never know.
But the point of the matter was, he was the one graspingly hating himself, spilling it onto me.
The other day, I was watching The Beauty and The Beast with my niece. In the beginning, Belle is strolling in the streets of France, being greeted by everyone with “Bonjour” and freshly baked bread, as she is heading to the library to pick up a new book, and since she has read all of them because the town is small and the times are older, she chooses to reread another.
But then this very attractive yet shallow man called Gaston, for whom all the other girls are desperate, gets in her way, and demands her hand in marriage. He takes the newly borrowed book out of her hand and carelessly dumps it in the mud, saying: “How can you read this? There’s no pictures!”
Laughing, I was explaining to my niece that this guy is so dumb he only reads the books like she does, and she is 3 years old.
One time, I played one of the most meaningful songs of mine in front of the guy who felt like real life Gaston without him knowing it meant so much to me. His reply to hearing it was: “Can you turn it off please?”
At that moment, I felt so hurt, like Belle when her book got thrown into the muddy puddle.
But I realized that when I rehear the songs that once used to crash me, I no longer feel the crash. All of that dark sentiment within them is still somewhat intoxicating, but it does not hypnotize me anymore.
When I turn the music off and there is silence, I still manage to feel as if I were here.
I think that even the state of years long hypnotising intoxication has an end date to its potency. It may not stop to be intoxicating, ever, but you are capable of making it stop to hypnotize you.
This time around, the world feels like summer, outside, and inside of my body. As if double the time you are anticipating throughout the whole year.
And so I woke up with so much liveliness within me, but instead of obeying to the visuals of the list of dates I could take myself on and the amount of money being deducted from my bank account as the night time approaches - bigger and bigger - instead of all that, I decided to write to you.
At the end of the day, how many more dates can I take myself on? Precisely how much thousands of Czech cash (the money sums here seem so much more than it is with dollars) do I want my bank balance to be deducted with, before inevitably having to repeat the process sometime soon, well, probably tomorrow?
All the years I spent inside of my head, earphones in my ears, the guy who would never hurt me could not tell how to help, because he sensed that every interaction I had with him caused me distress.
When he asked about me, the question was never supposed to be: "What do you keep thinking about so much, all the time?", because in reality, my head felt so utterly blank. The blasting music was the only thing making me feel like my feet were touching the ground. And so, all these years later, I have finally figured out the question was always rather supposed to be: Why are you not here?
Sometimes, I wish I could only be remembered as an abstract memory. A sentiment of some sort. I find it so irreconcilably hard to accept that other people are able to see me in 3D, or, for that matter, that I exist at all.
But throughout my life, I’ve adopted visuals that have continuously provided me with comfort. And I do not mean those that cause me to feel like I should obey.
Like that principle Jessie Inchauspé explained on a podcast, when she said the reason cutting out sugar from her diet after a severe injury side-effectantly causing her to feel dissociated from her body, helped her, was because the glucose overfloods your mitochondria. Instead of providing you with energy, it gives you temporary pleasure followed by the dopamine barking at you, because it was never the hormone of enough, it was always the hormone of more.
I have come to realize true happiness in people’s lives is not subjectively, hypnotizingly intoxicating. It is uniformly contagious.
Whilst struggling during high school, I pictured myself greeted by a little girl with the tiniest of hands as I was leaving the building, us walking through town.
Before graduation, the only thing preventing me from a complete collapse were the thoughts in my head of the sound of my heels somewhere on the pavement in France, as they went clap clap clap.
I know that if I were there, I would be able to hear the claps in real life. I would be able to smell the lingering smell of fresh bread. I would be there.
But for now, I am walking in the streets of my hometown.
My niece is there, holding my hand.
It is quiet. Only the sound of her laugh.
To real life Gaston: I am sorry for the bashing. But you have to admit the resemblance given that on our first date, you bent on your knees and put one of your rings on my finger. Maybe there are not-Belles over there in MĂĽnchen who will want to marry you.
As I finished writing this, suddenly there I heard a French speaker’s talking coming out of the street from my at night-time-chronically-opened windows at the very edge of a small town.
It felt surreal.
I have never heard French so close to home.
