Million sweet reasons

A carousel of voices. A social combat. Conversational wisps are competing with random blobs of treble and basses that drop down from the speakers in the corner.

She is struggling to catch the words that are addressed to her and to turn them into something actually affecting her. The lips, they move to make a point. The eyes are worse, they ask for applause, they cry for attention. She takes a prolonged sip of her white wine, a sour brew that is offering her a million sweet reasons to dive in and sink into oblivion. The aftertaste puts her into red alert that is immediately defused by the benign gaze of her night's companion.

He is observing everything she is trying not to be, and still, when their eyes meet, his devotion is reflected by a brief flash of warmth in her chest. At the mercy of the personality he imputed to her, he breathes in every single move she makes. Every word she utters is cautiously stored away in his mind and recompensed with authentic understanding.

She finds herself unarmed confronting his natural nature, she finds herself disarmed by his blemished perfection. And so her ratio and her reason shake hands and sign a contract of romance. But with every clause they add and with every consent, the apprehension in her grows and translates itself into a heartbeat of a noxious accelerando.

She knows that the iron band around her throat that is accompanying the allegro is called blind panic, the only Achilles' heel shared by ratio and reason. Panic has been responsible for the fatal ends of numerous reasons.

And she also knows that her rational way of being has encountered the strongest enemy that it could have found at the front of affection: affection itself. Affection for someone her ratio wouldn't even have put on the substitutes' bench. So, while her ratio was doing a dirty deal with her reason, a feeling rose from the dirty ground without leaving footprints and sent it's fellow fighter panic onto the pitch to win the game.

But this time she and her ratio would have found silent but true pleasure in victory - one without edges, one without deflections and sounds - but pleasure nevertheless.

Now, all that is left is that crystal-clear emotion that is targeted at someone out of sight, someone out of reach. All that she holds in her hand is that fiery feeling that is laughing at the perfection seated in front of her because it doesn't give a damn about perfection. Her ratio's prey has died with it's hunter while the affection's victim remains unscathed in the shadow - for as many reasons her reason had, as few reasons her heart could present. Her ratio aimed at the future, her affection, however, is aimless and wallowing in the hollow present.


Numbed by her discovery and stirred by the panic, she empties her wine, charms her companion - who is still carrying the alleged banner of victory - off to buy her another drink and stands up from her chair.

She stumbles through the nocturnal crowd and across a dozen bees in her chest until she finally reaches the door and steps outside to walk away while her back is frozen with the fear of being caught. And while she paces through the parallel universes of the passers-by, she can hear her ratio cry while a smile finds her face and the allegro becomes cantabile.




"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all." ~ Sophocles