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Life in SloMo #1

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You have been getting a lot of time to read these days. You have been reading a lot lately. Almost in a rush to read. In the back seat of the SUV with the tinted window glasses. Finding an empty corner in a railway station as you wait for a stranger train from a stranger place. Cramped airport lounges, sipping on expensive coffee that you do not like. Shuffling between the book and the kindle, shuffling between the books, because you cannot take too much of anything. Looking for distractions. Feed the brain enough material so it does not begin to think. 

You close your eyes when there has been too much reading. Try to collect the thoughts, go through everything that you have read. Now that reading has a hiatus, try to make sense of it also. Think, say, of the characters. The boys, and the girls. There have been a lot of girls in your books lately, you realise. Animated people, feeling their anger burn and the heart ache. Characters are not caricatures in your books. They are extant, alive. These words, you wonder, really contain some lives and you get a strange question ever so frequently - why do these characters feel more vividly than you feel yourself? Thinking characters in a blocked mind. Maybe you have sponsored the thinking to the characters. Characters thinking for you, on behalf of you.

When you close your eyes, you also have to take a long breath. You are trying to exhale something out of you, as if the overload of reading is a weight in your lungs, your stomach. You notice that the coffee has increased your heart beat. An aircraft has just taken off behind you, you see the reflection on the glasses. No word about your flight and you are not too eager for it either - you like airports for the reading that comes before the flights.

There is a black expanse in front of you when you close your eyes. Your ears are plugged shut by the airpods. The heart thumps, muffled, not palpitating. The silence in the expanse has more to do with eyes than the ears. Slowly, you let your brain run. Thinking characters. Thinking like characters. Maybe you will feel more if you were a character. Not the real you in the real world, things get too raw and a certain inhospitability to feelings is necessary. Let the characters think. Tell yourself that the characters are thinking well. 

The train arrives. The car reaches a destination. There is company now. Mt Everest reflecting back the June sun, its peak hidden by shreded clouds. Light invades the black expanse, noises fill your brain. Let the brain think now. Complex, structural, impersonal thoughts. Thoughts bouncing in the lighted, ever broadening expanse, cluttered with thousands of people. Growing up. Bold and adult. When you will be left alone again, strive to pick up the book again. Turn on the kindle. When you are idle, let not the black expanse return. Except after you have read the characters thinking for you.

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