Every time I changed social circles, jobs, gyms, or churches, you were there, misnamed yet unmistakable. “Rose,” I called you, seeing you bloom amid invisi…
Every time I changed social circles, jobs, gyms, or churches, you were there, misnamed yet unmistakable. “Rose,” I called you, seeing you bloom amid invisible thorns—defences against predators perceived only by my own eyes, much like the camellia that you are.
You attracted me, I won’t deny it. I tried to stay away, yet inevitably, I was drawn in, compelled to be intoxicated by your fragrance, one devoid of the prickly defences I imagined around you.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any “Rose,” but that’s okay; I live in a garden now. The flower I see most often knows how to capture my particular interest. Her unique fragrance clouds my judgment, for better or worse, and that’s perfectly fine. This “bee” seeks peace, harmony, and vitality, yet the monotony of a daisy does not suffice in the long run, and the fleeting thrill of a sundew is but a short-lived excitement, of which I’ve had my fair share. Jars of honey, now safely stored in the recesses of my memory, are to be used with caution—this stuff can be overpowering.
Cactus flowers are my preference now. No offence, “Rose,” or should I say, “Camellia”? My tastes are seasonal, like everything else. I might see you again, or not, nobody knows. One thing I know is that I will never leave my garden, nor will I stop seeing thorns where none exist to protect myself from myself. Well, trying to.
“They slaughter people in that building, I’m telling you!” Luke—nicknamed “Druggy”—told the group of less experienced drug users, myself included. “Sure, o…
“They slaughter people in that building, I’m telling you!” Luke—nicknamed “Druggy”—told the group of less experienced drug users, myself included.
“Sure, of course, they do. They keep the severed heads attached to those rings on top using barbed wire. The vent cover is obviously to expel the putrid smell from inside the building,” I replied jokingly. I really wanted to quit using that crap. I had just met a girl, and I wanted to be myself; she said that I could be a cool guy even if I wasn't high all the time.
“Exactly! This is proof that I am not going crazy. It’s this stuff we use that makes us blind, I’m telling you!” Luke promptly exclaimed.
“Sure, sure, uh, no, thanks, bud. I’m trying to quit,” I replied to Alfie, who was handing the stuff to me while I was answering Luke. Alfie shrugged, said “lol,” and took another round for himself.
My head was hurting quite a lot. I had taken some analgesic, but I wanted to push through, perhaps to be an example for these guys. I thought they were my friends, but we were just hanging out together—nothing more than that. In hindsight, I should have just gone home and never looked back. I would have saved myself from the PTSD that still haunts me after so many years.
As my headache intensified and the cold sweats began, my eyes also started to hurt a lot. It reminded me of that time at Nando’s when I’d touched my eyes with my fingers after handling super hot chili sauce.
I kept blinking hard and essentially crying. Then I tried to hold my eyes open, and I saw flashes of a completely different reality.
The building was not white but red, red like blood. I looked up at the three rings that Luke had pointed out and fell on my bum in shock. I couldn't believe it.
Severed heads, barbed wire—it was all there. My eyes were hurting because of the horrible stench, I believe.
The drugs were distorting our perception, numbing us to reality. Glancing around, I saw dozens of people who looked like they were having the time of their lives, partying as if oblivious to the atrocity unfolding before them. Further off, something even more bizarre caught my pained eyes. Men in suits with individuals in white coats were handing out these drugs for free, while others were led inside that ominous building.
Among the ones wearing a coat, I recognised her. She saw me too and I could read her lips saying “Sorry”, “I told you” and then “Go away” as she entered.
I felt betrayed even if maybe she just wanted to save my life.
I hate commuting so much. There’s just so much that can go wrong. Either you travel with your own vehicle or you share something with others, it’s always t…
I hate commuting so much. There’s just so much that can go wrong. Either you travel with your own vehicle or you share something with others, it’s always the same thing. I just want to walk to work, my legs won’t —hopefully— abandon me up until I am pretty old and dysfunctional already.
I hate trips that have multiple legs even more, you just increase your changes of getting something wrong. The driver might be sick, the boat might be broken, the weather might be to inclement, and so on.
I have been waiting for my speedboat pickup for more than one hour, sixty percent of the times, it was already late. Why do I even wake up so early I didn’t know.
What pissed me off is the fact that even if I wanted, I couldn’t have walked towards my destination. I thought that progress was meant to make our lives easier but here we are.
Learning to swim in my forties didn’t help either, I just can’t swim fifteen kilometres below sea level.
We invested trillions to reach for the skies, to probe for life in one of the countless number planets gravitating around the equally countless stars. Look at us now. We realised that there was so much undiscovered life just under our noses.
Finding Atlanteans was simply the greatest scientific breakthrough in centuries. I mean, they just gave us access to some of their crazy technology in exchange for some of the food that they had never encountered in their vast underwater cultivations. They are particularly fond of chestnuts and dragon fruits. How weird is that?
I work at the construction side of one of the new lifts that we are building to speed up the trade between us and them. I had to take the speedboat 12, then hop on the repurposed platform “Read the freaking manual” and from there it was all underwater travel, with all the depressurising involved, what a pain in the ass! The lift we were building removed the problem altogether, we could just maintain the same surface pressure, like if we created a hole in the ocean and we build lifts, stairs and pipelines inside. The metal alloys that they provided did all the heavy lifting, literally, but they didn’t want to provide the goods and also help us building it, we had to figure out ourselves. I think it’s fair, we are like monkeys to them, that’s one way to push us further and to go beyond or capabilities. That’s something that we had stopped doing for a while now.
Hello dear stranger, since you are here, for whatever reason, reading my thoughts and peeking inside my soul, I feel like I should at least say hi. I could…
Hello dear stranger, since you are here, for whatever reason, reading my thoughts and peeking inside my soul, I feel like I should at least say hi. I could be British and ask you “How are you doing?” but that would be non-genuine, I don’t know you, I don’t know anything about you.
I could instead be Italian and just say “Ciao” but you might think I am saying goodbye because perhaps you are more accustomed to Portuguese… Ok, I am making lots of assumptions here, since I am doing it, I’ll push it a little bit further and just pretend that you are something, that’s how we are going to have an honest interaction.
I will take this image as inspiration, pretending that you are what I am looking at. I see you got some life going on there, nice, very nice. You remind me of a pregnant woman, beautiful, not in a creepy way.
I wish you a majestic blossoming, it might be brief but what isn’t? It’s all ephemeral and relative and relatively ephemeral.
We should all make the most out of each fleeting moment even if life, with its randomness, always catches us by surprise.
You might feel like the time is perfect, it must be spring, you sense that the temperature is good enough but none of your fellow cherries is blossoming yet, what do you do?
I really admire you, it must be really hard and risky to be the first one that’s brave enough to take a shot.
But what does it mean to take a shot? Is it to blindly trust your sense of the temperature and risk the odd cold day right afterwards or is it to ignore the warm day and wait for maybe another cold one before blossoming?
It’s all a juggling of time and options. Time becomes more limited, life becomes more precious, experience increases but why? Because we made mistakes… because we took the “wrong shots”. Were they wrong if they led us to where we are now?
Subjects of a picture that a rando is talking to on the internet without any particular reason?
I don’t know. I only have questions but I’ll tell you what, I don’t know you but you are helping me finding answers.
You might blossom so to bear delicious fruits that are going to be the vehicle to provide your DNA a few more shots even after you are gone at this “game of life”. Or you might just blossom for pure show. Just because you can, because you believe that’s your purpose and that’s OK. I can only joyfully smile at any form of expression that has the ultimate goal of touching other souls one way or another.
You are a tree, I am a person, or at least I believe I am and yet you touched me. If somehow I touched you too, I was wrong, you weren't a tree but now you know I am an honest person. You can blossom again just to remind me.
—
Hello, dear stranger. Since you've stumbled upon these words and peeking inside my soul, let us begin with a heartfelt greeting. "Hi." There’s no pretence here, no meaningless pleasantries. I do not know you, after all.
I could have been British and have asked you “How are you doing?” but that would be non-genuine.
I could instead be Italian and just say “Ciao” but you might think I am saying goodbye because perhaps you are more accustomed to Portuguese…
So many assumptions but since I am doing it…
Let’s embark on an honest interaction, shall we? Picture this: you are the embodiment of the image before me. There’s a vibrant energy about you, akin to life itself. Nice, very nice. Much like the splendour of expectancy in a soon-to-be mother. Non in a creepy way.
I wish for you a majestic blossoming. It may be transient – but then, what isn’t? Our existence is fleeting, moments slipping through our grasp like grains of sand that don’t fall at the bottom of the hourglass but that are lost forever instead.
Do you feel this? All this randomness? I do too, it’s like if the grains of sand that represent our time are not only falling and disappearing but in the process are also span around by strong winds coming from all directions.
You took a chance there, you must have felt that the time was ripe for you to blossom even if your peers didn’t do it.
You, daring to unfurl in solitude, earn my silent applause. The courage to be the harbinger of spring does not go unnoticed.
To take a shot – what does it truly mean? Is it to trust one's intuition of the warm days, disregarding the risk of a looming frost? Or is it to shelve that trust, anticipating yet another chill before daring to bloom?
It’s all a juggling of time and options. Time becomes more limited, life becomes more precious, experience increases but why? Because we made mistakes… because we took the “wrong shots”. Were they wrong if they led us to our current standing?
As subjects of a picture that a rando is talking to on the internet without any particular reason?
I cannot claim to have the answers. Yet, your silent presence guides me toward them.
Perhaps you bloom to yield fruit, a testament to life’s tenacity, offering your essence a chance to persist beyond your physical departure in this grand game of life. Or perhaps your bloom is art for art's sake – a display of existence because you sense that is your purpose. Whichever the case, it prompts in me a smile, a celebration of life touching life.
You are a tree, and I am purportedly a person, and yet we connect. If my words have reached you, stirred something within, then perhaps you are not just a tree. And in knowing this, I recognize an honest connection. When next you blossom, it will be a reminder – not just of nature's cycle, but of this shared moment between us.
There’s no male or female; we invented these words because we have that capacity. We observe nature and we try to understand things because we have that ca…
There’s no male or female; we invented these words because we have that capacity. We observe nature and we try to understand things because we have that capacity. We name, label, study, play—that’s what you do when you are at the top of the food chain.
We feel, and we feel in a certain way because we have that capacity. Can lions and chimpanzees feel what we feel? We don’t know. Do we know if a male gazelle identifies as a female one? No. How do we know it’s a male then? We observe and make an educated guess. Emphasis on educated.
The gazelle doesn’t even understand a single thing of what we are saying. Why should it be bothered by our nonsense, especially if directed at its genitalia?
Peacocks are my favorites. As a kid, I always thought they were female; they looked "showy" and flamboyant, and my intuition attributed these traits as feminine. I changed my mind immediately, as soon as my ignorance was amended with some education, recognizing that peacocks might see things differently from me—no big deal. I am not a peacock, or at least I think I am not one. Sue me if you think otherwise.
If I see a lady with a beard and she shouts at me because I didn’t call her “him” or something I could have never guessed, I apologize and I stop talking to them immediately; clearly, they are more interested in being called what they like than hearing what I have to say, and I know for a fact that I often say things that might sound a bit like nails on a chalkboard. How do I know? Because I can still hear my thoughts! Reading back what I have said in the past, it’s quite cringe, but that means I am growing. Believe it or not, you are helping me grow. Thanks!
This is my creative space; if you don’t like it, block me. If you don’t want me on your platform, ban me. It’s not like I am going to stop thinking these or other things… what would you have achieved? If you really believe in what you are saying, please educate me… Just don’t coerce me in any way; I don’t play well with that, sorry. Neither should you, by the way!
Do we have the capacity to tell others how they should feel? No. Actually, often we obtain the exact opposite when we try. Can we coerce others into doing something that they don’t really want to do but that they feel like they would be judged by “other people” otherwise? Of course! We are complex creatures, but we are so simple and fragile. I embrace my fragility; if someone calls me a girl, I smile as I would smile if I was called a peacock! Worst case scenario, I would ask a simple question: “Why are you calling me that?” maybe learn something and move on regardless.
There’s no male capable of birthing children because it doesn’t have that capacity. Naturally. Not because they are not enough of what they are not. Why would a rose want to be a tulip even if it’s impossible? As hard as it could try, it would never ever achieve that goal. Why would a tulip accept a rose as its own kind?
Out of generosity? Out of empathy? Out of ignorance? Out of coercion?
Tulips and roses are different, and that’s OK. Every living being is, in a way, unique, but there are natural laws that transcend everything else. As humans, we have the capacity to bend many of such rules; perhaps one day, men will be able to grow babies inside of their bodies, women to use their sperm to fertilize an egg.
I just managed to summon a vomit aftertaste with my mind, so everything is possible!
Aren’t these abominations like it would be cross-breeding a lion with a crocodile? Or a man with a lion. What if the next trillionaire identifies as the king of the jungle and manages to become a “man-lion”; would you be OK with that?
“Yes, I would because they wouldn’t hurt anybody; they are just being lions—what’s the big deal? Also, it’s not happening in my backyard, so... who cares!”
Right… so what’s next? One day your daughter tells you that she cannot introduce you to her cat-boyfriend because you are allergic. She hates you for that! Congratulations! You should load up on antihistamines and accept… whatever. You can go cry in the toilet like a grown man!
My rebuttal to all of this is: “Why?” Believe me, I have asked a few times but have never received an answer; I was just offended and called names. I meant no harm, of course, like a curious and ignorant kid doesn't mean harm when they ask stupid questions, but if my idea of normal being:
man + woman = couple => kids
outrages you... I am deeply sorry to break it to you, but the world has much bigger problems right now than arguing on social media and on the streets with strangers about stuff that is taught, or at least WAS taught back in my days in school, first grade.
