I promised to tell a story of a place, or perhaps from a place; thank goodness for the variability of Babelled languages. This weird fish keeps his word, although the truth is that this place tells stories and we merely witness them. Well, not that it would tell them out loud. Not quite. It whispers stories to those who have cat-like whiskers, except these are fine-tuned antennas to catch the Forever Stuck in Yesterday FM, and actually receive the message that now is wherever else, but all the yesterdays are in charge here. For all yesterdays, yesterday’s parties, and rather all the sticky-stucky hangover-laden afterparties.
I remember—or do I? Not once upon, and definitely not time. An elderly Arab guy rooted in the very same chair, a nevergreen, under-watered, lucifugous plant. The very same café-fueled corpse pose. Day by day, dusk to closing—at least for those who still believed time mattered. Smoking, until this vice got banned indoors to protect the tormented lungs of city-dwellers, and then just sipping a single cup of coffee all day long. Perfectly tolerated here back in those days, which could reoccur tomorrow, except that’s, perhaps, the only thing that has actually changed since I was a novice-coffeehouse layabout. No more less-than-one-euro coffee shelter for teenagers, no more bottled beers almost as cheap as those from the convenience store next door, no more buttered pita for a penny. The Arab disappeared, scared away by all those Camus-reading Strangers, expelled, or simply repotted into a wooden cask once he made the fatal mistake of leaving timelessness. The surroundings are fancy now.
That piano perpetually astray, its scales adrift; those chalk-and-cheese pieces of furniture rescued from countless emptied flats which knew a last breath; those cavities in which you could conceal a love letter to a random soulmate from another plane or a few verses of a poem belonging to someone else—oh yes, that one you impudently stole, and now, all in remorse, you desperately crave passing it back to its rightful creator; those waiters roaming their own visions and occasionally stumbling across the intruders, us; those entangled spiderwebs of solitude, where we all are captured cocoons, barflies drained of light. That hasn’t—and couldn’t ever—really changed.
For that’s the true story of the place. No exposition, just position. No climax, just clime. Written as overheard or oversensed, felt, perceived, and perhaps even recalled in that Saturday morning. At least from your point of view. It was a Neverday’s mourning to me.
