April 1998 ........................... [load original version ]

As usual, fall season hid away many surprises from one year to another, something that always drove me crazy. Each following fall day would be the same story, same questions asked so many times in just one single day. Living moments like those is tough enough; a person would rather jump out of ones own skin. Only after several hours of daily mental challenging, I would say to myself that I'm deranged, but unfortunately I would feel that way too thanks to this worn-out season. On the other hand, fall was the only chance to dedicate some time to myself, after a long working summer. And why fall, it’s simple, I don’t like rain. To be more precise, I hate it. Rain was always there just to make my already fucked up life feel even worse. But the rain was always good for excuses.

By evaluating the facts around me, it was always obvious that I would spend an entire fall day in my four walled world. And that’s how it happens every next day. From time to time, I hear scream deep inside my sub-consciousness, which is desperately fighting for a piece of unreachable freedom that I prevent. Now I’m there again, on the same spot at the same time and, like a poor victim in The Twilight Zone, I’m spinning chronology of past events in my head. I remember last year and this particular fall day when I decided to visit a city library. That seemed to be the only reasonable thing to do, since the day was as depressed as I was. I remember…

He was sitting in his favorite chair, wistfully tapping his fingers to a table while flipping pages of the unknown book. Also on the table, by his right hand, was a small piece of white paper that he used to write on, making sure that every thought is put in a single line. All that time, he kept his head right above the book he was reading for the last half hour. Sometimes he would yank his body, and then he would look straight into my eyes. After that he would take a pencil and, for who knows what time, he would write something on his precious piece of paper. Every few minutes he would look at the paper like he didn’t understand something. He seemed pretty confused.

According to his clothes, I couldn’t tell much about him, and his disheveled, yet short hair didn’t say much either. This man looked familiar to me, like I’ve met him somewhere before, but his extraordinary smooth, yet somewhat pale face would took my mind off that idea as soon as I would make an eye contact with him. I wanted to find out who he was. I couldn’t just leave the place with unsolved enigma on my mind…

Lights turned on as it was getting dark outside. Dark clouds interfered with the path of the natural light and that way created various textures and contrasts in the room. If the circumstances where different, I would think that weather is strange, but then in that situation I was thinking about other stuff. Silence surrounded me from all sides. It all looked like a perfect monotony. I tried to shake off the feeling and take off the heaviness off my mind. The heaviness that pressured me like I was in a bad dream. I closed my eyes and rubbed my face for a moment. Same thing again. I tried to finish the novel I was reading, hoping to suppress all the nonsense I was thinking about.

Hours were floating away, and so I was at the end of Grisham’s thriller, a book my sister’s friend recommended once. The novel left a strong impression on me. Actually, the book was excellent. I wanted to write down few sentences from it, so I prepared a piece of paper and a pencil. At a moment of short relaxation, I heard a finger tapping again. I looked straight and got interested in a stranger who was still sitting across me. I didn’t know what to think about him anymore, about this man who seemed to lead some insignificant life. Insignificant? What is insignificance in a first place? – I would ask myself in the end.

He looked at me again, this time more aggressively. I took a bow to his look. I’ve looked down and got back to my writing. After several words and two gulps of water, I’ve looked again. This time, a mysterious man was not there. Instead, there was an empty chair decently pushed into the table. On the table, only that same piece of paper that he was using, which eventually ended up in trash where librarian put it later on. Closing time has arrived. I wanted to know what was on that paper, but I didn’t take it. Without a single word, I checked out my book, and with a confused face, left the library and walked into a dreary, cold night.

What happened then, I’ll probably never know. I never saw a stranger again, and sometimes I wondered if that happened at all, or was that just a product of my imagination. Thinking about it, I would ironically ask myself what is real, and what is not.

And rain? It kept raining… and raining… and r a i n i n g.