Kaal
Time and death, one word for both — Kaal in Sanskrit, it made me think of Russian word “kal”, that stands for feces. It’s funny and pretty accurate, time flies — shit, death is always around — shit. Weird entertainment I got, should have studied philosophy. I listen Osho’s audiobook, he talks about time, death and nuclear weapon…
Life is a weird movie, with weird scenario that rewrites itself so many times. Now I doubt any participation matters. All the plans have changed almost in one day and what I believed was established static is gone. Mom was saying about rubble default of 90’s, “we woke up in a different country”. I say, “we woke up in a different world”. COVID-19, mass hysteria in the beginning and global shut down later. Cozy university’s womb should have disappeared soon from my matrix in any case, but I’m puzzled with these fast weird changes. April 18, 2020, it means it’s been a month since I arrived home. I study, eat, sleep, repeat, see my college friends online but it all feels like I just left cinema 20 minutes prior to the end of a film and got home to finish watching it there.
I’m about to be born in the real world, again, yet with another paper that proofs I am someone. I am young specialist. But I am scared. I guess all the babies in a womb are scared prior to the moment they become newly born, our fear is natural and has nothing to do with the way the world out there looks like.
A lot of time for introspection while I’m locked inside. I started smoking again. Every time I light up cigarette, I realize I don’t like it. I don’t like the taste, the smell, but Gilligan cut and here I am standing at the balcony staring into the void. I wrote a note about it. About automatic decisions and absurd. Cigarette in hand explains our bizarre appearance, remove it and you’ll get human beings who waist from five to seven minutes of their lifetime just to deeply breath in and out, while being elsewhere in their mind, completely absent from this moment of here and now. It’s not the cigarettes that we need. I personally need “absence” from everything that is going on with me these days.
I started reading one of very few books I managed to keep during quick leave from university. I bought it around four years ago and it made it through my college years till the very end of the last semester unread. I opened it few times trying to get into the plot but lost interest soon as it seemed irrelevant. I kept it on nightstand knowing that at some point its time will come.
I started reading it on my plane home. Antagonist narrates how in his youth he was about to write a Christian documentary book entitled, “The Day the World Ended,” which should have been report on what important Americans did on the day the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. It was in his youth, he was Christian. Now he is a Bokononist, a follower of the mythical religion. Spectacular. How do such great plot ideas come to one’s mind? How can I learn to generate such ideas? That’s what puzzles me. I’m finally able to see this book’s greatness, that’s why this book is “relevant” to me now. That’s my outtake. No climax dramatic part here, comparison of new virus with nuclear weapon, no conclusion typical for college essay. “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut is great, death is always around and time flies, that’s how it is and that’s why I don’t worry. Because besides talks on nuclear weapon Osho said a lot of other things. One of which is that death always happens to someone else, never with us.
I’m packed with knowledge, teachers in primary school, professors at the university, they have been putting rules and thoughts in my head. But was this the knowledge I needed to live my life after I’ll finally get out of the womb? I guess all the babies doubt and underestimate the knowledge they acquired while sitting in a womb. Prior to the moment they become newly born.
Shiny curves of river spine, leaden sky. I am standing at the balcony staring into the void. The gilded spiers and roofs of the cathedrals in downtown and concrete human formicaries on the outskirts. I look at the verdant cemetery in the foreground. Time and death, they exist. There is not much we can do about it.
__ __ __
“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . .”
“And?”
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Anastasiia Gerasimchuk, senior student majoring in Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Bulgaria. She wrote this abstract piece few weeks prior to graduation, during transforming time of her life.
