[b]Herta Müller
Who can take a single step with his head?[/b]
Among other things, how profound is this?
Better to be at home in room and garden with ugly people than belong to strangers.
Especially ugly strangers.
The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked at the raised hands of the others. If someone’s own hand wasn’t as high as the others’, he would stretch his arms a little farther. People kept their hands up until their fingers grew tired and started to droop and their elbows began to feel heavy and pull downward. Everyone looked around, and since no one else’s arm was lowered, they straightened their fingers again and extended their elbows. Sweat stains showed under the arms; shirts and blouses came untucked. Necks were stretched, ears turned red, lips parted and stayed half-open. Heads kept still, while eyes slid from side to side.
Let’s decide: Genes more or less than memes?
Nothing had anything to do with me. I was locked up inside myself and evicted from myself. I didn’t belong to them and I was missing me.
Obviously: you commit suicide.
And I’m different without you. You’re the only one who thinks you’re never different.
Well, the only one besides me.
I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said.
Hey, whatever works, right?