Billy

It was one of my first days in McDonald’s. I hate the job, I hate the whole concept of it, and I find everything that I do, hear, learn or earn there, completely uninteresting.

The worst part of it is that I have to feel lucky and grateful that I got that job in the first place.

I came to Austria some months ago without speaking a word of German. I guess this makes a big difference in a country where, not all, but quite a lot of people dislike immigrants, especially those clearly immigrant-looking who don’t speak the language. And, as the intrepid reader may have guessed already, that’s precisely my case.

It has never been better said that it makes a Hell of a difference.

As an example. In the past elections, one could walk in the streets and read slogans of one of the politic parties that read:

“Daham statt Islam” (at home instead of Islam) or

“Deutsch statt ‘nix verstehn‘” (German instead of “no understand“)

Not that I am Islamic or anything, but… I guess this atmosphere of mainly not shared but widely “tolerated” intolerance is what makes one feel so bad whenever you walk in a park, or enter in a shop, or greet a neighbour, and what you get is someone’s face looking at you with an open expression of disgust.

I am not a person who gets aggressive or rude myself. But day after day after day, it just makes me feel terribly low and sad.

The positive side of it is that as a consequence of this daily routine of people disliking you inconditionally, usually, whenever I cross with another immigrant-looking person, we both can’t help but getting a shy smile with the implicit message of “it also kills you inside, right? Try not to let it affect you, it is the same for all of us in here.”

Paternity I

Ehmmm… Ok.

I wonder how everything is going to be. Will I be a good father? Will I experience paternity as a stimulating blessing or, rather, as a twisting torment?

I guess that those questions are pointing somehow to something abstract I am dealing with lately. I am expecting my first child to arrive into the world next February, and, the more I am thinking about it, the more I am realizing how many ideas that I don’t really approve or agree with (or have any idea of) were attached to my brain without me noticing it.

This whole idea of the family, of the good mother and the good father really scares me.

I think it is all a very smart invention to keep us longing for something we don’t even know what it is (as kitty wonders here, is good parents’ score really kept anywhere?) and working unnecessarily long days in order to give our children “the best”, since that’s what good parents do and everyone knows it.

Bad parents, on the other hand, go, without passing through the Judgement Day, directly to Hell. Everyone knows that also.

I don’t know… maybe it all comes from the fact that my own parents sacrificed so much for me and my siblings that I can’t avoid feeling guilty and sorry for them. I would have preferred that they didn’t cease being the persons they were just to become that abstract entity (meaning “my parents”) with who I use to lived all those years.

I think that “a father” or “a mother” are just blank inventions. Those concepts don’t really mean anything concrete to me, as a going-to-be-father, that’s it. Our children are no more than persons that happen to come to the world just where you happened to be. You are just the first person they get in contact with (and probably the first also with who they will get their complexes and traumas!), but nothing else. No sacred meaning for me. I feel sorry, but that’s the way it is.

And please, don’t misread me. It doesn’t mean that I am not going to feel attached to my child, or that I am not willing to love him and to welcome him into the world, or to walk hand in hand showing him around, sharing what I have got about what life is so far, etc… I just hope to build a relationship with him as I build any other relationship to any other human being.

I am afraid of loosing my child before it is born, of not being able to get to know him afterwards, creating between me and him an abyss of guilts and remorses, of forced feelings, all of this, by becoming already “his father”.

The wind

The freezing wind passed by howling,

everything was grey and I was cold

I had to stand there, waiting.

My last matches were wet, and so,

I looked around hoping to find someone-

with fire, with time, with a heart.

Looked left.

Looked right.

I sighed and put my cigarette back into the box

and the box back to my jacket pocket.

I felt as if someone was pressing me hard in the stomach

and were going slowly from there to my throat

squeezing the remainings of my hurt soul out

just as one does with a virtually empty toothpaste tube.

Not even today can I explain such a devastating feeling,

how painful it was to swallow the next moment.

Maybe I crumbled,

or understood,

or couldn’t avoid any longer to see,

that

Even by a fireplace, embraced by loving arms,

with some warm chestnuts and a glass of wine,

we are still alone and lost in the darkness;

emptiness.

Only freezing wind howling around us. Nothing else.