you’re in a nameless european city on the longest day of the year, it’s a strange situation and an even stranger setting, this small and impersonal bathroom drowned in poor artificial lightning and you have no clear idea as to why you are there or why you’re really anywhere at all. there is a lightness in your body (settled deeply, in your bones) that you have not felt in a very long time and you know it should alarm you, it does alarm you but only peripherally, vaguely, instinctively. you fixate your heavy eyes upon the door that you have locked moments before as if one gaze could fasten and freeze what’s existing simultaneously on the Other side, or more importantly, what is going on inside you need it all to stop (what do you need to stop) you don’t know but isn’t that what is most terrifying (you said i don’t know, i don’t know and he kept repeating the question, as if that would help or change anything). regardless - you think it would be absurd if these were the last sounds you would ever hear. because ironically, the distant clatter of silverware, the slow scraping from drawing in and out of chairs, the dulled voices, the general turmoil and then. the unity of it all sounds like what you imagine coming out of unconciousness might be like, that initial faltering register of everything hazy removed, unhinged and insensible. you would laugh if you could but of course you can’t and somewhere in your disarranged mind is the fact that somebody once wrote about how everything is beautiful and nothing hurt. a possibility to isolate an almost automatic wonder, how it would be if there was beauty to be found in this situation, encompassing, stark and whole, and if nothing hurt. that alone is enough and there you are: laughing, laughing in a jarring unremitting way, although seconds ago such a thing was inconceivable – perhaps it’s all the blood, what else is there.