Shut up

Don't tell me what I can and cannot do.

I can do everything.

Since always.

But what for me matters the most is

the moment.

And every moment is different.

It once leads me one way and then the other.

My dreams can wait.

But not for long.

Let your dreams for me wait

they'll never come true.

I was born free a master of myself

and not your underling.

And if I've chosen some forms of slavery

they were part of my learning process

a process that doesn't seem to seek to come

to an end.

I have not forgotten your words and exhortations

but I never wanted to partake

to the secret of the daily misery

that you call life.

Your way of thinking is ephemeral and

it's only purpose is the transient vindication

of your expectations.

I think of the past

study the present

and visualize without even trying

the future.

So, at long last you should shut up

and let me be myself

my own ruler

and if your dreams for me don't come true

worry not

mine one day will.

This was originally written in Greek.

The image was taken from here.

 

Anton Chekhov - Dreams

Here's another story by the russian master storyteller, Anton Chekhov. Read about Dreams:

Two peasant constables -- one a stubby, black-bearded individual with such exceptionally short legs that if you looked at him from behind it seemed as though his legs began much lower down than in other people; the other, long, thin, and straight as a stick, with a scanty beard of dark reddish colour -- were escorting to the district town a tramp who refused to remember his name. The first waddled along, looking from side to side, chewing now a straw, now his own sleeve, slapping himself on the haunches and humming, and altogether had a careless and frivolous air; the other, in spite of his lean face and narrow shoulders, looked solid, grave, and substantial; in the lines and expression of his whole figure he was like the priests among the Old Believers, or the warriors who are painted on old-fashioned ikons. "For his wisdom God had added to his forehead" -- that is, he was bald -- which increased the resemblance referred to. The first was called Andrey Ptaha, the second Nikandr Sapozhnikov.
The man they were escorting did not in the least correspond with the conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak and sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and extremely indefinite features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and submissive; he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty. He walked along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar of his shabby cloth overcoat, which did not look like a peasant's, was turned up to the very brim of his cap, so that only his little red nose ventured to peep out into the light of day. He spoke in an ingratiating tenor, continually coughing. It was very, very difficult to believe that he was a tramp concealing his surname. He was more like an unsuccessful priest's son, stricken by God and reduced to beggary; a clerk discharged for drunkenness; a merchant's son or nephew who had tried his feeble powers in a theatrical career, and was now going home to play the last act in the parable of the prodigal son; perhaps, judging by the dull patience with which he struggled with the hopeless autumn mud, he might have been a fanatical monk, wandering from one Russian monastery to another, continually seeking "a peaceful life, free from sin," and not finding it. . . .
The travellers had been a long while on their way, but they seemed to be always on the same small patch of ground. In front of them there stretched thirty feet of muddy black-brown mud, behind them the same, and wherever one looked further, an impenetrable wall of white fog. They went on and on, but the ground remained the same, the wall was no nearer, and the patch on which they walked seemed still the same patch. They got a glimpse of a white, clumsy-looking stone, a small ravine, or a bundle of hay dropped by a passer-by, the brief glimmer of a great muddy puddle, or, suddenly, a shadow with vague outlines would come into view ahead of them; the nearer they got to it the smaller and darker it became; nearer still, and there stood up before the wayfarers a slanting milestone with the number rubbed off, or a wretched birch-tree drenched and bare like a wayside beggar. The birch-tree would whisper something with what remained of its yellow leaves, one leaf would break off and float lazily to the ground. . . . And then again fog, mud, the brown grass at the edges of the road. On the grass hung dingy, unfriendly tears. They were not the tears of soft joy such as the earth weeps at welcoming the summer sun and parting from it, and such as she gives to drink at dawn to the corncrakes, quails, and graceful, long-beaked crested snipes. The travellers' feet stuck in the heavy, clinging mud. Every step cost an effort.
Andrey Ptaha was somewhat excited. He kept looking round at the tramp and trying to understand how a live, sober man could fail to remember his name.
"You are an orthodox Christian, aren't you?" he asked.
"Yes," the tramp answered mildly.
"H'm. . . then you've been christened?"
"Why, to be sure! I'm not a Turk. I go to church and to the sacrament, and do not eat meat when it is forbidden. And I observe my religious duties punctually. . . ."
"Well, what are you called, then?"
"Call me what you like, good man."
Ptaha shrugged his shoulders and slapped himself on the haunches in extreme perplexity. The other constable, Nikandr Sapozhnikov, maintained a staid silence. He was not so naïve as Ptaha, and apparently knew very well the reasons which might induce an orthodox Christian to conceal his name from other people. His expressive face was cold and stern. He walked apart and did not condescend to idle chatter with his companions, but, as it were, tried to show everyone, even the fog, his sedateness and discretion.
"God knows what to make of you," Ptaha persisted in addressing the tramp. "Peasant you are not, and gentleman you are not, but some sort of a thing between. . . . The other day I was washing a sieve in the pond and caught a reptile -- see, as long as a finger, with gills and a tail. The first minute I thought it was a fish, then I looked -- and, blow it! if it hadn't paws. It was not a fish, it was a viper, and the deuce only knows what it was. . . . So that's like you. . . . What's your calling?"
"I am a peasant and of peasant family," sighed the tramp. "My mamma was a house serf. I don't look like a peasant, that's true, for such has been my lot, good man. My mamma was a nurse with the gentry, and had every comfort, and as I was of her flesh and blood, I lived with her in the master's house. She petted and spoiled me, and did her best to take me out of my humble class and make a gentleman of me. I slept in a bed, every day I ate a real dinner, I wore breeches and shoes like a gentleman's child. What my mamma ate I was fed on, too; they gave her stuffs as a present, and she dressed me up in them. . . . We lived well! I ate so many sweets and cakes in my childish years that if they could be sold now it would be enough to buy a good horse. Mamma taught me to read and write, she instilled the fear of God in me from my earliest years, and she so trained me that now I can't bring myself to utter an unrefined peasant word. And I don't drink vodka, my lad, and am neat in my dress, and know how to behave with decorum in good society. If she is still living, God give her health; and if she is dead, then, O Lord, give her soul peace in Thy Kingdom, wherein the just are at rest."
The tramp bared his head with the scanty hair standing up like a brush on it, turned his eyes upward and crossed himself twice.
"Grant her, O Lord, a verdant and peaceful resting-place," he said in a drawling voice, more like an old woman's than a man's. "Teach Thy servant Xenia Thy justifications, O Lord! If it had not been for my beloved mamma I should have been a peasant with no sort of understanding! Now, young man, ask me about anything and I understand it all: the holy Scriptures and profane writings, and every prayer and catechism. I live according to the Scriptures. . . . I don't injure anyone, I keep my flesh in purity and continence, I observe the fasts, I eat at fitting times. Another man will take no pleasure in anything but vodka and lewd talk, but when I have time I sit in a corner and read a book. I read and I weep and weep."
"What do you weep for?"
"They write so pathetically! For some books one gives but a five-kopeck piece, and yet one weeps and sighs exceedingly over it."
"Is your father dead?" asked Ptaha.
"I don't know, good man. I don't know my parent; it is no use concealing it. I judge that I was mamma's illegitimate son. My mamma lived all her life with the gentry, and did not want to marry a simple peasant. . . ."
"And so she fell into the master's hands," laughed Ptaha.
"She did transgress, that's true. She was pious, God-fearing, but she did not keep her maiden purity. It is a sin, of course, a great sin, there's no doubt about it, but to make up for it there is, maybe, noble blood in me. Maybe I am only a peasant by class, but in nature a noble gentleman."
The "noble gentleman" uttered all this in a soft, sugary tenor, wrinkling up his narrow forehead and emitting creaking sounds from his red, frozen little nose. Ptaha listened and looked askance at him in wonder, continually shrugging his shoulders.
After going nearly five miles the constables and the tramp sat down on a mound to rest.
"Even a dog knows his name," Ptaha muttered. "My name is Andryushka, his is Nikandr; every man has his holy name, and it can't be forgotten. Nohow."
"Who has any need to know my name?" sighed the tramp, leaning his cheek on his fist. "And what advantage would it be to me if they did know it? If I were allowed to go where I would -- but it would only make things worse. I know the law, Christian brothers. Now I am a tramp who doesn't remember his name, and it's the very most if they send me to Eastern Siberia and give me thirty or forty lashes; but if I were to tell them my real name and description they would send me back to hard labour, I know!"
"Why, have you been a convict?"
"I have, dear friend. For four years I went about with my head shaved and fetters on my legs."
"What for?"
"For murder, my good man! When I was still a boy of eighteen or so, my mamma accidentally poured arsenic instead of soda and acid into my master's glass. There were boxes of all sorts in the storeroom, numbers of them; it was easy to make a mistake over them."
The tramp sighed, shook his head, and said:
"She was a pious woman, but, who knows? another man's soul is a slumbering forest! It may have been an accident, or maybe she could not endure the affront of seeing the master prefer another servant. . . . Perhaps she put it in on purpose, God knows! I was young then, and did not understand it all . . . now I remember that our master had taken another mistress and mamma was greatly disturbed. Our trial lasted nearly two years. . . . Mamma was condemned to penal servitude for twenty years, and I, on account of my youth, only to seven."
"And why were you sentenced?"
"As an accomplice. I handed the glass to the master. That was always the custom. Mamma prepared the soda and I handed it to him. Only I tell you all this as a Christian, brothers, as I would say it before God. Don't you tell anybody. . . ."
"Oh, nobody's going to ask us," said Ptaha. "So you've run away from prison, have you?"
"I have, dear friend. Fourteen of us ran away. Some folks, God bless them! ran away and took me with them. Now you tell me, on your conscience, good man, what reason have I to disclose my name? They will send me back to penal servitude, you know! And I am not fit for penal servitude! I am a refined man in delicate health. I like to sleep and eat in cleanliness. When I pray to God I like to light a little lamp or a candle, and not to have a noise around me. When I bow down to the ground I like the floor not to be dirty or spat upon. And I bow down forty times every morning and evening, praying for mamma."
The tramp took off his cap and crossed himself.
"And let them send me to Eastern Siberia," he said; "I am not afraid of that."
"Surely that's no better?"
"It is quite a different thing. In penal servitude you are like a crab in a basket: crowding, crushing, jostling, there's no room to breathe; it's downright hell -- such hell, may the Queen of Heaven keep us from it! You are a robber and treated like a robber -- worse than any dog. You can't sleep, you can't eat or even say your prayers. But it's not like that in a settlement. In a settlement I shall be a member of a commune like other people. The authorities are bound by law to give me my share . . . ye-es! They say the land costs nothing, no more than snow; you can take what you like! They will give me corn land and building land and garden. . . . I shall plough my fields like other people, sow seed. I shall have cattle and stock of all sorts, bees, sheep, and dogs. . . . A Siberian cat, that rats and mice may not devour my goods. . . . I will put up a house, I shall buy ikons. . . . Please God, I'll get married, I shall have children. . . ."
The tramp muttered and looked, not at his listeners, but away into the distance. Naïve as his dreams were, they were uttered in such a genuine and heartfelt tone that it was difficult not to believe in them. The tramp's little mouth was screwed up in a smile. His eyes and little nose and his whole face were fixed and blank with blissful anticipation of happiness in the distant future. The constables listened and looked at him gravely, not without sympathy. They, too, believed in his dreams.
"I am not afraid of Siberia," the tramp went on muttering. "Siberia is just as much Russia and has the same God and Tsar as here. They are just as orthodox Christians as you and I. Only there is more freedom there and people are better off. Everything is better there. Take the rivers there, for instance; they are far better than those here. There's no end of fish; and all sorts of wild fowl. And my greatest pleasure, brothers, is fishing. Give me no bread to eat, but let me sit with a fishhook. Yes, indeed! I fish with a hook and with a wire line, and set creels, and when the ice comes I catch with a net. I am not strong to draw up the net, so I shall hire a man for five kopecks. And, Lord, what a pleasure it is! You catch an eel-pout or a roach of some sort and are as pleased as though you had met your own brother. And would you believe it, there's a special art for every fish: you catch one with a live bait, you catch another with a grub, the third with a frog or a grasshopper. One has to understand all that, of course! For example, take the eel-pout. It is not a delicate fish -- it will take a perch; and a pike loves a gudgeon, the shilishper likes a butterfly. If you fish for a roach in a rapid stream there is no greater pleasure. You throw the line of seventy feet without lead, with a butterfly or a beetle, so that the bait floats on the surface; you stand in the water without your trousers and let it go with the current, and tug! the roach pulls at it! Only you have got to be artful that he doesn't carry off the bait, the damned rascal. As soon as he tugs at your line you must whip it up; it's no good waiting. It's wonderful what a lot of fish I've caught in my time. When we were running away the other convicts would sleep in the forest; I could not sleep, but I was off to the river. The rivers there are wide and rapid, the banks are steep -- awfully! It's all slumbering forests on the bank. The trees are so tall that if you look to the top it makes you dizzy. Every pine would be worth ten roubles by the prices here."
In the overwhelming rush of his fancies, of artistic images of the past and sweet presentiments of happiness in the future, the poor wretch sank into silence, merely moving his lips as though whispering to himself. The vacant, blissful smile never left his lips. The constables were silent. They were pondering with bent heads. In the autumn stillness, when the cold, sullen mist that rises from the earth lies like a weight on the heart, when it stands like a prison wall before the eyes, and reminds man of the limitation of his freedom, it is sweet to think of the broad, rapid rivers, with steep banks wild and luxuriant, of the impenetrable forests, of the boundless steppes. Slowly and quietly the fancy pictures how early in the morning, before the flush of dawn has left the sky, a man makes his way along the steep deserted bank like a tiny speck: the ancient, mast-like pines rise up in terraces on both sides of the torrent, gaze sternly at the free man and murmur menacingly; rocks, huge stones, and thorny bushes bar his way, but he is strong in body and bold in spirit, and has no fear of the pine-trees, nor stones, nor of his solitude, nor of the reverberating echo which repeats the sound of every footstep that he takes.
The peasants called up a picture of a free life such as they had never lived; whether they vaguely recalled the images of stories heard long ago or whether notions of a free life had been handed down to them with their flesh and blood from far-off free ancestors, God knows!
The first to break the silence was Nikandr Sapozhnikov, who had not till then let fall a single word. Whether he envied the tramp's transparent happiness, or whether he felt in his heart that dreams of happiness were out of keeping with the grey fog and the dirty brown mud -- anyway, he looked sternly at the tramp and said:
"It's all very well, to be sure, only you won't reach those plenteous regions, brother. How could you? Before you'd gone two hundred miles you'd give up your soul to God. Just look what a weakling you are! Here you've hardly gone five miles and you can't get your breath."
The tramp turned slowly toward Nikandr, and the blissful smile vanished from his face. He looked with a scared and guilty air at the peasant's staid face, apparently remembered something, and bent his head. A silence followed again. . . . All three were pondering. The peasants were racking their brains in the effort to grasp in their imagination what can be grasped by none but God -- that is, the vast expanse dividing them from the land of freedom. Into the tramp's mind thronged clear and distinct pictures more terrible than that expanse. Before him rose vividly the picture of the long legal delays and procrastinations, the temporary and permanent prisons, the convict boats, the wearisome stoppages on the way, the frozen winters, illnesses, deaths of companions. . . .
The tramp blinked guiltily, wiped the tiny drops of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, drew a deep breath as though he had just leapt out of a very hot bath, then wiped his forehead with the other sleeve and looked round fearfully.
"That's true; you won't get there!" Ptaha agreed. "You are not much of a walker! Look at you -- nothing but skin and bone! You'll die, brother!"
"Of course he'll die! What could he do?" said Nikandr. "He's fit for the hospital now. . . . For sure!"
The man who had forgotten his name looked at the stern, unconcerned faces of his sinister companions, and without taking off his cap, hurriedly crossed himself, staring with wide-open eyes. . . . He trembled, his head shook, and he began twitching all over, like a caterpillar when it is stepped upon. . . .
"Well, it's time to go," said Nikandr, getting up; "we've had a rest."
A minute later they were stepping along the muddy road. The tramp was more bent than ever, and he thrust his hands further up his sleeves. Ptaha was silent.

Source: 201 Stories by Anton Chekhov

Marina or The Sea

For this fine afternoon here's one of my own stories. It talks about a very special person that goes by the name of Marina.

-“Who are you?”
-“I don’t know!”
-“What are you afraid of?”
-“Myself!”
-“You are afraid of something you don’t know?”
-“…”

That is just about how our acquaintance began on one of the many lonely nights at the mirc. “My name is Marina, but I’d rather if they called me the Sea,” she wrote a few minutes later. On my face emerged a smile a mile wide that she could not see. “Is it possible,” I thought, “that in this spider-like World Wide Web, where lie is the name of the game, to have finally met a true and tender soul?”
In the end that was what she truly was; a lonely and tender and pure soul; one of those very rare beings that can create magic; who stand out and above all the rest with the truth of their soul and not with their image.
After that first meeting we arranged many dates in the wide open but actually hermetically closed chat rooms of the Web, we exchanged a lot of e-mails, and we’ve spent countless hours on the phone. And when we finally met in person, in a foreign city, in an alien land, we felt like we knew each other from time eternal; it was like we were never divided by hundreds of miles of silence, by unbearable weights of personal pain. We’ve met at the limit of a real new world, which could not only look beautiful, but also be so.
Many years have passed since that day. Our communication because of the distance and the circumstances that keep us apart, is now very limited, but with the same warmth as ever; full of love for the days gone by, full of expectation and optimism for the ones to come. The close personal contact is missing, but there is always there what binds us together, that special something that adds colors to our yesterday, that makes it look perfect, memories.
I hold in my hands her old e-mail messages; and I take a plunge into the blue waters of her existence. I can feel the salt of the sea on my body, and an immense sweetness fills my soul. I steal joy from the moments, from the words that she once silently offered to me: “I want to become just a little bit like the sea, salty, and never the same again.”
She did become like the sea, and she travels far and away, caressing some distant shores, but every now and then she sends me some special messages that talk about her world of thoughts: “…You should be like water; humid, fluid, refreshing, transparent…” That’s exactly her words, as she wanted me to smile at the “never-ending blue of dreams.” She talks to me still, even from afar. She talks to me about the people, and how much she loves the poetry in them.

Some times I find myself wondering why; why did she have to become a sea wave and go away from me? And I speak to her in silence: “Didn’t you just love our long conversations? Haven’t we lived some very special moments together? Do you remember that full eclipse of the moon that took our breaths away on that cool and joyful night at the beach?” Pictures and more pictures give life to my thoughts; pictures unique of unique moments that still haunt me and memories too magical to be erased by the passage of time. You left! You followed the path to your own destiny, as you would say. And I stayed back here, wondering: Are you still jealous of the seagulls? Do you still love The Green Eyes by Margerit Duras? Do you still worship Pablo Neruda? You really loved his poetry; I still remember how you flooded your messages with his verses; how you could make me travel with his sea-wet screams. As a song goes, “The time moves on and never turns back;” but I really want it to do that; to turn back and fill me with the Sea, to make me a Shipwreck at the seashore of your being, as I used to say…”

I thought about her and talked to her just like that for many a night, because she was far from me and away, and still is. Even if I write this letter in the stars, even if I invade all the computers in the world with these very words, probably this message, this joyous mourning will never reach her hands, her eyes, her ears.
Her face; that’s the one thing that keeps coming up in my mind’s eye again and again; it looked so serene that it could make me furious! The second thing that comes to mind when I think of her is her questions. She always asked why, about everything; about the beauty and the ugliness, about the joy and the sadness of this world, but mostly about pain. She wanted to know it all, to live it all; and she insisted that even our meeting did not occur by chance; it was meant to be; it was written as a prophesy on skies that we could not see.
She dreamed a lot; dreams of the sea! And she lived every day like it was the last. She thought of every day as something unique and never to be repeated again. And when she talked about her big love, the sea, poetry simply poured out of her being: “When I see the magic waves of the sea I know I can breathe”; “I dream without dreaming, and that dream I share with the sea.” Marina was immense, infinite, how could I ever fit in her vastness?
Many times memories tend to turn into a knife and stub your heart stone cold. Mine, are not that kind of memories. They are sweet, like a gentle touch, like a reward. Memories that lovingly push me towards tomorrow; because through them I get to know myself, I get to learn how to be myself; just like she was herself; the true, the transparent; my confidante, my mother, my friend, my daughter and my sister; she, who wrote poetry and led a poetic life; who loved with passion all the people; even those that she didn’t need. “Did she really need anyone or anything but the sea?” one would ask. Of course she did. She needed badly the madness and the passion of the ones that were true at heart; since, in her opinion, most of the people thought that they were alive, but had no clue about what the meaning of life really is.
We had too many things in common, and just as many differences. Once upon a time we both, in different places and under different circumstances, wanted to die of happiness. We both loved taking photos, stealing moments from people’s lives and stopping time. And we were both in love with dreams; we said that we knew what they were made of; despite the fact that more than once we saw them bleed. I’ll never forget one of her aphorisms: “We look for our dreams in heaven, but what the hell are we going to do if they come true?”
When I come to think about the things we lived together, about the things we said and done, I can’t stop myself from believing that it was for the best that in the end we followed our separate ways. If we didn’t probably one day all we’ve been through, the whole of our beautiful yesterday would drift away. So, there are no regrets for our separation. Besides, who knows? Maybe we are climbing on the same mountain from different paths and one day we’ll meet again; or maybe not; but that’s not what matters; the most important thing is that she still lives inside of me, a salty flood that fills and warms my soul, that offers peace to my thoughts.
Now, every time I listen to Loreena Mackennitt or Enya, I think of her and I allow my thoughts freedom to travel to all the Celtic destinations that we’ve never reached; to the road of her dreams, the one that leads to Santiago de Compostela; to that cheese like full moon that we enjoyed a summer night in Athens; to my ridiculous car-accident that made us laugh so much; to our words and our silences on her favorite jetty; to all her poems that never had titles; to all those things she gave me before flying herself away to live in some new fairy-tales.
My adoration for her torments my soul and makes me a laughing stock of myself, but at the same time it reminds me that once I had met a truthful and real human being; someone who stole something from my life and offered it back more beautiful; someone who has become my most lively recollection and my most sweet hope of things to come.
I have no clue where she now is, which is the sea that carries her in its embrace. What I do know is that if she ever comes back, she will find a safe and hospitable harbor in my very own arms. Till then, I will keep her company from afar, by reading her life-flooding messages and looking at her pictures, by pulling out from the vibrating computer of my heart all the special moments of our sea-like coexistence.