Status Updates From Kristalezko begi bat

"I have constructed a biographical testimony that is as true as it is false, so thin is the dividing line between what happened and what I invented. I don’t know if what I mean can be easily understood: a painting (whether it be a portrait, a landscape or a still life), even when it’s a faithful copy of reality, is not reality. The glass eye is not made of glass either."

"If our inner garden is not tilled with seeds that please us, forget about it. Like pumpkin flowers, our hours go by distended sometimes, sometimes contracted, because life is a concatenation of goodbyes, reiterations of pain, and in-between, periods of love."

"Dreaming with ama made me understand that there are no previous patterns to base the assemblage of our lives on. The things that happen to us are a collage, fragments of a larger story that gains meaning as the story completes: life is a dress that looks increasingly better as its parts are sewn together."

"Igor Estankona, in a poem in his book Anemometroa, provides a brilliant metaphor to describe desperate love. He says that to love so-and-so is to jump from a sugar tower. A sugar tower, the image of sweet but crumbling love, a love whose peak is reached by climbing over scaffolds assembled with great effort, using harnesses that won’t hold cowardice."

"Next to a man happily reading a newspaper there is, usually, a frustrated woman. Obviously, the noun newspaper can be substituted by many others. The meaning of this is that if the passion-adoration of a man towards something is not strong enough to include a woman in it, that woman, sooner or later, will end up embittered—and who knows what might happen after that."

"Beauty hurts the eyes of the blind. You won’t be able to understand it if it hasn’t happened to you."

"I should have grown used to not always getting what I want; but, alas, it’s impossible. Why revolt? Like the seagull who died tangled in the metallic net, I too will die of hunger, with my beak stuffed-full of the leftovers of idealism."

"Every now and then I create dramas (these writings stand as proof of that). It’s then that my psychological weaknesses are revealed. Self-flagellation, victimisation, a tendency to feel sorry for myself, hatred towards my failings and a misplaced sense of guilt, and feeling that I am next to nothing, provoke a bitter joy in me."

"I put my notebook, dictionary, watch, phone and cup of tea (a relaxing infusion of mint, lemon balm and lime blossom) on the table. I drink about half a dozen cups every day now; at night, Trazodone. Nothing soothes the pain."

"I was egged on by a desire to soothe my fear, a hopelessness that sought to sweeten my despair, an urgency to channel my fury, a need to break rules, and by my dreams, because I often fall in love with my dreams."