Helia > Recent Status Updates

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction-every second the city gets smaller only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at a million miles an hour.

Like a greedy looter, I want the books I read to be mine.Perhaps that is why I’m not comfortable in a virtual library: you cannot truly possess a ghost.

‘I’m not interested in appropriate. Darkness and edges and corners is where buried treasure lies. Fuck appropriate.’

I sat on the outside,I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with. I looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and future dreams they would have discussed while drinking wine late at night on the sofa.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

even today we are passionate collectors of foreign objects, as if we are still trying to possess this mythical ‘abroad’ or the imitation of it.

I guess nowadays collecting doesn’t reflect the state of facts as much as the state of our minds. We are hungry for things and afraid of the future.

Still thinking no, no, it won’t happen, not here, not now, clinging to the kitchen sink as if that cold, solid metal is the sole definite point in reality, and if you grab it tightly enough, it will hold your world so it will not fall apart that very instant? It’s morning, you are alone in your ghostly house, and you don’t know what one is supposed to do now on this strangely quiet-looking day.

When the political changes swept through Eastern Europe, I didn’t imagine it like this, so close to the possibility of war that it makes your blood thicken with fear - a fear that came slowly, gently, creeping into our lives, so that we didn’t even recognize it at first.

The smell of bread, the voices outside, the peace and quiet of a normal life all disappeared, as if the new day had been sucked in by a whirlwind from that blinking screen. Instantly, I found myself in the middle of a battleground.

This is why cities become mirrors of our inner selves. Their genuine beauty is in their perfectly human size, in the feeling that you can master them, not that they are mastering you. They have a center and people need centeredness: it gives them security.

we have a chance to repossess our cities,treat them as if they are not merely places we are sentenced to be in or only pass through. we first have to realize the meaning of a public space in general. We have to understand that the public space is not a Kleenex that one uses, crumples, and then throws away. It’s more like a handkerchief, embroidered at the edges,that one has to wash and iron to be able to use it again

The cities have been killed by our decades of indifference, by our conviction that somebody else — the government, the party, those ‘above’ - is in charge of it. Not us. How can it be us, if we are not in charge of our own lives?

In these endless, ancient, kitchens, while the soup is boiling, we talk of men - sorrowful talk, as old as the smell of soup, as warm as a fireplace and the feeling of intimacy we share.

For our generation, it seemed that communism was eternal, that we were sentenced to it and would die before seeing it collapse. We were not revolutionaries trying to destroy it. We were brought up with the idea that it is impossible to modify the system.
One’s life is not a waiting room in a provincial train station, where one sits waiting for a train that might never come.

What communism instilled in us was precisely this immobility, this absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining our lives differently. There was hardly a way to say to yourself: This is just temporary, it will pass. On the contrary, we learned to think: This will go on forever, no matter what we do. We can’t change it. It looked as if the omnipotent system had mastered time itself.

She is dead. Her grave is covered with ivy and tiny blue forget-me-nots. A candle is burning; her mother must have been here recently. But I haven’t been here — not once since the day she was buried. It’s not that I’ve forgotten her, just the opposite: I could not face it, her death, the absurdity of it.

we found that things were not exactly as we dreamed they would be. we slowly realized that we had to create our own promised land, that from now on we would be responsible for our own lives, and that there would no longer be any convenient excuses with which to ease our troubled consciences. Democracy is not like an unexpected gift that comes without effort. It must be fought for.

The boring parts of the revolutions had simply finished up on the floors of television studio cutting rooms all over the world. What the world had seen and heard were only the most dramatic and symbolic images. This was all right, but it was not all. Life, for the most part, is trivial.

That is how you are trained in this part of the world, not to believe that change is possible. You are trained to fear change, so that when change eventually begins to take place, you are suspicious, afraid, because every change you ever experienced was always for the worse.

He holds his sword aloft pointing the way forward, but the more I look at him, the more I am afraid he is really still directing us into the past, as if forty five years of living under communism cannot be erased from our collective consciousness without a substitution.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” he said. “On such a full sea are we now afloat, / And we must take the current when it serves / Or lose our ventures."

the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing.

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If,

As if a name can be more than one thing, deep and wide as a night with a truck idling at its edge, and you can step right out of your cage, where I wait for you. Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things—and call it good.

in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question—as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.

A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.

I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you. A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.

From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way.