Florian > Recent Status Updates

"But I do think it would be a good idea if we slept together," she said. "We're in a different country, and the sex you have when you're away doesn't have to count, in my opinion."
"I'm unfamiliar with that custom." He walked back to her door.

Maybe this is selfish, but I don't want to love more than I am loved. And I don't want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.

It was 1996, and the word
"appropriation" never
occurred to either of them.
They were drawn to these
references because they loved
them, and they found them
inspiring. They weren't trying
to steal from another culture.
though that is probably what
they did.

Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else's game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.

He shakes my hand and leaves without another word. All the same, the gesture lasts a little longer than the custom demands. There is no ambiguity, just an extra moment of pressure, somehow in keeping with the extraordinary singularity of what has occurred between us.

The series of relevations causes a sound to reverberate in my ears, the kind of distorted humming noise that an amplifier makes when it's shorting out.

I answer: I don't know what to say... And there is nothing more genuine than my inadequacy in this moment.

He looks at me for a long time afterward. I don't understand his insistence. I say: What? What's the matter?
He says. What's your number? I'm asking because you're not the type to call.

He says: You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that.

I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It's a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. [...] The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love.

This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

He taps his cigarette to make the ashes fall, but he hasn't smoked it enough. It's a gesture intended to convey composure, but it only makes him appear more vulnerable.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

I realise now that it never mattered. Because you were right when you said that people can't always give us what we want from them; that you can't ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that.

'Nice moustache,' I said, nervous, when you lit my cigarette and you saw my eyes flicker over your face, your fingers gracing mine as you cupped your hands to protect the flame from the wind. You ignored my comment, it's platitude.

You sat on your desk, back turned to the window, your face collapsing into your hands. And I felt tenderness, a possibilty.

A pair of panties. White and lacy, discarded like someone's fantasy.

You took another bite from the cake. 'Is that your problem?' You said this with your mouth full. It disgusted me, and I realised then that your power over me went so unthinkingly far beyond the physical.

The cold air gave us goosebumps as we undressed. We found warmth beneath your covers. We tested our strengths, restled with the urgency of desire, conjuired up heat. Our bodies like firestones. You had me and I had you. But it didn't feel like the other times, the first times. It felt like we were settling a score, evening something out. Like we needed this, this language, this code, to know where we were, and who.

I let the silence rush in, hoping it would blur the reality of this moment. Our footsteps resonated in the dimly lit street. There was no one there except us. I helpd on to the stillness for as long as it would let me, for as long as I could.

When we were naked like that, changing, showering amongst them, we weren't really ourselves. We were lighter, without consequence. We took off our roles along with our clothes, and only belonged to the anonymous world of bodies.

I don't know why he was so honest with me, but it made me feel less alone.

But now I begin to think that not everyone suffers in the same way; that not everyone, in fact, suffers. Not from the same things, at any rate. And in a way this is what made us possible, you and me.

She had to check again to make sure she had not mistaken the sameness of all the caravans. No, it was the one. She ran her hands along the underside of the collapsible kitchen table and felt the sharp pitted mounds of dried mucus. Mir Gillespie had liked to pick his nose after they fxcked and wipe it on the underside of the venieer. This was the place.

The size of the human brain had increased four times over the past two and a half million years. In terms of weight, the brain occupied only two percent of the human body, but it consumed some forty percent of the body's total energy (according to a book he had recently read). Owing to the dramatic expansion of the brain, human beings had been able to acquire the concepts of time, space and possibility.

"Racism was replaced by culturism. Today's elites usually justify superiority in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, 'It's in the ir blood'. We say, 'It's in their culture.'"

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

They major in French lieature at expensive private women's colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are fomally introduced to one, and quit work to get married.

He felt his heart stir, intensely, in a way he'd never before experienced, as if he'd been living for a long time in a house only to discover a secret room he'd never know about. Like a kettledrum, his heart trembled, pounding out an audble beat. His arms and legs were still numb, and he couldn't lift a finger.
The girls entwined themselves lithely around Tsukuru...

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls. It has gotten to a point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have