Table 19

28.07 By the sea, coddled and vaguely annoyed by the fresh marine breeze, continuous and unyielding, I already feel far from this city. I do not wish to place a particularly mystical significance to this moment, yet within me I recognize a growing sense of melancholia, as if the wind were insistently whispering: do you really want to leave this behind?

But the wind is only the wind. I, who wanted to spend an hour in the solitary reveling of the comeliness of local waitresses, instead find myself here writing. I suppose it's a nice way to begin a trip: table 19, a bottle of white wine, sand between my toes, and a buxom waitress who, from time to time, passes by swaying her hips,throwing me a smile.

The wine always runs out too quickly.

Now, I wait.

29.07 The last time I flew was a few months ago. A lifetime ago. At the time I was not alone, while now my window seat is complementedbythe empty seats beside me. Perhaps I'm writing because I feel terribly alone. Another jolt of the plane.A sob and a convulsed clutching of my arm.

- Don't worry! This is normal! - Oh, how I lament your absence! I shouldn't. I have no right to do this to myself. Too many memories. Even glancing out the window brings me pain. At times, we succumb to a will that is not our own,left in a state of complete impotence. No more writing now. Rest.

30.07 On the ground I found a fully functioning pen. Maybe it's a sign. As if the world were telling me: write. And here I am, headphones in hand and Pink Floyd buzzing in my ears as I freely distribute my CV. Yet I fail in finding any sense of assurance.

01.08 Last night I wandered the streets of London. It is undoubtedly a city that stems from its mystical charm. A place where the modern superimposes itself onto the classic.I have yet to discover its soul and I doubt I will succeed in doing so before my eventual untimely demise.

Austerity and ruin, ancient and modern, efficiency and immobility. So brutally paired. At times it reveals itself so entirely impersonal, yet everything reveals itself more complicated to understand when we find ourselves confronting it with feet buried in the mud. Certainly the biggest challenge will be overcoming the lack of bidet.

02.08 This could be the biggest opportunity that I've ever received to subvert a life fabricated by inconclusiveness and mediocrity. I absolutely cannot waste it, regardless of the end result, whether that be success of failure.

I must prove to myself that my drive can have weight. That it can change the course of events, the tide, for now I feel myself floating, lost in the undulation of the waves while I lay in dead man's float, lingering between suffocation and the infinite liberty of the sky above. It is in this moment that I drink a Guinness and scrawl words on the back of my rejected CVs, all with a pen I found on the ground.

I will smoke a cigarette, and the rest I will think about with my next Guinness. Then I will endlessly wander along the streets of London and prepare myself for the day to come.

I return to the pen only to write about a middle-aged man playing divinely in the subway. I changed my path to sit next to him and listen to what he has to say. It is undeniably the most beautiful moment I've experienced since my arrival.

People pass by and throw their change;the metro voice announces undistinguishable things. He plays and sings. Just for me.

03.08 Even the rhythms of the mind are different in this place. But in these blues I feel the entire universe. I am completely immersed in the people that surround me but I do not hear them, I do not perceive their smell, I do not share their emotions. There is only this irreverent music, the piano of the soul. I feel my mind gyrating in a colorful storm, as if my blood were beating to the rhythm of these sounds. I can be unaware of who I am, but I am. Rounds of applause punctuate temporal dilations.

While a black voice ignites the air and the sax shatters the heart I think this could be the place where I achieve my dreams. I know that outside there exists a different reality, one not inclined to compromise, one that is dissonant. Yet these notes, this scent of wood and beer jostle the bricks of my sanity, alter the balance of my inner most sense of self. Drums pound in a cardiac arrhythmia.

I hear the words on the page and the vibrations deep within my stomach.

Lost in this ecstasy I understand and accept: I need my refuge. I made a decision. This, in part, induces a sense of relief. Today it rains, but tomorrow, laying in the green on Hyde Park, I will contemplate the emptiness within me.

I wonder how the sea of Brighton will be. I can't wait to go.

4.08 A cold night, that sort of cold that pierces the skin and makes you feel alive.

I am back in the familiar hostel, myself and 19 other unhappy souls. Every day makes me feel like a different person, I perceive my mutability, which does nothing but drag me into an endless spiral of questions that remain unanswered.

5.08 Recapitulating, I am alone in London, amidst an existential crisis, a perfect nobody whose wallet was also stolen this morning while I was sleeping. I am a nobody with three cans of tuna, two bottles of water and five pounds. I don't even have my transportation card. They took that as well. Nonetheless I am calm. It is raining. No Hyde Park. I wouldn't even know how to get there anyway.

Today I will read, write, and watch over that which remains.

6.08 Why is it that in trying to keep afloat I continue to feel a demeaning inconclusiveness permeate my every action, thought, and movement? What brought me to this point? Was it my moving for inactivity or my laziness? I find myself facingdoubts as wrenching as a cilice: I might not even know my own self.

I wait. And suddenly those words that for years I kept within me begin circling in my mind.

Age tandem, universa alia alibi sunt.

It is the apotheosis of movement and of action but I continue to wait. A pretty girl sits next to me. She asks me a few questions, and I continue to wait.

I wait. I love and despise this wait. As long as you are still everything remains bound with infinite potential. Once an action is completed, all that remains is the bitter taste of reality soaking your mouth.

9.08 Tonight there's jazz on the Brighton seaside. I adore writing in pubs; I could do it for a lifetime. But who knows if these words could ever catch the interest of someone? After all I' not writing for others, I'm writing just for myself, for my healthy egoism. The fact that all of this is a simple self-analysis, and the purely introspective character of these pages renders them useless the very moment the ink dries on this page. I feel like the tree falling in the empty forest that only makes a sound for itself.

I have to stop writing to find a bit of peace within this silence.

20.08 Table 19. I'm back, resolute in wanting to change my life.

But the resolution, just as love or the firm resolve to not love, has an unprecedented price. With pieces of your soul you pay for something you never decided to buy.

Externally.

What can I get you?

A bottle of Traminer, thank you.

Soft smile, relaxed body.

In the only living part of your brain a man without a face screams things without sense, in a whirlwind of sand, lost in a desert void of wind, name, or heat.

The action is a palliative, the alcohol only an anesthetic. The fiction is clear, the comedy does not convince. I am blocked by my own self. When intentions and emotions diverge so potently, we feel ourselves lacerated, or maybe devoured slowly by a colony of worms that dwell in the mind and in the stomach.

Gnawing, trying to rise through the esophagus and the malaise, the anger heightens, the tremor, this despotic sadness is all that you can know. The only relief is vomiting everything on the white sheet of paper, with borrowed blue ink, the brain softly soaked in wine. The sun sets, a breeze blows. This is my place.

The moon is sweet even above container ships. All that is missing are the Brighton seagulls, they might shit on you at times, but their shrill singing perfectly frames the metrical roaring of the sea.

Now I just want to enjoy the view.