I don’t fully remember the before. The before feels distant. I know there was a before. It’s a fragmented video I can play in my head. Most days that’s not what I want to do. My life before was a scattered existence. If before I was a hail of buckshot with no aim, today I feel more like a spear. A spear that wishes to pierce injustice in its murky, pestilent heart.

Inside I may have had a garden. I don’t fully recall. Today it’s a bunker with bare necessities. It’s underground factory. My heart has sunk into elusive tunnels. The known symbol of all terrorists.

It’s cold in my heart. And lonely. And outside there are walls of ice between me and most other people I choose to deal with or have to deal with.

In my terrorist hideout in my recalcitrant soul is a factory. It runs 24/7 and it produces love and affection. And curiosity.

Part of me feels more alive than ever.

Part of me feels deader than ever.

There has never been this little joy and pleasure for myself.

At the same time I have never ever tried so damn hard to produce value, joy, contentment, excitement, cultural enrichment, delight, exctasy, at times I even try to share fervor, for other people.

First of all for my son, but a lot goes out to… strangers online. Some of which have started feeling familiar faces. Well, a lot of avatars and some faces.

I do more for clients, do more for students.

I am alarmed when I do nothing productive for fear that am contributing to circumstances that allow frivolity, banality to grow, the kind that lets a little girl sit in a car full of dead relatives for hours in a combat zone where the rescue workers who are trying to save her will also be blown to bits.

I have frequent headaches. Since November 2023 I have had the most persistent pain of my life. Physical pain. My right hip.

I have given up alcohol. In December I will have been sober for two years straigth. The longest ever, since alcohol was a small part of my life even in childhood. Different times, different customs.

I already feel guilty for starting so many sentences with I.

And here is another one:

I experience an odd mix of reeling and determination.

Am reeling confronted by a world that has become this harsh.

Not just in Gaza, or Sudan, or other places where the murdering is direct, unforgiven and merciless and physical.

I also reel at the daily slaughtering of the soul.

Yesterday I spotted an Instagram post that got 90,000 likes.

It was a woman who posted she loves men becomes they mean food, new clothes, etc.

A man in his thirties told me how after weeks in Bangkok he FINALLY got to have a conversation.

He ended up deeply dissapointed.

The two young men only wanted to know if he was rich, how much money he was making and when he told them he wasn’t rich they wanted to know why he wasn’t rich.

Another man told me he was in stress and so he booked two prostitutes, two shemales to blow off some steam.

Hours later he reported: ‘The quality was mediocre.’

All day the same man had been complaining to me about how cold people are, how they live in bubbles, how all love is selfish love and how nobody appreciates his talents.

So I am reeling.

Then am also alongside of that reeling or because of that reeling determined. Determined to helping develop a counterweight to all this bleakness, people telling me their dream is to buy a Porsche – insert eye roll – all this vampiric obsession with only wanting to be associatede with the hot, famous and rich.

A world where millions watch two teenagers spend a normal person’s year’s salary, not once, but multiple times at the mall in one day.

Often what I do feels utterly pointless.

Materially it gets me very little.

Then on Sunday I had that most cliché of cliché realizations.

I was out playing with Bruno.

He looks so handsome, so cute, so adorable, so happy, so free of worry.

We chase each other across some floor hockey field. Communist style concrete.

Barely any other people around.

Lifting him, hugging him, smelling him, hearing him, seeing him.

I felt like crying but I postponed it to the next day when he was in school.

Nothing I do actually matters much at all other than that.

Life has become stuff I do in between being there for my son.

Hopefully stuff that pays the bills, is a bit decent, is a tiny bit courageous here and there, the tiniest bit original, not degrading to myself or others, but it’s now mostly filler.

I am entirely convinced that all that will remain of me in my dying moments are thoughts of Bruno, if I gave him enough, it never feels like enough, but I do know I manage to give him a lot, and maybe some thoughts will go to a few women I loved and was loved by, though not anymore for sure, and maybe to some things I wrote that were a bit above most average fare, and my father, and mother and other relatives, a friend here and there. They will not go to any hateful comment I got anywhere. They will not go to how much money I make.

And the stress I had over having to renew my Slovak residence card will look sad and laughable.

And I do suspect I will think of horror like the horror that was done to Hind Rajab by ISRAELI decisions – I will go to my grave naming the people I hold responsible – and I will think: finally death is here, so I almost certainly – one never knows – will never have to look at the ugliness of life anymore, or experience my acute seemingly forever unfulfilled, unmet desires.

But I will also cry, I already have tears in my eyes again, knowing I will never get to experience holding 7 year old Bruno in my arms again and make him feel so safe, and so cherished, and so lifted up, and seeing him so lost in happy moments, hoping, praying that he only sees my joy about him and only ever gets to feel how happy I was LOVING him with every fibre of my being, but without ever knowing, especially not before he becomes an adult, how besieged, broken and coldly denied I felt in this world. And how guilty I have felt for feeling something could be missing when I had him in my life, the most beautiful, clever, funny, surprisingly practical boy who ever lived and will ever be. Am his father. It’s not only true he is all that, it’s my sacred duty to state it.

I have to teach some Dutch to two teenagers now.

And I forgot what it was I set out to say in this text.

Maybe you will know anyway.