Loosing ground

The glass weighs heavy in my hand, I am holding it tightly, slowly sipping, swallowing the cold liquid - it tickles in the back of my throat, burns on my tongue. What do you want? Where do you want to go? What do you want to reach? Browsing through possible answers, I reach a point nearby: the glass in my hand that cools down my fingers. There is a world to explore. And there is the yes and the no that is left for now. Yes, I do whine. Yes, I do drink. No, I do not smile. No, I do not leave my room. The world ends at my door and it is fifteen square meters big. What lies behind the walls is unreachably far. I am a twenty-five years old, white, female university student. How did you get a different perception?

My life is perfect. My worries are not worth a sentence. What lies beyond the walls of my much too expensive student room is paradise for several thousand kilometres more in each direction. There is paradise, and there is hell.

What is the first thing that comes up in your mind when you think of hell?

The closer you get to paradise, the more you approach hell. In many ways, paradise means to stop looking for things. It is the place where everything you could ask for is just at hand. Is consequently, the less you want, the closer you get to paradise? And is hell the state in which you suffer of loss or of lacking something? If I have nothing at all, is that paradisiacal?

The hand holding the whisky glass is trembling. My head starts acing, I am loosing ground. One of my neighbours is listening to music; all I get to hear of it is the baseline. It hammers inside of my head. Creep out of your misery you self-pitying creature. Storytellers go back to where the misery had started, after introducing someone like I just introduced myself. But here is what I am telling you: there is no beginning. Both paradise and hell are eternal – with no end, and no start to it. Reproduction of the extremes in every second. Yes and no, you just have to choose.

An average afternoon with an average temperature, the sun has been trying to peak through heavy grey clouds for hours, without success. A man on the radio reads out statistics on the weather of the past fifty years to his audience. Apparently, today is the coldest March-day in ten years, and the driest March-day in five years. I change the radio station to hear a woman introducing a masterpiece of classical music. There are two possibilities. Like so often. The first is to leave. The second is to stay. Both possibilities follow a structure of some pre-set conditions. Each of the choices involves expectations. It is after all just a matter of which side you are on. The tricky part is that neither of them is right, and neither could be called wrong. It is just up to you.