Topic: Random thoughts

Railway station.

___________________

Dialogue # 1

-Where would you most like to be?

-On a huge railway station.

- Right now?

- Yep right now. I want it to be enormous - so there would be lots of busy folk around me. So that everything would move, come and go, and well, be ALIVE. So that I myself would feel big and

important because of the bigness and importance of the railway station. All the bad thoughts go away politely when asked, when I'm at the station. One can go anywhere from there. Anywhere one wants. Maybe you think this is all very rashly said and silly...

- I don't think so, not at all...

- Wait, let me finish. So, in response to all accusations of being rash and silly I'll say seven words:

I want to go to the station.

Topic: dreams

____________________

Thought #1

Dreams are always weird.

The most weird dreams are those when you dream about feelings and such.

If it's a bad dream and you have bad feelings in there, when you wake up in the morning you think:

- Oh my God am I that bad?

Even though it was only a dream and you dont have to be repentant of anything, really.

And if it was a good dream? You wake up and think why I was I so happy there? Why did everything seem so soft?

You try to catch that softness, but you can't, it's there, in the dream and it cant be brought here.

Stories

A grown-up dreamer

by Ireth

He never said he liked being weird.

He just was.

Weird.

He never told anyone how much he liked to be alone.

He just was.

Alone.

Anyway, that sure was a weird beginning. Let's get on with the story.

His name was Rodger, and he was a weirdo - not the kind of weirdo that blinks at you, makes funny noses and on the whole, creeps you out.

Nor was he a geeky weirdo - he didn't have a special interest in anything.

He was a kind of dreamy weirdo - a weirdo, whom sensible people wouldn't have called a weirdo, but everyone in his life called him that way.

Yeah, there weren't many sensible people in his life at first, that's true.

He was a teenager, and he didn't wear braces or glasses, so he didn't actually look 'weird' as lots of teenagers like to call boys and girls with glasses and braces.

He looked pretty normal - a tall, thin, not excessively handsome guy, though not exactly without some charm(that is, nobody got to see this charm except the author, otherwise you wouldn't have even heard this story).

His skin was pretty clean for a teenager, though of course he had some blackheads on his nose and everything, but they weren't super visible, so he didn't mind. When, sometimes, he saw his imperfections in the mirror, he just sighed and thought: hey blackhead, I think we've known each other for some time.

He wasn't in any way crazy about the way he looked, but he wasn't dirty or neglecting his appearance in any way.

Girls never called him a cutie - in fact, they were too busy flirting with the other, "cuter" guys to pay attention to him. One or two girls tried to come up to him and act very 'nice; and 'girlish-y', but he looked them in the face and said: something I can do for you?

That put an end to their flirting with him and afterwards they only talked about him as 'that weird lonely' guy.

Maybe he was a 'weird lonely' guy. He didn't actually care.

In class, his face always assumed a tense, busy expression, and he really was studying hard. That made his mother really proud and in a way, he liked studying too - only when the subject wasn't something as boring as maths or geography.

After school, he always left alone, crossed the street, went through a park, then crossed a bridge over a little river and finally came to his house, where he lived with his Mum and Dad.

That's what the Mum and Dad thought anyway.

To tell the truth, they didn't know anything about his life.

They only knew he went to school, studied there, and came home when school was over.

But what they didn't know was how he went back. They didn't know how he left the school building, crossed the street and entered the park, and how slowly, but steadily, the busy, tense expression left his face and he started smiling quietly to himself. How he crossed the park, going faster and faster, and then running through it, waving his arms around as if he wanted to learn to fly.

Then he came home, said 'hey Mom' in and shut himself up in his room.

There, he suddenly became alive. He shook off his school bag and shoved it somewhere out of sight, so as not to see it.

Then he went over to his bookshelf and took out a picture book, and sat down on the bed and looked at the pictures intently, remembering every detail. Afterwards, he shut his eyes tightly and tried to remember every single detail and to see it with his eyes closed.

That was called his imagination training game.

Then he took out his favorite picture books and started copying them into an album, full of his drawings. 

Most of the books he owned were fantasy and fairy-tale and since he long wasn't a kid anymore it was kind of 'weird' again, as many put it.

He did 'normal' things too though. Listened to music, went to the cinema, played video games sometimes, though rarely.

His family knew him as a serious kind of guy. His class knew him as a weirdo.

In fact, nobody knew him at all.

He couldn't have been called a kid, because he really wasn't one.

He was grown-up and he knew what suffering and having to make decisions was like.

Though sometimes he wished he was a kid. It usually came at a time when he was sad or depressed, or going through a bad time in his life.

That's when he wished it would rain and the lights would go out and he would lie down on the bed, hugging a pillow and sobbing tearfully until tears came no more.

He remembered his childhood vaguely, and the relief and even delight he took in crying when he was little.

Now, he never cried.

Never. 

He thought a lot and once he thought that sobbing on the bed is a kid's way of being sad. And the lights'd better be out too and it'd better be raining.

An adult's way is a far harder one. It is sitting on the bed, looking at the wall, being completely calm, smiling even, smiling through the pain and through the very impossibility of the smile, feeling disgusted at yourself, because you are smiling when you should be weeping. And the worst part of it is the sun shining through the open window and hearing other people's voices from out there - happy.

So, he wasn't a kid. He wasn't a boring grow grown-up either.

He was (in the author's opinion) the best kind of person. A grown-up dreamer.

He daydreamed all the time. Imagined things that could never ever happen.

He never was sad that they wouldn't happen - he liked to dream about them all the same.

He liked to dance to music when nobody saw him do that. He sang with the singer and he jumped around when he liked the melody really much.

And most important of all, he never felt lonely.

Sometimes, just sometimes, he wished he had someone to tell about his awesome dreams. Someone to share with - he felt he had so much of this awesomeness he might as well share. And the great thing is, he did share - otherwise you wouldn't have heard this story.

I don't know why I wrote this story down. Maybe no one's interested. But I felt like Rodger's story had to be shared. Because in case another grown-up dreamer reads this, they'll know their reality is an awesome one. And that there's nothing weird in being weird.

The End

____________________

Dont Touch My Beach

by Ireth

There was once this girl.

She liked to spend her time on a beach. A long, white, deserted one.

Sometimes other people came there. People, who trampled the ground, threw stuff into the Sea. It hurt the girl, so she decided to put a fence all around the beach.

The fence was with a gate though, and the fence was transparent, because the girl didn't want to take away from people the view of the Sea, she just didn't want them to spoil it.

And once there were so many people outside, asking her to let them in, she thought it would be pretty exciting not to be alone here, so she let them in.

It was fun at first. They did all the things she liked to do together.

And then, there was this one guy. Once she let him come up so close to her he managed to hit her on the face so that she fell over.

Screaming, she chased him from the beach and shut the gate behind him, wishing to hit him back, even though it was her own fault she let him come so close. Then she bathed her face in the Sea water and it healed. Afterwards, she lived a bit with her friends, but even they couldn't refrain from throwing small things into the Sea, so she politely asked them to leave. Of course most still visited her sometimes and she liked their visits, but she still prefered to be alone.

Once, another guy came up to the gate and knocked on it gently. She didn't want to open it, but the guy came each day and knocked so gently and cautiously, and he looked so nice and kind she decided to let him in.

They sat on the beach for a while, looking at the Sea, and then she told him that she liked him very much, only that he mustn't touch her when she was sitting on the beach. He nodded and never disturbed her solitude again, even though she spent the rest of her time with him.

Once, about 5 years later, she came to the beach with a little girl, her daughter. The girl played and bathed in the Sea and her Mother was happy that she finally found someone who loved the Sea as much as she did.

And then one day, the girl, now an old woman, found a little boat waiting for her in the water. She climbed into the boat and as soon as she pushed away from the Shore, she disappeared. Her daughter disappeared the same way, some years later.

The beach was deserted for some time. And then at last, finally, one magical morning, a little boy came there through a hole in the fence. He liked it there so much, he ran and told his older friend, the author of this book.

As the author crossed the beach, she suddenly saw footprints on the sand - those weren't hers and they weren't the boys'.

And that's when she thought: whose footprints are these?

Those people deserve a story.

And so she wrote their story down.

The End