ruebefrei

It was one of these dull hot sleepy mornings when your body cries for sex beneath you but your head is just too tired to come up with any solution how to satisfy this need. It was 9:32 in the morning, precisely, and the sun was shining at the front sides of the neat and tiny brown-bricked Amsterdam houses right across the street, leaving irregular shady patches where lupine and oak trees were hiding the facades, their height slightly exceeding the roof level of these small terraced houses.

I stumbled out of my sleeping bag and, all dizzy, hurried to find the phone, which was ringing somewhere in the slightly untidy, but totally enlightened student living room. It was M’s mother. She wanted to inform him she and his father would be going on holidays this morning. After I told her he was staying at a friend’s house for the night and would not return before five in the afternoon, she even apologized for having called me.

I accepted that. I had to get up anyway and her call was a good reason for that. Slowly I realized the mood I was in apparently. An undefined shimmer of early morning summer sun hang in the room, though it couldn’t actually enter it at any point. With its cool, but already heating beams, that bleached the opposite window frames outside to a bright white and made the sky an entirely perfect light blue globe, the sun announced a hot and sweaty day over Amsterdam.

I went to the toilet. Thoughts travelled through my mind while I was sitting there, only dressed in underpants, which were torn down over my bent knees. In a cool and uncertainly rumouring way this young early august summer day caused a thrill in my stomach that consisted of hunger and the everlasting urge to explore, this sort of feeling that makes people run for miles, drives them mad and restless and creates this inner force of seeking out for, well, a new love. I looked down my belly. Entangled dark hair were scattered across my chest, around my button and converged to the black and curly fuzzy triangle between my thighs, which seemed to hide the cave of a sleeping animal, a foreign body, an uninvited guest.

Satisfying the hunger part of my stomach’s unease was relatively easy. Sunlight entered the kitchen through the big balcony door window and warmed my naked white skin with a first idea of the strength its burning source would come up with today. I didn’t know anything, and, what was worse, I felt I didn’t know anything. The world lay before me as open as can be, but instead of benefiting from this fortune and jumping in carefree, I felt tension and slight fear down my belly, lack of authority and unease, again.

Every time a summer day started like this I felt this unease of a young animal trying his first steps, only that I grew older and older every summer. I’d grow twenty-four the week after and still hadn’t found even a glimpse of clue what to do with my life. My first steps always ended in vicious circles of daily routine that needed another thrillingly piercing summer day to make me break out for another set of first steps.

People told me I was still young, but they had kept telling me for four years now without anything changing noticeably. I felt trapped within myself, trapped behind the mechanisms of illusion and daydreaming, trapped by the fear of being a personality, the fear of being at all, trapped. My head was humming again from all the confusion the early morning anxieties had caused it until now. I was as uncertain as ever when the last traces of sleepiness evaporated from my brains slowly revealing what I would have to use as my personality, as myself, basically, today. I would have to make the best out of it.