Mon šotek à moi

Posted on 06/06/2024 by writingbrussels

À Ludmila

« Ce déménagement a été un vrai cauchemar ! »
Je prononce ces paroles avec un sérieux teinté de tragique pour rendre plus crédibles les terribles épreuves que j’ai traversées.
Je n’ai pas vu mon amie Ludmila depuis longtemps et c’est un vrai plaisir de pouvoir lui confier mes malheurs. J’ai pratiquement disparu de la circulation ces derniers temps. Des problèmes parfaitement absurdes, indignes de ma personne et de surcroît évitables m’ont absorbée.
Ludmila plonge un morceau de sucre dans son café tout en m’écoutant attentivement. La plupart des gens se méfient du sucre comme de la peste et j’apprécie que mon amie ait le courage de perpétuer cette tradition malgré les diverses pressions sociales. Cela me plonge dans une douce nostalgie. Continue reading →

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Trickster On A Terrace

Posted on 01/06/2024 by Katarina

The sun keeps appearing and disappearing behind fast moving clouds that quickly change their shape. It is a spring afternoon in a neighbourhood where people do not worry about money. (Which does not mean they do not worry, obviously. Their get frightened over their bodies, partners, children, pets, cars, tennis rackets, mothers, affairs, etc.) Continue reading →

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El gigante con corazón de niño

Posted on 04/05/2024 by writingbrussels

El otro día soñé con Hossam, que bailábamos un vals de insólita coreografía determinada por nuestra diferencia de altura. Voy a extrañar a ese gigante con alma de niño que a las ocho y media empezaba a quejarse de que tenía hambre y quería volver a su casa.

Sus compañeros marroquíes lo llamaban yogur, porque su apellido es idéntico a una conocida marca que en árabe es sinónimo del producto lácteo. Apodo refrendado además por su costumbre de traer algo de comer para todos, muchas veces justamente yogures -otras, bananas y otras, chocolates- y repartirlos, banco por banco, al comienzo de la clase. Continue reading →

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The Whales

Posted on 02/04/2024 by gaelle6

Their father died on a Saturday night. It was in January. The doctor would come in the evening. In the morning of that day, he’d asked his wife as well as Max and Charlotte, his kids now well in their 30s, to leave him alone. They had gone shopping…but nothing was bought. How can one buy anything on a day life ends? They’d spend their whole day wandering. Waiting. Charlotte had noticed how surreal the sunlight had been at the end of the day. As if a bridge of light had been set between heaven and earth for him to cross over.

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Dear George (3/3)

Posted on 23/03/2024 by writingbrussels

Photo courtesy of Penboutique.com

Once she was living in the reality of her transformed relationship with her deceased husband, Patricia’s awareness and appreciation of what she had hitherto referred to as only a ‘physical’ world, expanded like a delicate flower-bud opening in the bright morning sun. She began to see people, and living things around her, literally, in a new light: a many-coloured luminescence, an intimate, alive, embracing relationship of hues, and shades, and tones was flowing and pulsating around her and in her. Life became a continuum. There was no cutting off point between what she saw, what she thought and what she felt. She felt herself as a part of all Nature, and Nature felt a part of all of her.

“Natura Naturans,” she would whisper to herself, whenever the memory of a barbecue in the garden some years before, with their friends the Lamberts, and their godson Santiago and his passionate theories about biology, floated up.

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Posted in Letter, Mark, Observing Brussels | Leave a comment