Today Klara was anxious in such a way that it
was impossible to stay in bed as usual and wait for the alarm to officially
wake her up. She got up, went to the bathroom, took a shower, got dressed,
kissed her sleeping son and husband and closed the front door of their apartment.
It was one of those days when the air had a different structure- it was thicker
and it got stuck to the sides of your lungs and instead of filling them up and
helping you breathe it just makes you feel blurry.
She was entering as usual the subway in a way
only a ghost would enter a place- silently, without paying any attention to
what is going on around him and just heading straight to the correct waiting
spot. She got on and immediately took a strategic position in the corner that
allows her to observe the people around her even though she usually observed
inwards.
Klara wasn’t feeling well these days. She had
this strange pain coming from unknown location inside her body. Physically she
was functioning, she even ran some blood tests as the normal people would do,
right? But it was all fine. Fine- she said to herself. However, she was still wondering
what is it that bugged her- was it something real- or was it all in her mind. And
are the mind matters real at all or are they the ones shaping our reality? And
how can a person dealing with the mind matters be fine?
Klara is one of those people you can’t see reading
a book in the bus – she is one of those people who treated books specially as something
too sacred to just take out of the bag and open in front of everyone. It takes solitude
and peace to read a book. That’s why recently she hasn’t read any books but she
missed it. She also missed the smell and touch of a new book being opened for
the first time. So few new books and so many old ones you wish to close…to
finish.
The other day she was in their living room when
her son came in the room carrying a page thorn from one of the books in their
library. She did not how to react- how are you supposed to know? She took the
page from her son’s hand. Explained him that he is not allowed to tear pages
from the books and that those stories described in the books need every page.
It was part of them. Small, big, important part. At first the little one started
crying – then he stopped. Later the same day he was standing by the bookshelf
struggling to put back the page into the book. It wasn’t possible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said -“I cannot
remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so,
they have made me.”