You absent-mindedly stick your pinky finger in your ear to scratch it, happily chilling in Slaveikov Square, when a middle-aged colleague from the library passes you by and whistles at you to catch your attention and greet you. You essentially just nod a hello back, finger still firmly lodged in your ear. You’re left thinking that she greeted you just to let you know that she was there to witness you with digging for gold with your pinky.
There is a Dutch princess – apparently the patron for libraries or something similar to that – visiting Sofia City Library’s Children’s Department to present the fresh Bulgarian translation of the children’s illustrated book she recently finished writing. You tremble at the idea of actually having to meet her, because you’re simply clueless about how it would be proper to address her: “would Your Highness be too strong?”, you think to yourself. “Would shaking her hand without, err, kissing it or something, be too… normal?” It even occurs to you that, maybe, if you greeted her in just her first name, no titles or anything attached, you would do what no-one had ever dared to do before; talk to her normally, for what she really is; just another human being. For that she would deeply admire you – just like in the movies. In the end, you don’t get within 5 metres from her.
You see in the distance the guy who met one of your roomies in a big party the previous night, with whom he stayed out for the whole night and with whom they apparently hit it off quite well. He’s probably waiting for your roomie, judging by the three red carnations in his hand. By coincidence, it’s the same spot you’re supposed to meet another, completely unrelated, friend. You pretend you don’t see him; the least you want is an awkward exchange in the spirit of :
-“Hey, how are you?”
– *obviously aware of the fact that you noticed the flowers and still at the stage of deciding whether he should address the small scarlet-coloured elephant in the room* Good… eheheheh, good. And you?”
–“….”
Good. You avoided that. For half a minute or so all he can see of you is your back. You doubt he can recognise it as it being yours or, even if he can, if he would be willing to make the fact known to you. When you discreetly turn around, your roomie has already arrived and met up with the guy, is holding the flowers and is vividly exchanging with him whatever it is you’re supposed to say in such situations – I don’t know what it is, sorry. You pass them by and greet them both; now there isn’t just a single person sitting there, it will finally be both socially appropriate and desirable by everyone for you to just say hi and continue walking with no further questions, exclamations or general interaction. You start moving towards them but not exactly; you know, in an angle from which you they can see you but you’re not actually walking in the middle of the air holding them apart.
Neither of them notice your very briefly outstretched hand somewhere in their vicinity.
You do not change your course of bipedal locomotion.
All of your groceries have run out and you’re too bored to actually buy more. But is it really all of them or was that just a matter of speech? Not quite – you still have eggs and potatoes left. Your hate for eggs has been stuff of legends before, but you’ve somehow been forcing yourself to eat them in the past few months. It begun when you needed extra protein in order to hopefully see that exercise you’ve been putting your upper body through have some tangible results. That dream has been left in the orphanage of abandoned dreams (that was a horrible image, I’m sorry); you don’t life your weight around at a rate where extra protein would be of any use anymore – let’s just put it like that – but the “fake it till you make it” part has paid off at least psychologically speaking and now eggs don’t sicken you as much as they used to.
The frying pan is hot. You reach for an egg but your fringers go through the shell as if it was yogurt. You curse everything that’s holy (and not so much) that made it normal for people to eat chicken menstruation. You empty the contents of the egg spilled in the carton into the pan. You check on the potatoes that you fried before and left wrapped in paper in order for it to soak the excess oil, the way you’ve always seen your mother do and you yourself do but your flatmates strangely mocked. You immediately decide it wasn’t such a good idea to use toilet paper instead of the normally used paper towels: the majority of the potatoes are now covered in filmy, greasy tree pulp. You spend the next 10 minutes removing chewy stuff from your food. The sensation of futility is comparable to peeling apples with your bare hands – no, not normal apples, that’s not so bad – maybe the candied ones you’d buy at the πανηγύρι. You resign and end up eating maybe half of them, paper and all, and throwing the rest out, something for which you are not at all proud.
While writing these lines you’re still unconsciously picking out little pieces of paper from between your teeth with your tongue.
Fish Who Answer the Telephone and Other Bizarre Books by Brian Lake