Batakliev's Bloc

Where the knitwork of thick cloud was thinning ever so slightly, I could see the dark gradients of the North sea, seasonably desaturated. The only object interrupting the monotonous stretch was a solitary phantom barge, enveloped in haze, like a distant chimera. The strong gusts carried us forth, above windmills, neat patches of green and a flawless infrastructure of Lego-like roads, canals and bridges. More water, shiny white industrial builds, geometrically aligned gabled rooftops. Well, hello Amsterdam. It's good to see you again.

Let me tell you about Langkawi. I am lying on a chaise longue amidst a patch of radiant green growth and the gentle morning breeze is tickling my bare feet and forearms. Running water, buzzing insects and the velvety timbre of birds' vocals form a soft blanket of sounds, the morning's background music. It feels like I have never not been on Langkawi. Night after night, in my bed in London, I would repeat the magically sounding word like a mantra trying to fight insomnia and visualise the colours, shapes and fragrances behind the otherworldly name. Lang-ka-wi, lang-ka-wi, lang-ka-wi... Now that I am here, I spend my time admiring marvellous fruits or watching blackbirds drinking from the pool, their reflections quivering in the turquoise water. After a swim in the sea, I stand still against the wind, eyes semi-closed, watching semi-blurred water cones forming at my pulsing fingertips. I pay attention to my hands and my feet. I have managed to catalogue all the teeth in my mou...

She sometimes felt that her life was as insignificant as a youtube video ad. Once she opened her mouth, all people wanted to do was skip her in 2 seconds. I sometimes tried to endure the full length of her and listen but she sabotaged me with persistent mediocrity, urging me to push the X button. When I finally did that, she would smile swiftly, flare her nostrils, lift her eybrows and whisper with her eyes: "See, I'm worthless."

I was going with the flow. My consciousness was slipping into a sub state ever so slightly, like a wet towel in a steam room sliding off a languid limb, heavy with its own weight and ready to succumb to weightlessness by way of a simple yet undecipherable physics formula. The downside of excitement is exhaustion. While at the peak of excitement, my thoughts were itchy, dry and flammable, in the pit of exhaustion they were vapid, soggy and bloated. Day in, day out, I was oscillating between excitement and exhaustion driven by the flow in a seemingly forward direction yet lacking a clear course, a sense of destination and milestones along the way. As a result, my home had turned into a storage place for unrealised ideas and mutually exclusive objects. It seemed that gravity, the fundamental force of attraction, was pulling everything downwards stronger than ever. My reluctance to lift up something which had accidentally fallen down was also growing stronger day by day and the prospect...