Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

The closer the deadline

The closer the deadline, the more nervously I move piles of scrawled-on paper and books around the apartment. Castles of sand. Every hour there’s a larger wave, and the horizon, lurking behind the English term deadline , is more and more tangible. A captive of circling thoughts and helplessness. To relax, I jog up Golovec. At first my legs won’t obey, but then the forest embraces me with its oxygen. I’m jogging uphill, I know the path by heart, it will curve three more times and disappear before I see the crest dipping where the word path descends, limping. Like the silhouette of a woman in a night window, a view of Barje marsh opens up before me. Years ago there were only swampy fields and meadows, cut through by canals, full of stagnant water. Then they were filled, asphalted, and shopping centers appeared as if they’d fallen from the saddlebags of fugitive gods. More and more people. But soon the roads wrinkle, the fissures in the asphalt start signing the undercarriages of cars. The swamp returns without megaphones and spectacles, as grim as the flight of a raven over an empty parking lot. I read the sentence “someone speaks from the belly of the word.” Read literally, someone speaks from the belly, that of the word that has consumed its own speaker. He’s

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