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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