Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

I stared at thenightof the city

my other half. Like any handsome youth, he was arrogant and without mercy. He said: ‘I am your other half, the half you have incarcerated inside a dark and dangerous cellar. I am your stifled and unfortunate half.’ And I believed him. I don’t know how to open up my heart to you. We are created in such a way that the moment we come close to love we shatter something. Do not be shocked, therefore, or taken aback, if as the moment for the final handover draws near, my shaking hands and defeated soul succumb and shatter other things. My son, for eighteen years I have kept the secrets I am telling you now at the back of a shelf, as if inside a glass container full of them, placed behind other glass

containers. Do not blame me, or criticise me, saying, ‘What a shameless, sad old man.’ It is my conviction that it is a coward who tells the truth only on his deathbed, yet that coward is still braver than one who takes his secrets to the grave. Doddery old man that I am, I must now climb a broken ladder, the ladder of my hesitations and cowardice, and from the top-most rung, the rung of the fears and apprehensions of my seventy wasted years, with my wrinkled fingers, I must throw the glass containers in the air one by one, and shatter things – break and shatter them. At the moment of death, man should open up his box of secrets so that later he may have a proper understanding of the divine verdict. As he

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