Agoraphobia

It's stupid just to stand around – she thought, looking around for the non-existent reason why she had come here today; she was soaked through, her thin-soled boots damp after the very first step outside, after she missed the puddle right by her front door, its surface reflecting the city lights.

Urban environments are busy, filled up spaces. An agora according to which the fates of buildings and existences are shaped. I am using a lens to sculpt the architectures of less than pretty towns, remembering and registering for late: “City like Plato”. Sit, makes yourself at home, add a little chicory, over there sprinkle a little basil leaf. There is both nature and fury – just as in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, while these tiny French towns are even more threatening than their protoplasts, such as Paris or Barcelona...

Should I then focus on the senses? Register the smell and flavor of each newly discovered island? Wiping the dust from all city lawns and leaving marks behind in the form of fragments inscribed into city walls? Cities have always fascinated me, as I think of the topography, sociology, yes – about how they live thanks to us. I treat it like a self-perpetuating creation. And then I pull those photos of a hollow city in Ecuador – thinking of how the absence of people freaked me out when at what I think was lunchtime no one showed up for work at the bank or restaurant. The city as a film set? I thought then – what an awful joke, worthy of Woody Allen. I, however, in cities must drink, so quickly on to New York and from there to Buenos Aires.

Something occurred to her as she was sitting on a window sill, gazing intently into the street – it was an unknown sort of aroma in the rain, mixed with the sweet smells wafting in from a nearby bakery. She got up, looked around the room, rolled up her sleeves and threw on a raincoat. She scratched her head as she was running down the stairs, trying to remember if she had locked her front door, but it was too late to go back up, as the wooden staircase carried her downwards, her shoes drumming upon the planks, to the sound of rain drops smashing into the leaves hanging from nearby, expansive tree canopies.

She liked those tree, especially in the fall, when they kept on losing their broad leaves which then warped on the sidewalks in regular patterns – their corners raised as the leaf spines tightened and then fell. She opened the exit door, confidently leapt across the threshold, a few rain drops striking her nose the way cats pop people with their paws when they want to wake them and get fed...

She pulled the raincoat hood over her head and ran towards the academy building. She walked fast, trotting at times, the skin on her face tightening, her gaze watchful and focused. She ran across the street, spooked by a car honking which made her reach for a cigarette. She tried lighting it in the rain, shielding the lighter with her hand. Anyone watching from afar might have said her face looked determined – she was trying to relax, yawning wide and deep, like an actress in front of a mirror practicing her vowels. Her lithe and rather overlong arms hang down gently, swaying a little as she walked on, lifting the cigarette to her lips from time to time.

She reached the academy entrance soon enough, and entered a space she had once upon a time spent short winter days and evenings which seemed to stretch into infinity, watching lecture halls reflected in the windows so that she could peek at all the other students as in mirrors. Feeling sleepy most of the time, she tried to get to another place, one she did not yet know, but was more than certain existed.

Housekeeping. It all began with a McDonald's, which illuminated the street outside her home with its modern lighting – the 1990s, even according to Bauman, were a traumatizing period of modernity. I am sitting on a bench, listening to my walkman. Remembering as if it was yesterday, I see it all as if it was yesterday, the city buzzing, and I sit there reading Sartre and other existentialists, at age 16 saying to myself “Loneliness is other people”. I am a little afraid, but I take a swig of wine from the bottle as say the city's humming pulls me in. I miss Berlin and Paris, but London and New York most all, places I don't yet know at all. I breathe in the gasoline fumes from a nearby petrol station and stare at this brand new McDonald's which is meant to be the fulfillment of all our urbanite wishes back then.

I look for answers to the question of where the longing for big cities has come from, the need to be around large crowds, the metro, the hustle and bustle... First they call me “jet setter girl”, cause I board planes any time I have the opportunity. I fly from town to town and just walk around their streets, best come nighttime, to feel their inner spirit, best when I'm drunk so as not to feel fear of any strangers I come across. I then get to know myself better in various ways, watching lots of movies, reading the Catcher in the Rye and On the Road. Dreaming of visiting America. Yes, I now recall I first came up with the theory of cities buzzing, only then did I start really drinking. Out of longing? They had already started calling me Euro Trash Girl – I hitchhiked all over Europe, spending nights on building sites, beaches, city parks and, if I was lucky, in squats. I read Jung and Schopenhauer back then, writing morning treatises about nomads while unburdening myself of the last of my money. I could by then have become Marquez's Brazilian whore, being eighteen years of age and suffering from gastritis. I recall Berlin, a rat infested kitchen, people from South Africa and juggling fire. I had sort of a dream to attend university, but on the other hand living the life of a homeless Polish girl was something I enjoyed. I liked going to the Sony Center, where I felt like Kilgore Trout in a phenomenally chaotic modernity. I began categorizing chaos as a post-modern mosaic. Freud got hold of me and together we analyzed my childhood.

A great storm has broken, there is no way out of my house.

I once went out on the town, when I was 6 years old.

After I'd been told about the existence of guinea pigs.

After that, things kept getting better.

I spent the warmest day of the year three times – experiencing temperatures of over 30 degrees Celsius in Prague – with Kafka under the bridge, in Berlin on Oranienstrasse by Lodown publishing house and in London at the christening of a child already being abandoned in dirty Soho.

Cities began to tire me out – I wanted to burn buildings down, jump in the river and run away. Rats and pigeons were everywhere and had more right to exist. The city did not want me. Denying me, while I floated along, stoned on the streets of Holland, spraying the occasional male face, stoned on the streets of Spanish towns where I admired the graffiti while pissing in the gutter.

And I think it was there, in Barcelona, that I fine tuned my theory – I will be honest, Gaudi helped in this... After the horrors of London I could finally live on the streets. The street took me in as one of its own, the city feeding me tasty morsels: fish in the port, fruit at market stalls, people offering me shelter from the rain. This was how I went about searching for the city.

Cities are like men.

At first, it's intense.

Then it gets lyrical.

Hung over in dark streets..

Wine in the park.

Cities give me energy.

I bounce off door frames.

I can be everything that I fear being alone between four walls,

I am liberated.

To be.

With all, always, together.

At all times and everywhere.

She was thinking about the summer, about skin and earth burnt by the sun, peeling from shoulders from excessive sunbathing. She was also thinking about flowers and mosquitoes, recalling the sound of insufferable buzzing and the heady aroma of wild tulips. She remembered the feeling when her bare feet sank in the grass, her ankles tickled by weeds. She looked in the window and out to where dark navy blue was eating up the already short day with decided ease. She was thinking of the icy wind waiting for her round the corner, once this struggle came to an end and she ran out of here, wrapped in a thick woolen shawl. The hairs in her nose would be annoyingly irritated by the the icy cold, snow creaking underfoot. She was thinking of all this, knowing that right round the corner she would come to be attacked by a snowy gale, stopping her from walking with ease. Even so, she couldn't wait to face all this real soon...

Lectures bored and would not let her focus on any of the subjects being delivered, so instead she watched her fellow students busy taking down copious notes. She was rarely able to hear anything, as if she was absorbed by listening to a great LP, some soulful melody lifting her away into a world of her own thoughts. She watched the hands moving quickly across the pages of notebooks, raised in the air indicating readiness to take part in discussions, hands moving in the nervous gesticulation which tended to accompany public speaking. She compared these gestures to the act of lifting a small cup of espresso in a cafe on the corner of her street, the raising of toasts or lighting of cigarettes.

In that cafe, she'd sit positioned so she could see the door and the bar. At first, she'd pull a book from her bag and open it about half way through, turned over so the cover was showing. She'd then usually order a glass of house red, though at times this would be cherry vodka on ice. Regular customers would bow to her the way one bows before a critic – quickly, seriously. The heavily built men who would pop in from time to time did not pay her any attention – rarely would any man sit at her table, with a glass of liquid courage for help, chatting her up in ways which were not engaging, depressing in fact – even if they had pre-rehearsed some opening joke ahead of time. She would then look up with confidence and smile, evading questions with bursts of word games, preferring to let them talk. Alas, she never had enough patience to follow whatever it was they were trying to say, preferring to watch their lips forming the shapes of words, fingers nervously tapping on tankards. She would often apologize: “I'm lost, one of those days, I just can't focus...” and then she'd chase the suitors off. If she did get into a conversation with anyone, it would be with old drunkards, and then she would imagine they were talking in foreign tongues, studying their lined faces, the grimaces those wrinkles accentuated.

Her gaze, though slightly blurred, was filled with curiosity and focused on tiny details. Like that time a drunken man, as if in a slow motion movie, fell off a bar stool. The moment lasted for hours, and she almost made a sound to warn of the impending fall, which would have spoiled her fun. She looked on in silence, as if unwillingly, rarely troubling the person she was observing. It seemed as if she was looking right through them, at someone altogether else.

Another time, driving along she slowed down to look at some burning forests. The fire was at the car doors, and she couldn't push the gas pedal down. No, not out of fear – out of curiosity choking her with its intensity. And even as the car grew uncomfortably warm due to the encroaching flames, she did not look at the fire, instead looking up at the crowns of trees bending over the inferno, and beyond, higher up, into smoke and the void beyond it.

She had managed to reach the academy building, trying to remember the usual route she would take leaving the place during those short February days and almost running, guided by an unknown instinct, she would set off for her nighttime strolls – wanting to recover her smile and the lost hours of the day, digested in sitting down. She could walk like that for hours, looking into townhouse windows, popping into local dive bars, hanging around tram stops and studying the passengers waiting for their ride to arrive.

And yet the very moment she was running out onto the college courtyard, a mighty force stopped her in her tracks: she stood there a while, like someone just coming to realize they have to head in the opposite direction, turning about in a crowded market square. The last time she was leaving the academy entrance, she did so with her usual speed. This was following an exam she passed, holding a sweet bun in her hand, which she took with her to a nearby park.

It was early summer, the sun beating down from on high, while she bit down on the marmalade-filled bun began looking behind her for the first time ever. Five years of pretending in front of others that she can do it, she can study and will graduate in the end – with all her strength, she fought to free herself from dull hours of grammar work and Latin lessons, as well as literature and philosophy sessions that were all talk and no action. She ran to the park, kicked off her uncomfortable shoes, bought especially to be worn during the exam, and looked at boys flying kites, smiling to herself, the poppy seeds trapped between her teeth glistening in the afternoon sun. now, standing in the rain and remembering the elated mood of that day, she felt stupid and decided to go back to that park at night, cover the same tracks as she had done that victorious, summer afternoon.

Four months had barely passed since the summer recess began, but she was not interested in holidays or getting any sort of steady work. She liked walking, but since the fall sadly arrived, she spent her days sitting by the window gazing out at passers by, being soaked by cars racing past, mothers taking their kids to school in order to then return five hours later, kids and bags of shopping in hand... young women racing for the bus, chattering away into their phones, and older men slowly traipsing through soggy fall streets, their hands crossed proudly behind their backs, or else the kids leaping in and out of puddles, sticking out their tongues to catch falling drops of rain. She sat and watched, at firs feeling relief to finally have time to patiently study human faces and the emotions etched upon them, trying to guess the places they were aiming for, the topics of conversations and moods they were experiencing. Yet, after a couple of weeks of being glued to the window, she felt numb and finally looked in a mirror.

At first, she was surprised to find her expression blank, stripped of emotions. She studied her own reflection, as if looking at someone passing her by in the street. She walked past the mirror, glancing at herself, to then stop and stand facing it, her legs spread wide, arms crossed, her gaze focused. It was not in the lips or the nose, not the forehead or the chin. It was an oval of face and eyes – they'd changed. She seemed flat to herself, as if she'd been able to look right through herself. She went to fetch a tight-fitting blouse and pinned her hair up – nothing seemed to help – she still saw silence and hollowness in her own reflection. She went back to the window and the creaking wooden frames – the fall playing about outside, street lights blinking over people who, waiting at a bus stop, covered their faces with their coat collars.

She ran down to the park – it was late, the meadow abandoned, no more boys flying kites, the memory of her stilettos in the grass concealed beneath molding leaves. She sat on the backrest of a damp bench, the whistling winds adding rhythm to her swaying body – forwards, to hunch over into herself, and then back again to move a little for warmth.

How to describe in words that state when the city grabs its own collar and looks you in the face? I walk down streets, running at times, naked and dressed.

Singing some stupid hippie hymns, suddenly in San Francisco somehow.

Under the bridge, on the bridge. In a queue for a club or sitting over a book, sipping coffee.

Passing the witnesses of my existence by, the city carrying me around in its embrace. All its noise raging in my ears. I lick my lips and roll my sleeves right up.

The day is sweltering hot and battered by a blizzard.

I walk, conquer and discover.

Speaking five languages at once.

Crying in your human tongue.

Boom. Boom.

America. Agoraphobia.

Nepal, feral!

I've had enough of this sort of love and now Jung is telling me under my skin: “Go to Nepal.”

You should be nature, in nature!

Hitchhiking and demons from songs by the Doors, trying to find my place. Looking for some sort of god, beyond Bukowskiesque bottles.

And He said. Or something of the sort...