The world has changed, but we cannot grasp it

It all started early one morning when Mr. B dragged himself out of bed and strolled slowly to the bathroom. He had not been sleeping well lately, and he had been waking up at night, and the long nights were broken up into tiny pieces like his late wife's beads, which he had found in a drawer long ago. He took the string in his hand. The rotten string broke, and the colored beads fell all over the floor. Most of the beads are missing. From then on, during sleepless nights, he often wondered where those round, thoughtless little beings had gone. In what pile of dust did they make their home? Which floor crevice has become their living space?

In the morning, as he sat on the toilet, he saw that his socks had a seam in the middle -- both of them, a neat machine seam from the toe to the elastic.

It was a small thing, but it got him interested. Apparently, he had slipped it on without noticing the bizarre phenomenon - a long suture running from his toe to his heel to the elastic opening. So when he finished his bathroom ritual, he went straight to the front of the cabinet, and in the drawer below lived his socks, black and gray in a mass. He pulled one of them out at random, pulled it apart, and held it up to his eyes. It was a black sock, and the room was dark, so he couldn't see anything. So he had to go back to his bedroom to look for his glasses, and then he saw that the black sock had the same slit. He pulled out all the socks and planned to arrange them in pairs -- the seams of each sock running from toe to heel and up to the elastic opening. The sock, it seems, has seams, which are a natural part of the sock and are not transferred by the will of the sock.

At first he felt angry, whether with himself or with his socks. He did not remember such socks with seams from top to bottom. He knew only that there was a seam at the end and the toe, and that the seam was smooth. The smooth! He put the black sock on his foot and it looked strange, so he threw it away in disgust and started trying on others until he was so tired that he felt he couldn't breathe. He had never noticed that there was such a gap in the sock before. How is this possible?

He decided to drop the whole sock thing. These days he does this a lot: he carefully stores things he can't solve in the attic of his memory, and decides never to touch them again. He began to go out of his way to make himself his morning tea, adding some herbs that were good for the prostate. He strained the tea twice through a strainer. When the tea leaked through the filter, Mr. B cut two slices of bread and buttered them. The homemade strawberry jam had gone bad -- the blue-gray mold looked at him defiantly and arrogantly from the jar like an eye. So he ate bread with butter.

The seam problem still bothered him a few times, but he had to treat it as evil -- like a dripping faucet, a broken cabinet handle or a broken jacket zipper. It is beyond his ability to deal with these things. Immediately after breakfast, he marked the programs he planned to watch today on the television forecast. He tries to make each day full, leaving only a few hours free for cooking and shopping. Plus, he hardly ever adjusted to the demands of television. Each time he would fall asleep in his armchair and suddenly wake up, not knowing what time it was, at which point he would try to find out from the TV show.

In the corner shop where he bought his things, there was a so-called manageress. She was a stout woman with fair skin and thin black eyebrows. As he was putting the tins of bread and bolognese into the bag, something touched him, and he asked for a pair of socks.

"Take these free ones." "Said the manager, handing him a pair of brown socks neatly wrapped in clear plastic. Mr. B began to look at them clumsily in his hands, trying to see something through the packaging. The manager took the sock out of his hand, neatly removed the wrapping paper, and immediately took one out and held it up to Mr. B's eyes on his carefully maintained, manicured hand.

"You see, there is no tightness in these socks, they do not choke the leg, and they keep the blood flowing. At your age..." She began, but did not go on, for she realized that it was inappropriate to speak of age in this way.

Mr. B put his head towards her hand as if to kiss it.

There is a seam across the sock. "Do you have one without seams?" "He asked, as if casually, as he paid.

"How can there be no seam?" "Asked the salesgirl in surprise.

"The kind that's completely smooth."

"What are you talking about? I don't know how to make these socks. What do you do with unsewn socks?"

So he decided to ignore the matter. When you get older, you don't notice a lot of things -- the world moves on and people keep coming up with something new and more convenient. He didn't notice when the socks changed. Well, maybe it's been a long time. No one knows everything, he consoled himself, and went home. The wheels of a shopping cart clanked happily behind him, the sun was shining, and a female neighbor downstairs was washing the Windows. It occurred to him that he should ask her to recommend someone to clean his Windows. Now he looked at the Windows of his house from the outside -- they were grey, the same colour as the curtains. It's as if the owner of this apartment died a long time ago. He chased away those foolish ideas and chatted with his female neighbor for a while.

Spring was the season of tidying up, and he felt uneasily that he ought to do something. He left his shopping on the kitchen floor and, without changing his clothes and shoes, went straight into his wife's room, where he was now sleeping. His own room is used to store old TV magazines, boxes, empty yogurt cups and other things he may need later.

He glanced at the still pretty, feminine room. Everything was just as it should be -- the curtains were closed, the room was pale and dark, his bedding lay neatly on the bed, only one corner folded up, as if he were asleep. Glittering sideboards are teacups with gold and blue ribbons, crystal goblets and barometers brought back from the sea. The clear words on the barometer underline this fact: Klinica on the sea. His blood pressure monitor was on the nightstand. Opposite the bed stood a large wardrobe, which he had seldom and unwillingly looked at since his wife's death. Her clothes were still hanging there, and he had tried many times to give them away, but had not been able to. Now he had a bold idea -- perhaps he could give them to the woman downstairs, give them to her. Then he can ask about cleaning the Windows.

For lunch he made himself bagged handy asparagus soup -- it was delicious. The main course was a small baked potato left over from yesterday, which he warmed up and drank some kefir yogurt. After lunch, Mr. B takes a nap. Then he goes to his room and works for two hours sorting through the old TV trailers. Week after week, he accumulated over fifty every year. So there were about four hundred issues of newspapers, stacked in piles of varying heights. Throwing them away is a symbolic cleanup: Mr. B hopes to begin the same cleanup as the ritual bath this year, which begins in the spring rather than on a date in the calendar. He succeeded in carrying them all to the rubbish dump and threw them into a yellow container with the word "paper" on it, but he felt a sudden panic -- as if he had lost part of his life, cut off from his time and past. So he stood on tiptoes and peered inside desperately, trying to find his television preview. But they disappeared into the dark depths. In the stairwell, as he climbed the floor of his home, he briefly sobbed with guilt, then felt weak, a sign that his blood pressure had risen.

The next morning, when he sat down after breakfast, as usual, to pick out and mark the shows he wanted to watch, the ballpoint pen annoyed him. The mark of the pen on the paper was brown and very ugly. At first he thought it might be the paper, so he took another magazine and angrily drew hard circles around the edges of the paper, but the circles were also brown. He realized that the ink in the ballpoint pen had changed color over time or for some other reason. He was angry that he had to interrupt his favorite ritual to find another pen to write with. He strolled over to a closet where he and his wife kept all the pens they had collected over a lifetime. Of course, many of them were no longer usable -- the ink was dry and there were bubbles in the refill. He rummaged through the pile until he pulled out two and returned to the newspaper, feeling sure that he would find a normal pen that could write blue or black, even if it was red or green. Not a single one. All the pens were the color of poop, or the color of rotting leaves or floor brightener or damp rust. Old Mr. B sat still for a long time, with only a slight flutter in his arm. Then suddenly he stood up and banged open the wine cabinet in the old closet where his papers were kept. He picked up the outermost letter and immediately put it down. These and all other documents -- bills, tips, lists -- are machine-printed documents. It was only when he managed to pull a handwritten envelope from the bottom that he saw, to his despair, that the ink was also brown.

He sat in his favorite TV chair, stretched his legs, and just sat there, breathing and looking at the white ceiling. It was a little while before he began to have thoughts, which went up and down in his mind, and then he pushed them out of his mind:

There is probably a substance in ballpoint pen ink that, as time goes by, loses its color and turns brown;

-- a toxin in the air, causing the ink to discolor;

Until the end:

-- he had some kind of macula or cataract in his eye, so he saw a different color.

But the ceiling was still white. Old Mr. B got up and went on marking the television program -- whatever color the handwriting was. His picks were "The Mystery of World War II" and a movie about bees on a planet. He wanted to have a beehive.

Then came the stamps. One day, when he took the letter out of the mailbox, he found that all the stamps on the envelope were round. The stamps are jagged, colorful and contain one Zloty of Polish currency. The size of a coin. He started and became hot. Ignoring the pain in his knees, he quickly went upstairs, opened the door, and, with his shoes on, ran into the room with the letters. When he saw that the stamps on all the envelopes, including the old ones, were round, his head began to spin.

He sat down in a chair and began to search his memory for the shapes of the stamps. He's not crazy -- why do these round stamps seem so ridiculous to him? Maybe he didn't notice the stamps before. The tongue, the sweetness of the glue, the paper he stuck to the envelope... Sometimes the letter is so thick that the envelope is bulging. The envelope is blue. He licked the sealing glue with his tongue, then pressed it firmly with his fingers so that the mouth of the envelope would stick. Flip the envelope around a few times -- yes, the stamp is square. That's for sure. But now the stamps are round. How is that possible? He covered his face with the palm of his hand and sat in a quiet emptiness that was right under his nose and could appear at any moment. Then he went to the kitchen to open the shopping bag.

The female neighbor accepted the gift with some trepidation. She looked suspiciously at the carefully arranged silk shirts and sweaters in the box. But when she saw fur clothes, she couldn't hide the wistful light in her eyes. Mr. B hung them on the door.

They sat down at the table and had a piece of cake and a cup of tea. Then old Mr. B summoned up his courage.

"Lady Stasia," he began in a very slight voice. The woman looked up at him curiously. Her vivid brown eyes were surrounded by deep wrinkles. "Madam Stacia, something is not quite right. Tell me, do socks have seams? The long seam from the toe to the elastic?"

Stunned by the question, she was silent for a moment, leaning back slightly in her chair. College "dear of, you talking about? What has seams? Of course there is."

"Has it always been there?

"What were you thinking when you said, 'Not always'? Of course, all the time."

"And what colour does the ballpoint pen write, Miss Stasia?" He asked again.

Before she could answer, he pressed again:

"Blue, isn't it? Since the invention of the ballpoint pen, the writing has been blue."

The smile slowly faded from the woman's wrinkled face.

"Don't be so anxious. There are also red ones and green ones."

"Yes, but they're usually blue, right?"

'Would you like some wine? Would you like a flavoured wine?"

He wanted to say no because he couldn't drink, but he thought it was a little unusual. So he agreed.

The woman went to the closet, took a bottle of wine from the liquor cabinet, and carefully poured two glasses. Her hands were shaking slightly. Everything in the room was white and blue -- blue-striped wallpaper, white sofa covers and blue sofa pillows. There was a bunch of blue and white fake flowers on the table. The flavoured wine gives off sweetness in their mouths, pushing dangerous words back deep into their bodies.

"Tell me," he began carefully, "do you feel that the world has changed? As if..." He was looking for words. "We can't hold it?"

She seemed relaxed and laughed again.

"Of course, my dear, you are quite right. Time is a rush. That's why it happens. That is to say, time itself is not in a hurry, but we stop thinking and cannot seize it as before."

He shook his head helplessly in incomprehension.

'We're like the old hourglass, you know dear? I read about it. In such an hourglass, the grains of sand are rounded because they are constantly being poured back and forth, and they are polished so that the grains of sand can flow faster. The old hourglass is always faster. You know what? Like our nervous system, it's tired, you know, it's tired, it's like passing through a leaky sieve when stimuli fly at it, and that's why we feel like time passes faster."

"What about the other stuff?"

"What other things?"

"You know..." He tried to make up an excuse, but coming up with nothing, he said bluntly, "Have you ever heard of a rectangular stamp?"

"Interesting." 'she replied, pouring them another drink.

"No, never heard of it."

"Or a wine glass with a spout. Oh, see, just like here. They've never been..."

"But..." She had hardly begun to speak when he cut her off.

"... It's either a jar that turns left and opens, or it's zero on the clock where it used to say twelve o 'clock, and oh, and..." He was too angry to speak.

She sat opposite, her hands folded on her skirt lap, and suddenly gave up the argument, polite and correct, as if she had lost all power. Only a slight frown on her forehead indicated that the position was uncomfortable. She looked nervously and disappointedly at her elderly neighbour.

That night, as usual, he went to bed in his wife's bed, where he had been sleeping since her funeral. He pulled the covers under his nose and lay on his back in the dark, listening to his own heartbeat. Unable to sleep, he got up and pulled his wife's pink nightgown out of the closet. He held it to his chest and let out a little SOB from his throat. The pajamas helped him. He fell asleep, and then everything stopped.