Haje’s Brain

It’s a warm night after a long day of not much but rain. On the bus, the windows on the upper deck are completely foggy, and only the most optimistic (or least secure) of bus passengers decided to make a half-hearted attempt at picking a fight against the persistent mist on the windows.

My last step up the stairs to the top part of the double-decker bus is interrupted by the sudden jolt as the (as usually, hopelessly inept) bus driver cuts off a cyclist as he rolls the multiple-tonne colossus of steel, glass and flesh into action again.

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I’m trying to do things, but my short term memory… Useless. It’s gotten worse recently. I think. Why is it dark? Is there a light switch around here somewhere? I can hear rain. Slow dripping against the floorboards. There must be a leak.

Is this even my house? (more…)

Thoughts swirling around in my brain have a strange conformity to them. This only breaks apart when my stream of consciousness gets reduced to a thick-running sludge of semi-consciousness, partially alleviated and ineffectively combated with Lemsip. (more…)

“fuck”, she said quietly, answering a question that was still lingering in the air, like an infinitely sustained echo between the bare walls of my apartment. The very same apartment we had spent two days packing away into banana boxes, binliners and the boxes we picked up from the local supermarket at one of our midnight shopping runs.
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I did a lot of writing on Trinidad. I must have started at least 14 short stories. None of which I finished – some I abandoned after a couple of paragraphs, others after a few pages. But I’m writing again. (more…)

The silence is laying still, like a heavy leaden rug over the landscape. Nothing out of the ordinary, perhaps, but it seems a lot more noticable today. The silence is sharply contrasting my heartbeat, which sounds like mortar rounds beating into the vast nothingness surrounding me. (more…)

The new year is not without its own surprises. Just like the old one wasn’t. It is a bit like starting to bike when the pedals are pointing straight up and down. You can’t. There is that tiny little forward motion you need to be able to step down. And to be able to move the pedal forward, you have to be moving forward. Which was how the whole drill started in the first place – the wish of going forward….
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This is a story I wrote quite some time ago. The story behind this story is about as complicated as the story itself (yet, fortunately, considerably shorter)…
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I was about 9 years old, I think. It must have been around then. That summer, we had moved to a new house, and I spent the next few months getting new friends. Especially the boy who lived on the other side of the road. We used to run through our garden, down to the road running in the little valley between our two houses. We’d steal some strawberries or perhaps some apples on the way, although stealing from your own garden probably isn’t stealing in the first place. We spent the summer shooting with airguns at paper targets and tin cans. We smoked grass. Not marijuana, but hollow pieces of reed. It tasted awful and had no intoxicating substance of any kind, but it made us feel old. Mature. Men. We were men indeed….
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