{"id":22234,"date":"2024-09-13T12:40:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-13T10:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/?post_type=stsp_text&p=22234"},"modified":"2024-09-15T11:56:34","modified_gmt":"2024-09-15T09:56:34","slug":"six-moments","status":"publish","type":"stsp_text","link":"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/en\/text\/six-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Six moments"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Surface<\/strong>

I used to be able to walk on water. The trick was to make yourself light by thinking light thoughts. You then walk quickly, looking at the horizon, skipping with your bare soles (you do have to take off your shoes) on the surprisingly buoyant surface. It was a limited skill. It would only work on very flat, still water; impossible at sea, or in a crowded, summertime lake. Even in the best of circumstances, I would only be able to walk a few steps, after which I would sink like a stone, without protest, with the pleasure of surrender. Anyway, I regret forgetting this technique, if I did forget; maybe I just stopped trying, if I ever did try, and one day, like a foreign language learned in youth, it will emerge again.



Dinner party<\/strong>

I invited some buffalo over for dinner. It was a big success. We talked about genocide and time management, recent feminist trends in agricultural studies, the illusory nature of sensory experience, all while they grazed with gusto.
So fast did the night go by that when they had left it felt like a tornado had razed my apartment, leaving me broken in the ruins of what used to be mine. But then it is just those kind of exaggerations that buffalo cannot stand, I thought to myself, still feeling the shadow of their presence.



Earthfork<\/strong>

Because the aardvark entered the English language much later than the other Germanic animals it didn’t acquire a proper pronunciation yet, saying termiet <\/em>when it means termite, nacht <\/em>instead of night, and graaf <\/em>when it means grave, which it never does, for it always means dig.
After three centuries of ridicule it has got fed up with its name, its fame and its tongue (which is rather longue) and these days will only respond when addressed as Orycteropus tubulidentata<\/em>.



Appearances<\/strong>

When I drove home by myself for the first time in my life and daylight faded and the road before me became a play of floating lights, I wasn\u2019t sure if my eyes were to blame (I was trying out new lenses) or if I had never paid attention to how dark the darkness gets. Had I failed to notice that of other cars, you can only see their gear- and headlights, disembodied like pairs of eyes in a cartoon closet? On second sight, even those lights lacked stability (flickering, double-imposed), which seemed to get worse over time. My vision deteriorated as panic gripped me. I made sudden, rash decisions, changing lanes at the wrong time. Loud honking on various sides reminded me of the world of things that was hidden behind these appearances. But even in my panic things seemed unreal. Concreteness only returned when I stopped at a petrol station. I took a deep breath. Petrol and cow dung. The trucks lay asleep on the parking lot. The petrol station shone brightly, but it was closed. On the road I had temporarily escaped, a cone of light came by, followed by a car. I stared at a line of trees behind the road, all standing still, before fields and fields that were just lying there, not moving at all.



Convicts<\/strong>

In the aquarium I stood staring for a long time (as if turned into stone) at two convict blennies, as the sign informed me that these fish were called, although at first I thought they were sea snakes. Their heads peering out of separate openings of a hollow rock that was lying on the bottom, they looked like the snakes on Medusa\u2019s head in a picture I had once seen, except that those snakes were silvery, while these two were blue with yellow stripes. Nor was there anything dreadful about them. They were very endearing. One of them was using its broad mouth, as broad as its head, to move the gravel inside of the rock to a heap outside. It would take a mouthful of stones (they were stones compared to the size of its head), spit them out on the heap outside, swim back again and repeat. Clearly it wanted to use its arms, but it couldn\u2019t, because it did not have any. Meanwhile the other one lay almost motionless, only undulating with the water, seemingly unperturbed by its partner\u2019s busy arrangements.



First date<\/strong>

Like a flower that comes up the first warm week of March, only to be frozen the next day, or like a coup attempt that fails at the first meeting, because both attendants turn out to be infiltrators, or like a planet that enters another\u2019s sphere of gravity, and then catapults out into the great emptiness, or maybe like a novel that is started one night with all the correct preparations, and then when the silence is there, and the implausible supply of pens and paper, and the vanitas skull on the tablecloth, and the glow of the streetlight outside, and the distance from all that requires distance, and the closeness to all that requires closeness, yes, much like that novel that turns out to be only a moment, our relationship never really got off the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surface I used to be able to walk on water. The trick was to make yourself light by thinking light thoughts. You then walk quickly, looking at the horizon, skipping with your bare soles (you do have to take off your shoes) on the surprisingly buoyant surface. It was a limited skill. It would only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22135,"template":"","categories":[60,11],"class_list":["post-22234","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-29","category-lyrik"],"yoast_head":"\nSix moments - stadtsprachen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/stadtsprachen.de\/de\/text\/six-moments\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale:alternate\" content=\"de_DE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Six moments - stadtsprachen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Surface I used to be able to walk on water. The trick was to make yourself light by thinking light thoughts. 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