Sinister: Everyone's dreaming of all they've got to live for

[Dimitra Daisy]

Lately I remembered a night, sometime around the time I was fifteen… lying 
in bed at night and listening to the radio in the silence and the darkness. 
I heard two girls, that couldn’t have been much older than I am now, but 
then seemed to somehow belong to another world, read out something like…
“Self-alienated, a man doesn’t even communicate with himself. Deep inside 
him lives a scared child that he hides well, especially from other men. If 
however a woman discovers it then he has another mother and he’s definitely 
lost. The second castrates what the first one has left. Only when men sing 
and drink together are they (temporarily) free.”

(Of course, I didn’t remember that by heart for six years. The girl was 
reading it off a magazine that was reviewing the book it was written in, and 
the next day –back at those days, I was patient enough to stay in bed and 
wait for the next day - I found the magazine in our living room, cut the 
pages out, glued them together and kept them. It surprises me that six years 
and five times of moving later I knew exactly where they were. If I have 
killed it in the process of translating it, forgive me. It was weird in the 
first place anyway.)

Yesterday, or the day before – at three am, it’s not today but it’s not 
tomorrow either- I went back to the flat I used to live. It’s strange how 
much I know and remember that place, how the way the walls are painted and 
the view from the back windows and everything is familiar – so familiar I 
can still walk in it in the dark. It is also strange how much the boy that 
lives there is familiar, everything down to the way he messes up his room 
and the way he piles up things. And it’s strange how even the things he 
never did when I used to live in the next room are familiar too, how he 
looks more and more like he always looked in my dreams.

We sang along to Hefner together in the half-light, ‘let me put it to you 
this way, you will get hit by a bus, you will fall from your bicycle’, and 
for a while, it felt as, as will put it, it could alter the structure of 
reality itself. He asked me if the song said that you’ll get hit by a track 
if you do bad things, and I fell over giggling and couldn’t stop for a 
while, it made him turn the volume up and look the other way. Apart from 
giggling, I felt like crying too, I was moved to tears by the fact that 
someone can say that. And by the fact that someone can be a part of you and 
at the same time keep surprising you.

He asked me to imagine how the room would looked if you were standing at the 
window opposite, he said it would look like a movie, and I didn’t know what 
to say first: you’ve always looked like a movie, or do you think I haven’t 
imagined that already? I used to live here remember? But it was innocence, 
not carelessness or something like that, and it made me make lists of the 
reasons I like boys. In my head, of course, and with a clarity and accuracy 
that for my dazzled mind was surprising.

Their smell – and they’re being different – being made in a different way – 
and the wonder of two differently made creatures coming near –

I suppose that’s how far it went.

I said I think the song is about how all the things you could have done but 
didn’t do will mean nothing when you’re dead, which could be anytime, so do 
something pretty while you can. I just like it for the way it says it.

I had woken up that day with an urge to play It Could Have Been A Brilliant 
Career in the silent house, in a theatrical way. To make a mixtape starting 
with it. To tell the world something, anyway, starting with it. Which would 
be strange, if not inexplicable, had it not been for the feeling of loss 
that’s been haunting me the last few days. Loss of what, you might ask. I’ll 
probably say I don’t know. I might be lying about it.

Cause all that was only for a while, and  then he had to go and do different 
things with different people, and me, I don’t know what I had to do.


I remembered that night, though. I remembered the silence and the darkness 
that made me more open to all feelings. And what the girl read out loud. In 
a way, I didn’t understand it; and in another way, I understood everything – 
or at least the feelings behind everything, which, for me, is everything. 
And it was weird. How it broke my fifteen-year-old heart – at the time I had 
no expectations from any boy whatsoever, so I was free to feel the sadness 
of it. And how I’ve lived the rest of my life with a vague knowledge of it.

Whatever it actually is I’m talking about.

Why is falling love so difficult? And why does it scare people when they 
want to fall in love anyway? And why do people run away from things? And why 
do people do things that don't really make them happy? And why is letting go 
of your fears so hard?

Oh, please, do something pretty while you can,

Dimitra
xxx



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