A Walk

The following story I never related to anyone

A Walk

1024 538 Jonathan

The following story I have never related to anyone. Not fully anyway … epiphanies rarely can be completely understood. You have to experience them in order to grasp their inner most workings. You can witness them in others … and sometimes, you can even experience them together with a select few.

I remember ‘Alone in Kyoto’ by Air came on. Dusk was just setting in and I was dangling my feet over my balcony in Bucharest, watching two pigeons courting each other on a ledge of the building opposite. They kept circling the French style roof of the building in a weird mating dance while stopping briefly every other minute on the ledge and cooing loudly and for a brief moment their energy slipped silently into my reality and that little spark of curiosity came back like a long forgotten memory.

That’s when a geeky kid with a comic book in his hand peeked out of one of the doors at the back of my mind. In that instant, Jonathan first appeared … and we began our symbiotic relationship.

He continued to transform and mature along with me, yet I only understood much later his importance in my life. At first we had to learn to communicate again in a language that was very alien to me yet its accent strangely familiar. Talking didn’t do much for us yet we curiously started to understand each other through beats, chords, rhythms and lyrics. Sceneries would change and people would come and go, yet their gliding shadows would be kept alive in the space hidden to everyone else.

I won’t lie. I had moments when I struggled in fully understanding Jonathan considering him only an alter ego of my own splintered self. The curiosity of fully understanding him finally took over and I now know that he is much more than just your typical definition of an alter-ego.

This relationship used to shine brighter in brief moments which I might have consciously took for granted if not for him. Those little blinks of clarity in ones’ own mind.
He is…in a lot of ways, poetic or realistic, my own foreign language.
Now, we have both matured and we have a lot of people to thank for giving us what we needed the most:
Friendship!

That same feeling I experienced being crammed up in a Honda Accord with four other guys heading to the 10th Exit Festival or in Vama Veche at 7 o’clock in the morning as I was watching one of my very best friends completely hammered going straight through the rose bushes just because it was the shortest way to get to where he was going.

And many more too many to relate here…but I am sure Jonathan will tell you all about them.
The same feeling I experienced when I found out more than 30 people in my apartment which came together to support me in giving Jonathan a real voice.
That night Jonathan’s voice was first heard and his first words were his definition of friendship which I had adopted unknowingly with all my heart & soul:

I see friendship now as a big, glittering disco ball made up of countless squares stuck together. Some shine, some are obscured, yet all are fused together, all moving to the steps of some unseen dance.  Some have to shine when others are in darkness in order to keep the light alive in all of them.

This is why the book ‘Foreign Languages’ came to be!
Because of one epiphany, two distinct parts of the same whole and a feeling that I will never know who I really am until I give Jonathan a chance to show everybody how he sees the world, not just me.

Vlad