Glimpses

I haven't written anything for a while, now. Sometimes I feel like thoughts in my head just keep repeating themselves over and over again and I don't see the point in rehashing the same old things. It doesn't make those thoughts any less relevant or perhaps even true, but it shows me that I lack answers, and still more questions in my head arise. It's tiring at times.

So I had a random read at my old writings, and I found this entry in one of my diaries which brought quite a few strange memories back to the fore, somehow. It happened sometime this year, between March and April.

"Last night was very strange and made me feel as though we were suddenly back a century or two in time, in the slums and glum of poverty in the dark entrails of London. Scenes from Dickens’ books kept popping in my mind... To give but an idea of the scene that played out before my eyes. Mum had just come back from a long day at work, and she had quickly prepared her dinner, a bowl of soup and some chicken, when the landlord finally came. He knocked on the door and we barely had time to clean the mess around us.

I hid the cat’s food away from sight, but the rest was as it stood: cluttered and messy because there is simply no room. I was still in my old pajama pants and wore that huge canary jumper (which I wear today, and almost every day because I get so freaking cold in here), my hair held back in a loose ponytail. He came into the room, wearing a black suit, and stood there like a lemon, really, for an awkward moment, not even daring much of a glance around him. He had a folder in his hands that contained the ‘contract’ and direct debit form, and asked for the rent, which is when it all kicked off with mum, of course.

She began to tell him how much money we spend on the electric just to keep the room warm... About 5 quid a day. She told him that it had now been 2 months we hadn’t been able to use the shower, let alone any hot water at all. He opened his eyes wide in fake surprise, muttering that we should have told him, even though we had. He said something like ‘English people always live in cold rooms anyway” in such a dismissive tone that mum just hit back with a “I’m not English so I don’t live like that”.

At some point mum began crying, saying something about living like pigs. I had to bite my lip not to laugh, really, because I knew she was playing with him. Dealing with ruthless, cold and heartless people who only live for profit on the back of more vulnerable people teaches you to play along just enough to survive. You can’t get angry at these people -not in their faces- and you can’t tell them the truth about their abject ways. You show them that you’re as vulnerable and weak as they like to think you are. The truth is that if you let out what you actually have a right to say - the truth of the matter- they would kick you out in the cold in a heartbeat. And then what? What do you do then?

As soon as mum started crying, the landlord seemed to lose his footing slightly.
“M’am, m’am, please, don’t cry,” he mumbled, taking a step forward and bumping into the things scattered in this tiny room, not knowing where to place himself. He looked at me and I simply shrugged, rolling my eyes in desperation. So he suddenly told us we could use the bathroom upstairs where the prostitute used to live - she moved out last week, you see- because there would be hot water there, and we wouldn’t have to pay for it. He says “come Aliska, come, I’ll show you, it’s a nice shower.” So I follow him upstairs, still in those dirty white and pink pants and bright yellow jumper, and I almost want to laugh at my appearance. I wonder for a second when it was exactly that we fell so low, and already we have stepped into the prostitute’s old little room. In a corner there is a shower room but when the landlord tries to turn on the light it doesn’t work, so he must show me the hot water in semi-darkness. I feel the warmth of the gushing water on my hand and I nod as he keeps saying “you see, you see, hot water! Ah, you see, it’s nice, it’s hot, you can shower now.”
I glance at the floor and see the streaks of grease and black dirt all over it and he sees it, too. He mumbles an excuse as to the dirty state of that wonderful shower, saying it will clean itself when we actually use it. I bite my tongue again not to express my disgust at him. I almost want to ask him if he would shower in that filth, but what’s the point when you already know the answer?...

We go back downstairs and mum hands him about half the rent money, and though he seems very hesitant and asks several times for the full amount, we promise to give him the rest as soon as we earn it. He leaves us at last and we are left hating the fact that we are now well and truly stuck in that shit hole. Yes, to move out we would need enough money for a deposit and first month rent, but we have barely enough to pay for this dump.

There are people out there who have known at some point in their lives what poverty was all about. Losing everything or rising from nothingness... One day it might well be that I won’t be poor anymore, or that I won’t have to be poor to follow my beliefs against corruption. I would never want to forget. I could never forget or pretend that these things never happened. They happened, one after the other, each worse than the previous, like a vicious circle. These are horrible times, they really are. They make you question if you are still human, or a poor excuse for a human life. They make you question the people out there feeding and building their wealth on people like us. They make you question the core of human existence, societies themselves and their ruthless order.

Poor people have to exist in order for the rich to be. If you want something, then something else has to give. If you already had a taste of getting what you want, then you might feel sad at the account of some poor sod’s struggles, but you will no longer be able to let go of your wants. That is corruption of the mind. Because of this, and because of the natural envy that grows in most people’s inner hearts, there must always be poor people to grant a wealthy status to a few.

I could die tomorrow and be safe in the knowledge that I lived a very human life in the end. I experienced a wide spectrum of what being human on this Earth really means. I pushed, and pushed against the boundaries of my own mind to try and make sense of what my eyes showed me. It started out like so many others out there, more or less shielded from pure reality thanks to the power of my imagination that fed constantly on a plethora of illusions, but in the end I had to face glimpses of our reality as it stands before us, far removed from any cushioning veil of delusions.

If I try, these days, to remember how it was like back home, when I was still so young and blissfully unaware of the realities of life... It feels like home, a bittersweet wave of wistful remembrance growing hazier as time goes by. It feels like another life, perhaps just a dream I once had."