Mikko Soiniemi - A Day in the City

But why then is this guy next to me smiling in that fashion. I don't like it. It is like a joke that I don't understand, I feel left out and at the center of attention at the same time. He is smiling a little too much for my taste. I swear I only looked for a short second. Now he nods in my direction. What am I supposed to do? Do I know him? But if that was the case, he would have said something, wouldn't he? But would you say something to somebody here? I nod back, trying my best to smile a little, that should do it. What was that, he raised his eyebrows, what is that supposed to mean? I saw it, he raised his eyebrow and then grinned. That sicko, as if there was something to laugh about.

It's been minutes since anything came and I feel even worse now, he will have noticed it by now. He might already suspect I have some kind of problem. I feel so uncomfortable that any chance of success is long gone. Relief is far out of reach. It is all because of him, standing there staring, grinning. What a sick guy. Oh no, not this too now. I feel it coming, why does it all have to happen at once. He could have just waited a little longer outside, all would have been fine, but instead he had to come now. It is like he planned it, I am sure he was just standing outside waiting for this. This creeper, he thinks he is funny, that is sick, really he has a problem. What kind of man does something like that? I can feel it racing through my bowels, but what can I do? It is getting hard to breathe, I switched to something that is more gasping than breathing. That son of a... Look at him, he is just standing there playing all innocent. What impudence, how he turns his head and fakes this questioning look. This is so low. I am sure this gets him going, he enjoys this, that's his obsession. Like a little worm I lay in front of him and he just stands there and smiles. That pervert.

Finally, he zips up, turns around and leaves. What a change, I feel free. Free of this maniac, I am in a flow and one with myself, a deep breath, more a sigh comes across my lips. It is from way deep down and feels fantastic. I have to smile, he wasn't that big anyway.

In my life I have heard so many things about what home is. The warm feelings, childhood, your mother country, your home town. No one could ever explain to me, what home means, what is your home. Some people say it is a feeling rather than a place. And I must admit, they are right. At least they are closer to the truth than most people are. It is a feeling, but it is not just a feeling. It is many feelings at the same time, it is a place and the feelings and the people. That is what home is, a moment. It is a moment which you see and feel as home.

Let me tell you what home is for me, it is not a country, it is not a continent. It is far from the city or street I live in. My home is a room, it is not my room. It is a room that belongs to my family, it is in our apartment. It is the living room of our apartment, in which I spent countless hours. It is the place where all the family comes together, after school, university and work. It is where our lives take place. Everything else is unimportant, it is this one room in which we are a family, in which we are more than just solitary creatures living a plain existence. This place is, where we meet, where we share and hate each other – sometimes. The place that I call home is this living room, it has a TV that is always running, it also has a computer which is online permanently. But that is the magic of this room and place and moment, both of them are unimportant. What counts is us, the other things don't even distract us. They are there, but not more. My home is the moment in which I am sitting at the endlessly running computer peeking at the TV and I know everyone is there and will be there forever. My brother is sitting on the sofa after school, which he considers to suck. My sister is reading something and complaining about something. My dad is at work but the phone is ringing, it is him, we all know that. He wants to know what happened today, any news? We all know there are no news, it is all the same, it is perfect. My mother is in the kitchen preparing lunch, she is almost done and tells us to get ready for lunch. We argue what to watch on TV while eating lunch, but it doesn't matter after all, as we will be louder than the TV anyway. I can smell the food, I can hear my brother, the dog is begging for some attention, the sun outside is shining in our not really taken-care-of-yard. It is very warm and we switch on the fan, before we get the ice cubes for our drinks. No one thinks of tomorrow, we are just together, there is no doubt, there is no fear. We will be together like this forever. Many things changed since then, but this will always be home.

Once upon a time there was a man who said he didn't believe in anything he could not prove to exist. He lived his life being happy because everything he ever saw he knew was really there. When he walked down the street, he knew that the people in the street really existed, that the concrete he was walking on was really there, that the sky and the clouds above him were there and you could prove it. His whole life was centered on the idea that he knew what exists and why and how, because in the end everything was perfectly logical and all a matter of science. His life was well-ordered, because whatever happened to him had an explanation, everything had its sense. Even the bad things that he encountered in his life were always just the result of something that made sense. If somebody he was close to left him, it was just logical because people go their own way. If somebody did not like him, it was logical because they did not match up in their personality and their pheromone smell did not mix well. If somebody died, it was logical because humans have a limited life span, their functions cease, their life ends. They turn into compost and become part of the cycle again. He acknowledged the fact that there was no higher power in this world, that the world itself was the power. The system was the only thing that existed and it only existed because of the people in it. Everything had its place and purpose, not in a moral but logical sense. Action and reaction, life was nothing but a constant scientific experiment.

And when the day came that he was about to die, he thought about his life. He thought about the things that made him happy, he thought about the things that made him sad. He remembered the women he loved, the people he cheated. The people he helped and the people he didn't even notice.

And when he closed his eyes for the last time and knew that this was also just part of the equation, that it was nothing but a biological reaction that would end his existence he was not sad, just empty.

She had already forgotten how long she had been standing in front of that mirror. But this was important. “There are enough people out there who obsess over trivialities”, she thought. But this, this was something entirely else. All these girls she knew who stared into the mirror because of nothing, because there was a zit somewhere, maybe. Or who had ridiculous thoughts about their hair, breasts, butts, weight, eyebrows or anything like that. They would go on and on about such unimportant things. Who cared if you weighed a little bit too much, if there were some love handles to be found. Oh, how she hated that term. It was sick and wrong to always search for your own faults, little shortcomings or things that you don’t like about yourself. Why always focus on the negative? Why did people waste their time and energy with complaining and thinking about things that shouldn’t really bother them? All the teenage girls trying to look like the stars on TV, buying the magazine and starving themselves for just a little less weight. All the girls thinking about plastic surgery for their lips, boobs, asses, maybe all of it together. Taken from one place and put into the other. All of this seemed not only utterly ridiculous, it was actually more. It was disturbing and in the end probably bad for anyone involved in it. This here was something else entirely. She was not a little overweight, she didn’t have just some love handles (there it was again…). She was an ugly giant of a woman, she was obese beyond any imagination. And she had tried everything already, sports and diets, saunas and enemas, plastic foil and pills. None of it had made any difference. She was just the blob. Years ago she had already given up hope to ever be normal, to ever be thin and attractive. Yet she still endured the same procedure every single day of her life, most days several times. She would get out an old shirt of hers and put it on in front of the huge mirror in her room. And then look at it, how she filled it out, how it was nearly exploding, how it was unable to keep back her belly, how it made her breasts appear like the flabby pieces of fat they were. How none of it fit into it. And this shirt was only a couple of years still pretty presentable. What had happened to her, how could she have gained so much weight, what did she do to deserve these enormous proportions. It disgusted her to look at herself, yet it was like watching a deadly car crash: one could simply not look away. With morbid fascination she scrutinized every inch of her body, searching for more of the terrible flaws that others didn’t have to suffer from. She put away the shirt and started again to look at her body. Now naked, she realized that her belly was way too big, it was not like the flat piece it should be, but it looked more like she was pregnant, somewhere under the million layers of fat. She turned around and inspected her back, it didn’t look much better. She grabbed at her shoulder and could hold the skin and flesh between her fingers. She moved it between them. It almost made her puke. Underneath her back she didn’t even dare to look at her saggy ass, hanging down there, being of monstrous size. It just hung there, moving on its own she felt, making her nothing but an enormous clown. A caricature of a woman. What are you supposed to do? She watched everything she ate, she counted calories, she went running after each meal, she drank gallons of water. A while ago she was fed up with how all of this was evolving, so she came up with the idea to keep book on her meals and how much of it was left in her body. The fat had to come from somewhere, there had to be a reason why she was like a hot air balloon. Calorie counting had proven to be useless and in fact it was probably just a lie by the big companies anyway, to trick people into eating unhealthy, fatty food. So she came up with a much better method of checking her nutrition. That was when she found out that something was wrong with her. It took her years to see it, but just after a couple of days of keeping record she had the undisputable evidence. Her body was not right, it didn’t function properly. Nature had cheated her, it had given her a broken body that instead of using up the food inserted into it, just grew and grew. Her body was like cancer, it couldn’t be stopped, not contained not even speaking of healed. How could you otherwise explain the discrepancies she found? Not once, not twice, but every single day. She weighed every last piece of her food, every drop of water she drank. All of it. On a very, very precise scale in her kitchen. The result was always the exact same one. When she weighed what came out again, on an equally exact scale in her bathroom, it was always less. Not by much, but it never was the same. So her body was against her, it was playing tricks on her. It just kept a tiny portion of everything for itself to grow. It might not have been much, but it was enough. Every day it did that, think about all the years she had been eating and drinking, it was no wonder she was grotesque like that. Why did the world treat her that unfairly? How can it be that you are cursed with a heinous, treacherous and evidently broken body like that? Others lived happily for 80 years and never had issues with their body, she just turned fourteen and was already a fat wreck. For the fifth time that day, she lifted her enormous body on the scale. Nothing had changed, still the same. She would never be perfect, never be at least acceptable. The scale was proof enough, all her trying, all her fighting, all her discipline, it was for nothing. She still weighed almost 75 pounds.