Women… Fiction… stockholm… More coffee..

” You know, a gentleman always allows a lady to maintain her own fiction” she said

It was an unusually pleasant sunny day in Sweden and we were drinking coffee in one of the street cafés when we saw a woman passing by with tears for obvious and only reasons and Ertyass commented on her, in her usual unique style.

“Come on! Give me a break” I said, “are you suggesting women live their lives artificially, knowing that they are living in fiction?” I asked.

“Well it’s a matter of perspective; fiction can be as real as reality depending on how much feeling or tangibility you can give to it. Who can say I am real and not a fictional character to you in your mind like all other real people interacting with you, and are you not a fiction to yourself, a character in a book you are writing and reading everyday with all these characters dancing around. Fiction is just another dimension or the state of matter or reality my dear, existing somewhere beyond the usual solid, liquid or gaseous states. Fiction is what our soul feels and wants to feel, rest is all felt more by what you call reality…. And you know sometimes we have to take the matter in our own hands no matter what state they are in” she ended her argument mixing both the fictional and real matters in one place.

I replied, “but since when you started to care about your fiction, I thought you were the carpe diem class , living your life in the moments”

“Well off course I am the carpe diem class and my fiction lives as much in present tense as well, but let me share a little womanly secret with you…call it our sense of insecurity or unacceptability of our current state of being but we women think of life, as ugly and unbearable, as we think of our aging body, face and existence…. and just like we try to hide our body behind make-up, fashion and corsets, we hide our life and soul behind fiction. We create realities around us in order to hide our real sense of self” she spread her words looking somewhere deep in the open air.

A long pause…. We both fell silent … the air became heavier . She looked sad, a sadness that comes when someone loses his virginity for the first time, opening him/herself to a new person expecting to be accepted the way he/she is… I saw the same tears in another woman passing by again… the time imprisoned itself in a garbage paper not trying to go anywhere being pushed by the heavy air… the leaf-art on the coffee’s frothy surface started loosing its momentary existence…the heaviness of the air being felt by both of us only, amid passing young crowds of boys and girls giggling and gossiping in an otherwise free Stockholm…..

I broke the silence after a long pause… “you know you look more beautiful when you perform yourself in sadness”

“And now you are trying to maintain my fiction , isn’t it? “ she taunted.

“ Don’t you want me to be a gentleman ? I smiled.

“ Yes! Perhaps my fiction wants you to be and not just for me but for all my types… ” she smiled too.

And we started sipping from our cappuccino-thoughts again, in the thought-café of hers… in the free-breathing mind-streets of mine… in the real world of fiction…. in the free city of Stockholm…………