Ava Zvolenszky

I haven’t seen a shaved man since the fourth grade. Well, except for my father. Otherwise, they are all artists. Suddenly, they all make some kind of art. Most often, photography. Cause it’s handy. And they are all dark and twisted. Misunderstood. Rebels. Most often without a cause. At 40+ years old. But also at 30. And at 25.

We are all stubborn. We each have our own principles, opinions, fixed ideas, theories of the matches, better or worse, more or less anchored in the surrounding reality or the one in our head. And it’s good to have them and believe in them. Up to a point. As long as they do us good.

He put on his green shirt today, the one he hadn’t worn in a century. He used to wear the same one every three days when we met, just because I told him it made his eyes sparkling. Ding, ding, ding! Red alert! Why is he wearing this shirt? Why now?

She is a girl; she is 7 years old and, like all children her age, she has no friends to play with in front of the building as we did. Today, her grandmother allowed her to go down alone in front of the building and to walk only on a well-defined part of the sidewalk so that she could stay within sight of her grandfather, who was on the balcony.

Ideally, you should be at peace and happy with both, but sometimes, maybe most of the time, you are put in a position to choose. We all seek that at the end of the day to be in the arms of the man we love and who loves us, to receive and give affection, to fall asleep peacefully on the sound of rain and his breath, preferably after making awesome lovesex.

I wish this wisdom belonged to me, but apparently, I don’t have enough depth yet, since someone else put it out there before me. I wish I could tell you who, but I don’t remember. All I know is that it got stuck in the back of my brain.

Women are among the most complex subjects in this world, and men complain everywhere that it is difficult to understand. That’s why I say it’s easier to let them cheat with the book on the desk. Natural selection will triumph and make your life easier, helping you to flunk those who simply browsed through the contents and had a keen eye to know from which page to cheat for a better grade or a number.

…And you play her like a yo-yo toy, knocking her to the ground and then raising her to the sky, from the position “today I want you” to “tomorrow I don’t know if I want you anymore,” expect the thread to break. Maybe not all of a sudden, but certainly one day, sooner or later, depending on how much strength the wire has or how much resistance the one at the end of it has.

…In which they want to place things and children. Theirs: their things and their children. Sitting nicely, as they place them, mathematically: the sofa in front of the TV, at the right distance depending on the diagonal, the stove in the kitchen, the painting on the wall, the child in his room with beautiful unicorns drawn on the walls. Concerned about calculating distances, architectural symmetries, bank installments, most often forget to pour love over everything.

“This is who I am!” he says serenely like a ray of sunset, one day when you caught him with the cat in the bag (or with the hand in the cookie jar). As they say in my country, if it suits you…very well; if it doesn’t suit you… well…another one mamma doesn’t bake. And you look at him stupidly, not understanding where is the one who yesterday whispered declarations of love in your ear and promised you that he wants to be better for you than he was for others. And you believed him looking at him with wide eyes in wonder that you had finally found him.