lovesummermarx

[lovesummermarx]

Chapter 1: Love, Slavoj, Sisyphos

Slavoj, that was my mom's boyfriend's name. He had a house in Nový Jičín and behind us, I mean, he always came to see my mom on weekends. We lived in a small, cramped flat in a block of flats in Brno, Lesná, and I was whenever there was that terrible noise - my mother moaning, Slavoj and the creaking of the bed, I cursed not only this stupid apartment, but also my father. "Your father was an asshole for leaving us two and losing the most precious thing he ever had," my mom always used to say, and she wanted me to believe those words, but I was I knew she didn't believe them either. My father left us when I was about five. And we've been talking about him ever since. we haven't heard from him since. He's joined the endless line of runaway fathers waiting in line for milk and cigarettes. Just from the fragments of memories that he was in, and that I've unreasonably I knew that he had never led a family life he didn't want to have a family. By the time I was five, we were moving almost every year. It was always to a different city and county. He had trouble finding work, making friends, finding fun, and so often and sometimes he'd just disappear from the house and come back in a week. or even two weeks.

The night he disappeared, for good, we also thought that in a week or he'd be back in a week or two. I'd been hoping for almost a year that I'd hear the doorbell ring, he'd come with a peace offering and everything would be fine. My mom hoped even longer, about ten years. In fact, once she met Slavoj, her regular evening crying sessions in the living room with Turkish soap operas or her mental breakdowns where she would hysterically call him to her. Are you so awake in the middle of the night that you hear some screaming, you came into the living room, there was a Turkish soap opera on the TV. on the couch, and my mom was screaming, "Gustav, come back to me, please! What did I do to you, what did I do to you? I did to you? I still love you and I won't stop. Gustav, come back to us."

One day, Slavoj was sitting in our kitchen, uncomfortably sipping the soup he had been given his mother had made him. Slavoj was a weirdo. Apart from loudly slurping any liquid that he consumed, Slavoj would have these weird tics where he would rub his nose with his hand and sniffling. His mother sat next to him and looked at him almost lovingly, which I I didn't get it at all, which is why I stood in the doorway and looked at the two "lovebirds" or rather, beauty and the beast, or more accurately, "beast and the beast". "You can't live in this apartment," I resolved to give my mother my opinion on our living situation, which frustrated me because we were so close to each other, which in turn I didn't mind so much with my mother, but with Slavoj it was unbearable.

"Are you starting again? You know you're going to get wrinkles," said her mother, laughing, …and she laughed, of course, how could it be anything but stupid? Slavoj, spoon in mouth, smiled too. She looked bitterly at my mother, but she didn't care and continued her provocation: 'Live in the moment, here and now, and be happy. Imagine if we were, for example. Eskimos…" she laughed. "And lived in their needles of ice," she finished, and then directly she burst out laughing in the illusion that she had pulled off the joke of the decade. Slavoj started laughing too, that …his soup came out of his mouth and he chuckled. "Give it up," I said venomously. It came out almost automatically, since I've often said that to Christopher when he's being an asshole, but I'll tell you about it later. Immediately after I said it to Slavoj, I was a little worried about what to say. he'd say. But morally I thought it was okay, he deserved it. I couldn't stand the way he was his sipping and his presence, his invasion of our apartment. Slavoj cleared his throat, looked at me, then at my mother, and started snorting and laughing. "He said, 'turn yourself in,'" he repeated in a high-pitched voice, probably trying to parody me, which made my own mother laugh maniacally. So I went to my to my room. Behind me I fucked the door, which was the last thing the two clowns in in the kitchen laughed and then it was quiet, except for the occasional snort from Slavoj.

This happened to me quite often, and not just at home. People didn't really want to take me seriously. They found me a little emotional, unbalanced, and they didn't think I had any perspective of my behavior, but that wasn't true. I wasn't like the other girls, like the ones from in my class, who drink vodka and coke with the football players from Zbrojovka and then and then they spread their legs, or on Wednesday I'm going to have sex with the midfielder, and on Thursday he's coming the striker, Friday is the defender's and Saturday is the goalkeeper's. In my spare time I often went to these cosplay parties. Always I'd meet other people, even though it was practically the same people in different costumes. We sat in Lužánky, which is a park in Brno, and played at being the people we are. we never were, and we ate sandwiches. It was fun, sometimes. I put down the weight of my of my personality and imagined that I was intelligent but calculating lawyer Kim Wexler from Better Call Saul. It felt good because my cosplay friends, dressed mostly in anime cosplay, took me seriously, even though they didn't take me seriously, just what I was doing. When I didn't want to be Kim, I was Queen Daenerys Targaryen or Rue of Euphoria. I kept my distance, and through it all, I was able to act reasonable. and adult, unlike my peers. The problem was more my mom, who was stuck in when my dad left and she still thought I was this five-year-old girl who was looking out for herself and so she preferred to make decisions for me.

"The room will be painted pink again," she called once. I replied, "But Mom, I'm not nine anymore, I want a black room." V my 12-year-old self was going through an emo phase. But whatever. Guess what it's like ended? Yeah, just like that, with fucking pink walls. It's like my opinion didn't really matter, like I lost my autonomy. This apartment was all about me. without me was the motto, and the Munich Agreement served as a guide. And then Slavoj started to interfere, who, quite unexpectedly and surprisingly. parroting his mother's views. "Black lipstick doesn't suit you, Mom's right," says the redneck, and he snots on the sofa where Mom used to watch soap operas. I missed that time, because in at least we were alone then, and my mother sometimes forgot I existed, and so I I could do half of what I wanted. As for school, that wasn't so great either. They didn't take me seriously by my classmates or my teachers. One day I wore a corset and a 70-something-year-old history teacher gave me a creepy look in class and then said out loud: "Nina," so I by the way, "you're such a class slut, aren't you?" The boys in the class were going nuts in the classroom, only Christopher didn't laugh, or did he, but I didn't notice? Of course, after that scene, I never wore that corset again, because just looking at it brought back memories of of that scene, the way the horror of the Vietnam jungle comes back to American veterans movies.

I didn't have a lot of fun with the girls in my class, I thought they were so stupid and unattractive. Either they were the classic generic straight girls who like football players, wearing skinny jeans, making smoke with their dumb vaporizers on in the bathroom. They post an idiotic selfie on instastories every day, and they usually play the new Yzomandias or Nik Tendo. The other group are the nerds who, between themselves and between themselves and some boy, all the volumes of Tolstoy's War and Peace. The only person I've ever had any more frequent contact with in class contact in class was Christopher. We were longtime classmates, since we went to kindergarten, elementary school and then high school. He lived in the same apartment building two floors above and so I walked to school with him every day alone. If we hadn't known each other since since we were kids, I don't know if I would have even talked to him. He was a little strange. He's had a thing for me ever since we started high school. He always wanted to, to date him, and he even once told the whole class that I was his girlfriend and that and that's why we went to school together every day. I was so embarrassed then to explain. I didn't talk to him about it for like a month, but I finally I forgave him because I didn't have anyone to talk to anyway. Then these things came after in fits and starts.

At thirteen, on a bench in front of a block of flats, he said: "Hey, Nina, don't you want to come with me to go out with me?" "No." At 14 on a ski slope, "Nina, I think I have feelings for you and I was wondering if you …you have feelings for me, too." "No, I don't." At fifteen at 1:30 in the morning on the playground, he started with this: "Hi, I'd like to tell you to say something to you." "Well," I said, already sensing what was coming. "I've got a crush on this girl- " he stammered, and I knew what was coming next. go on, so I paused. "No, I'm not going out with you. Dude, I don't even know if I like guys." I explained, but I guess that wasn't enough and more questions came. "You don't like guys? So you're a lesbian?" "No? I'm not really into guys like you," I told him, and after that he started pouting for like a month, but eventually he forgave me and we started talking again. Probably it was for the same reasons that I forgave him for the Nina at my place sleeping incident.

But what I told him then was true. I wasn't into guys like him, but I wasn't into girls either, except I was still into those things I hadn't dealt with them. I didn't really know anyone who was like him. He was a sui generis person. He had a weird sense of "humor" as he called it, but he didn't even humor because he was always talking about suicide and that he was going to throw up or overdose or probably drowning, and then he said he was just kidding. He could talk like that for hours and I would listen to him talk for hours and I didn't care what he was talking about, at least it wasn't silent. I didn't make anything of it as he said this all the time and to try and find him for help when he never did anything was pointless anyway. He also liked to watch anime, so I'd get a notification on my phone that Christopher was sending me a picture. Usually it was some anime girl who was doing ahegao, which is a little face that expresses a girl's pleasure at orgasm in anime porn, Google it. A lot of times, even that asshole begged me to make that face and take a picture and send it to him. But with this. I always told him to fuck off. Sometimes he had nice moments, he could make me laugh, ask me how I was, say goodnight, have similar opinions about our stupid classmates, and every now and then he'd send me funny memes, but sometimes he'd send me that demented ahegao face, ideally all over of cum.

"Dude, don't send me these weird faces again, please. Or I'll turn you off notifications, as it wakes me up at two in the morning, for example,” I told him when we once They went to school in the morning. "Yeah well, I won't anymore, sorry," says Christopher with a very serious expression and then smiles. He looked quite nice like that, but then he blew it like he always did everything. "Don't you want to ahegao for me? Just once, now, please." and tried to make dog eyes at me. "Choke on it, asshole," I gasped, and he chuckled as usual. It's weird, I thought that if I told someone something like that, whether it's Christopher or Slavoj, so they are sorry, shocked or angry, but those people just laughed. All around me are suddenly old cynics. The day after this, when we were walking to school in the morning, it hit him again. "Nina, I feel like I understand you more than anyone, and I know what's best for you. It's me And you know who's the best for me? You. I don't think I need any other girl in my life You. I don't want to be just a friend. I want to show you how big my heart is and how I can love," the kid in the white sweatshirt that had all those fucked-up ahegao faces on it told me. The guy who didn't even really listen to what I was saying when I rejected him told me he understood me more than anyone. It looked so ridiculous and at the same time sad. Brother, you want to express your feelings to me for the eighth time, and you're going to wear this ugliness that's inspired by porn from the Land of the Rising Sun? Like really?

So neither was my best friend, which the individual probably was. He never took me seriously and even though I rejected him so many times, he kept coming up with this pseudo-romantic bullshit and Sisyphus hoped it would work this time. I turned him down and his boulder rolled down the hill, but I knew he was slowly pushing him up the hill again. That day was the day when one of my generic classmates was probably doing a photorealistic version of ahegaa for some football midfielder, so that day was obviously Wednesday. I came home from school and saw Stanley's sandals in the hallway. It was Wednesday, wasn't it? Was he here, or had he just forgotten them? Unfortunately, the worse option was a reality. Before I went into the kitchen, I heard a snot. So he was definitely here. I peeked through the door and there he was with my mum, talking about something. When I came in, they fell silent. 'Nina, we have to tell you something,' said my mum, with a rather serious expression on her face, and stroked Stanley's hairy hand, and he sniffed happily. I thought of the worst. Mum had had Stanley make a baby for her.