The Bullet Biter

When it comes to love, I always follow one rule: kill it before it dies. Pull the plug, fire the gun, serve the final blow. Until recently, I had a very singular (if a bit narrow) vision of the future: as a rigid, endless, long-term concept – a circle, not a line. Future to me meant eternity, the closest thing to forever that our mortal nature allows. And that’s why I never cared for fixed-term love - I just didn’t understand it. Writing this down just makes me realise the absurdity of the self-imposed rule I have lived by for so long. I think about it rationally and wonder how out of touch with reality I must have been to truly believe that the only choice I ever had was between always and never, how crazy I was to think that the in-between is nothing but a bridge you cross frantically to get from one end to the other, without ever stopping to contemplate the view from the middle. I used to dress my lovers with layers of hope and potential. I tried them on like shoes,

The other day I was sitting by the small window in the corner of my living room. A seemingly insignificant spot in a new place, candid and clean, yet permanently stained with a premature cocktail of meaning and memory. I was having a cup of bad coffee as I made a list of all the things we still need to buy for the new house. A rug, a new lock for the bathroom, a TV set. I was trying to think of wallpaper for my room, choose a colour and a pattern, something that speaks to me and about me. I’ve always striven to describe myself through my surroundings: every object and stain on the wall must have history and sense and meaning. But that’s not easy to do when you have no idea who the hell you are anymore. I went from being a person with the strongest sense of self to being… someone else, a stranger to myself, a different man in a new house and a new skin. What had changed in the past six months? Well, things have happened. God, sometimes it feels as if, in my life, things never s

I spent most of my existence wishing that life were like a movie. As a child, I would sit on a fluffy rug at my grandma’s house, glued to the screen of a vintage television set for countless hours. I stood way too close to the telly, mouth open, wishing that that shiny box would one day turn into my own rabbit hole, and that I would slip into a perfectly edited world where remarkable stories awaited me. When I realised I had grown too big to fit into my TV, I had to come up with another plan. I decided that I would live the most extraordinary life, that the plot of my existence would be so intricate and wonderfully told that it wouldn’t fit on the back of a DVD case. It was the beginning of a Hollywood-induced delirium that continues to this day. I woke up one day, at age 23, to realise that I had made it… kind of. All the time spent watching Nora Ephron movies and memorising dialogues from 90s chick-flicks finally paid off. Sure, my life was far from perfect. But I had m