les petits riens

ph: devina

it carries a chill in me. a brush of fresh air. freedom. dance. literary passion. curiosity. i love spending my days in a secluded place, reading thick paperbacks to kill time. reinhardt jazz blaring in my ears. i'm feeling strong. i'm still running, always running. j'ai finalement perdu dans mes rêves. i would write love declarations in gaelic, smoke my regular mild seven, go out without telling anybody, and shoot letters at the sky. il y avait toujours un vide, un vide très, très nul.

la joie imaginaire

ph: devina

michel legrand. "sous le ciel de paris". the same afternoon, same afternoon rain. same wind, same dryness, same traces of time on the cold linoleum tiles. i keep on inventing by writing, challenging, dreaming. it is through them that i find insanity, life, internal whispers. i still keep the flame he'd left me that september. it was raining back then, too. i was with him at his studio. same cold, white, bleak linoleum tiles. him: "long day." today, my favorite secondhand bookstore. thick hardback. iced coffee. hot apple tea. cigarettes, cigarettes, seemingly no-end of them.

i think about him. mo grà. he's with somebody else now. elle l'aime beaucoup. il n'est pas l'aime. les complications dans deux gens imparfait.

l'une des nuits

ph: devina

dream. reality.traces. missing steps. stories. i felt like floating on a personal wonderland, writing down about the personal wonderland, getting lost in there, just praying. this city. the people. smoke. cigarette butts. gypsy jazz. all i wanted was to avoid confusion and get on with life. this life.

i was probably missing something, searching something, an absolution, a truth, an echo. that would be just one of those nights. i couldn't stop thinking about you, i wanted to say. tell him. the truth. if i were to write a book, it'd be titled if i were anais.

he could be my henry

olive lights

ph: my sis

i once knew a friend who was addicted to jazz and coffee. she said she wanted nothing else than a good place to read; a good, silent place in which she could linger inside her own hardboiled wonderland. she loved to read, she loved to write, she loved to dream. all day long she told me her dreams about exploding over the city like fireworks. my raison d'etre, she said.

dans mon rêverie,

ph: devina

I smoked until the morning sun painted a red line across the horizon, its rise slowly completing the shades of warm colors. Morning was approaching its peak, and in the morning the Avenue had lost its spell. Some tourists were seen coming to the place. Starbucks was opening, I could see the morning-shift staffs rushing in, preparing things. I was still sitting on the wooden ground of the veranda, smoking one cigarette after another. I still had on the heavy leather jacket, broken-pink bodysuit, and old combat boots from last night. I woke up with my hair messed up. I was looking at the sun. The night scenery of the harbor had been crushed under a harsh blow of reality. The dark stage had been bathed in light and people were coming in, filling the theater. The strange flow of time had returned to its forward-moving, fast-paced states.

I tucked on the earphones and replayed the song from last night.

l'hôtél dauphin

ph: devina

Bare skin, butter-colored light filtering through the sheer curtains. she woke up with her hair messed up. she was looking at the sun. The night scenery of the harbor had been crushed under a harsh blow of reality. The dark stage had now been bathed in light and people were coming in, filling the theater. The strange flow of time had returned to its forward-moving, fast-paced states.
she tucked on the earphones and replayed the song from last night, her eyes surfing through the starry windows.

my super space lover, she was my super space lover.

my

super

space

lover.

cold pavements against rubber soles

ph: devina

ryohei's "the game we played" was playing at a loud volume in her earphones. the night air carried a chill, unlikely at first, then after a while her skin had adapted itself to reality. the blasts. the waves. the powerful currents that carried fate contained inside layers of clear membranes. the night's battle was the cold pavements against the thick soles of her combat boots. she thought she could always stomp.stomp.stomp. carried a certain rhythm with her. stomp.stomp.stomp. she only wanted to build her own bridge between fantasy and reality. she would like somebody to tell her that she was only a nice, simple, lost girl who loved to listen to songs which genres are almost undefinable. facts didn't ring true. she was inside a glass ball, and it was not about to let the outer air pressure in through the layers.

even if the air was let in, what would be retrieved inside her was the scent of aged pages in a book.

l'oiseau du soir

ph: devina

love lies down on the cold, cold asphalt ground. the evening afterglow had kindly left the horizon. the streets bathed in mute lights as innocuously as loneliness. she went out with a thick paperback, a pack of cigarettes, a notebook, and a pen in her bag. she'd lie down on the cold asphalt pavement to gaze at the indigo sky. she'd notice the colors passing by, melting into the intense grayness the way the passage of time being downed by the edge of nothingness. the city was asleep. she would be writing down her dreams about a harbor far away. a harbor at the edge of an island framed by a metropolis. the harbor that went along really well with the southern sea as if they were made together in the day of creation. at night, the sea would be so dark it'd be hard to differ it from the night sky. every morning someone would step on one of her velvet boots to wake her up.

and she'd wake up, with a cigarette dangling between her lips, she'd wake up, holding with her the dreams of a harbor far away. a harbor at the edge of an island. love lies down on the cold, cold asphalt ground.

through the lights that filtering in,

the crowds, tapping my finger to ellington's jazz playing in the background, but i said nothing. purely nothing. not that i had not anything to say, but it was simply i wanted to preserve the silence. i had not run out of any word to say, to express, but something inside me wanted me to be silent. i wanted the passage of time to stir nothing in me for now, forget about me for a while, stir whatever inside me really, really slowly i could hardly detect a single movement.

i washed down tom collins with a glass of iced perrier, feeling the faint bites on my tongue. still, i said nothing. he said nothing. we said nothing. we were looking at the crowds alright, savoring every fleeting second of the afternoon, but we said nothing. i waited. and waited. and waited. looking out through the windows where the lights came filtering in.

my idea of personal oasis

"the sand of the times keeps running out from under our feet.

we're no longer standing where we once stood." — haruki murakami

i've been asked by so many people on how i am always able to combine composition and poetry, and my answer to it is that poetic expressions come to me when i can really translate the events in my own life into the music of words. they are something i can really touch and experience from a very close range. sometimes they get too real i can hardly call those words 'dreamy' anymore. i am constantly trying to blur the lines. — V.S.

sud de la frontiere,

a metropolis approaching midnight, minimal external din, closed malls, caged front gates, small coffee shops near the station, a book suitable for a late-night read, languorous jazz, empty-sounding steps on emptied pavements. she wants to write down a story about subway lovers, two persons that, either by fate or named by the stars, keep on running into each other aboard the last train. the girl is a night bird who gets drunk easily and doesn't know how to gamble, but she gets herself drunk literally, beyond the magic of the texts and the journey she always sets for herself. she loves wearing a guy's old leather jacket two sizes too big for herself. she loves wearing boots so tough that make her feel as if she can actually kick someone in the face. the man will resemble the chinese lover in l'amant: tanned skin, small eyes, clad in expensive clothes as if he is to carry the entire weight of the world... on his clothes. he loves milan kundera and henry miller, and all the time he questions the existence of god the way someone questions the possibility of a thunder's appearance in a warm sunny afternoon.

stealing lights.

through the thin curtains in my room, lights from the street outside and the moon seeped through. memories returned, in darkness alone whispers retained their prophetic connections through duke ellington's "the star-crossed lovers" playing in my ears. my soul was a crow, and her intensity was laced to the borders of creation. her wings were always strong. she was supposed to be the toughest twenty-one-year-old.

pale lights and moonshade,

ph by devina

sometimes i feel like i'm living a dream; boarding a light-speed train, all guarded by thick, shimmering silver steel plates that save me from being injured by the rush of wind generated by the force outside. at times i look out of the train window, trying to catch a view of light, and all i get is a single bright spot. knowing that i am probably unable to find another one, i close my eyes and savor that light; a light from a village far,far away, a village so far i wish i know the name.

i stare at the rain outside and cherish the silence. i know something: silence is something that you can actually hear.

breathing inside the bell jar,

"ce soir, je vais chanter une magnifique chanson pour mon amant imaginaire—parmi les etoiles, les lumieres, sous le ouvert du ciel."

milk on the road,

prank party tonight, venue: his wrecked-up art studio. gotta bring a giant, creamy cake and throw the cream all over the wall, then paint my name and my superstar crush on the large clear-glass windows and entrance doors. i would mix my cheap San Miguel with half a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, the recipe i got from my best friend. i was never a good drinker and i'd known enough how to avoid drunkenness so i wouldn't have to climb a tree and pee all over everybody. i would smoke until i could steam away the desperations of youth, and when my stomach got heated-up enough i would wash things down with two cartons of vanilla milk. then in the dark we would all stare at the lit large LCD screen watching muted indie videos, waiting for the night to pass its peak. as the sky grew darker and the street lights seemed brighter, we would rain camera blitz all over each other, posing so fiercely as if we were models for Calvin Klein campaigns.

forever nocturne.

strong, burning nights like fire on Absinthe. beers, revolution, rebellion, white smoke inside gray lungs, the doors of perception. truth and insomnia, dreams are to be awaken, after all.

she had an eye for Romanticism, but her feet were too heavy she still couldn't afford a pair of iron wings. daylight wasn't her thing, and when night came to wrap the city like a womb, she'd dreamed of a stranger with sun-kissed skin, dressed in all black. his expensive leather-and-velvet jacket would have a lot of drapes, and his designer leather boots would stomp on concrete pavements like harsh rain on one's skin. he would be small-eyed, the stranger, and just like any other great artists, he would 'light either sides of a candle'.

ph by devina

@VindaSonata on twitter

late-night coffee and greetings of the moon,

"save your complaints for another nights, my heart is in a sea of lime. the view of the stranger with the sun-kissed skin has gotten me intoxicated for the night."

comeroundsoon .

From time to time I bury my heart in myself, hiding behind the imaginary mirrors of imagination. Whether I am drunk or sober, in reality or out of it, I find writing as a delight. It is always something new, in it an endless wilderness waiting to be explored. It is through writing I repel my own shadows and find my old self and the new me.

l'amour etait fort et toujours bleu,

French music and second-hand bookstore. she found inspirations screaming to her in silence, in silence she found her detachment from her concrete self also. as if dwelling in the very bottom of a dark well, she'd think of the distant intense sea, inhaling into herself the equally intense shade of blue.

leaving through the pages of le marin de gibraltar, she thought of the tail of love: the strong, overly intense love that sparked both in the heart of the man looking for a massive change in his life and the woman in search of the lost sailor from gibraltar. a love that would eventually melt away into nothing, into an echo for ever unheard of. it would rain on them, the intensity, the silence. seeping through the other side of the mirror, the love had rained on the girl listening to French music also. she was to undergo a massive change in her life. mais bien sur.

ph by devina

@VindaSonata on twitter