2005 Pushcart Prize Nomination On A Hazy Day

I'm wondering who this picture took... 

Everything is hazy. You can see in this picture how hazy things are. This picture was taken in 2004 but I forgot who took it. I do remember that I wondered why in the world life is so obscure, when the picture was shot.
I don’t know where to go today. I talked to a beautiful voice on Skype. Even during that conversation things went hazy. A huge electronic squall began to muddle up the talk. I don't think it was a supernatural being who did that. I think, in the end, we blamed it all on Bill Gates.
Later I wrote a letter. I tried to explain something hazy to someone. Then I thought: what the fuck am I talking about?

However, this morning I received a clear letter. Kathy Fish, one of the editors of Smokelong Quarterly wrote me:

"The editors of Smokelong Quarterly are thrilled to nominate your story ‘He Wrote Sixteen Pencils Empty’ for the 2005 Pushcart Prize. This is a yearly prize for the best stories published in American small presses."

How cool is that? Nevertheless, since I received that letter, life is more hazy. I sit behind my Dutch cloudy desk here, much like in this unclear picture, and I gaze at the ceiling and I think about my blurry life and things.

*

PS. I would appreciate it if a lot of adds about penis enlargement and snoring problems, would appear as comments to this hazy message. I'm trying to get used to that.

The Frozen Lips Of The Idol To Touch

Picture: Daphne Buter 

Once upon a time there were two writers. A man and a woman. One lived on one side of planet Earth, and the other lived on the other side of planet Earth. The writers started writing letters to each other, and after some time they fell in love with the words. They created worlds by words, magical worlds where they could be together in real, and the worlds they created floated through the universe. It was a small world where the writers made love with words, and God knows they were in love with nothing but words.
Anyhow, one day it had to stop. Who wants to be real in a story only? Things like that just cannot go on forever, because, try it; being in love with nothing but words is a dire thing. It is much like being in love with Betty Boop, or like being in love with Elvis Presley, or like being in love with God. You can never touch the superstar that you adore so deeply. And at night you reach out your hand in the darkness of your bedroom, just to imagine someone is there – the frozen lips of the idol to touch – but there are nothing but words, nothing but visions, and all these things come from the inside of you.
So, the two writers who were so deeply in love with the words, quit writing love letters and next they couldn’t write stories anymore. They couldn’t write stories for a long time because craving for each other’s words had eaten all their words that were meant for their stories. All they could do was gaze outside their windows, fixing their eyes to the skies, both on their own side of this planet, and then they whispered each other’s name.

The good thing about this story is that their love was over, and there wasn’t one word in the world, spoken or thought, that could renovate that.

For as far as I can remember, both writers are still alive and they don’t miss each other at all. They just write their stories again, because that’s what writers are for. To just write their stories, without being taken into custody by them.

Based on a true story.