How to enjoy your life. A short story.
You can treat it as an anectode, but it is a story of a normal day, of a normal man and a borrowed guitar.
“It was this moment in one summer night, in one gorgeous historical city in Ukraine. A city with cobblestone streets and narrow alleys, and fountains at the end of each of them. And a city where only young people seemed to live as soon as the sun started to set. A city with a tiny historic center and a labyrinth of tiny alleys.
And this specific moment, of a girl and two friends sitting on the cold damp cobblestone in a hidden dirty alley of the city center and listening to a homeless man play his guitar for hours. And some young hipsters joined, they danced, they offered him beer. Some girl came out in the alley and kissed him and left with another guy. He played Nirvana and Guns and Roses and we listened and sipped our beer out of the can. He was dressed funny with poor dirty clothes, but was kinda our age. He had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my entire life, and I do watch a damn lot of “Got Talent”. He was not singing for us. He was not singing out of sorrow either.
He was deeply enjoying it and he seemed so damn happy. It was this freedom and beauty and misery in one small alley with cold concrete in the hot summer night.
A guy came dressed in his skinny jeans and leather jacket that looked like very expensive things that are meant to make him look like the “efortless rock and roll punk kinda guy”. He gathered the money the singer had in the guitar case in front of him, he counted them 2 times, he got a bit more than half and gave it to our guy, he put the rest in his pocket. Our singer thanked him and gave him the guitar, clearly it was his. They shook hands and our singer left. The guitar was packed and our hipsters left as well. One night that looked so common for them .
I have written this in the moment, sitting in that little alley with my two friends and drinking my Ukrainin beer out of a kinda dirty can and listening to the best Guns and Roses covers ever. I don’t know if it was the accoustic of that little alley, the people dancing near our singer homeless friend or just the sense of freedom that I always feel in that city . But I do know that now, about two years later still feel the feelings from back then, the beauty of that scene, the feeling of that music, that sense of freedom in the mundane.
In a time where freedom seems out of reach and happiness is more like finding happiness around thing, I remind myself about this story and feel just a little bit happier.
