RE: Liars — Hive

I have a friend who is currently - but perhaps has been for a long time - my nemesis. When the masquerade started last year and we were debating, I kept thinking to myself: you want everything to be exactly as it was before. Only you won't. You have never wanted to give up anything of your own free will, just like that, without demanding that everyone else do the same. The world should revolve around your needs, round and round, and in this world you give yourself as if you were its navel. In the summer, when people were getting on planes again, wearing masks, she said to me that "flying is very cheap now". When I told her, almost exactly ten years ago, that I didn't want to get on any more planes and justified it by saying that I wanted to protect the environment, to give a good reason for this decision, I probably thought I was doing it out of love for nature. That was certainly true in part, but I did not name so many other parts, nor did I want to name them. I would have preferred not to give any reasons at all, because whenever you give a reason, it is picked apart long and wide, debated and criticised. I made this decision and that would basically be the end of the matter. The fact that I don't like flying, that I've never felt comfortable on a plane, that I found it weird to get from one place to the next so quickly, that I prefer slowness, that it might have something to do with my age and finally also with not wanting to spend money on a plane ticket or actually not being able to afford it, all that plays a role and then again it doesn't play a role.

I have very slowly reduced my life down to a lifestyle that presents itself to me as frugal. At least in relation to the world around me, it's a modest existence that really didn't suggest any lack to me, but simply living and experiencing how I feel when I don't buy or throw away so much. There is something deeply satisfying about using things up to the hilt.

I reaped some reproaches for my new lifestyle, as if I had demanded the same from my friend, for example. But I didn't. And I wouldn't ask anyone to live the way I do. I would wish it sometimes, but you have to be careful with it. The environmental dictators who now, ten years after my own decision, claim that we must protect the environment, I don't believe them. They want to continue to get on planes and live alone or in pairs in one hundred square metre flats and buy everything they buy.

And that's how I see it, that when masked people want to go for a walk in the sun or sit by a beautiful lake, they want to force the others to put on a mask and keep their distance. They don't want to do without anything because there is a greed for life in them that is insatiable. And yet... and yet... this greed can never be satisfied because it is not liveliness nor life that they crave. It is dead things, things that slide off the smooth surface, that connect to nothing.

I know that my friend really only wants to be loved and to love.