Recent frustration: 

It feels as if I've lost my words both in Bulgarian and in English. No eloquence possible; not a proper way to actually express what I'm doing, what I'm observing or thinking about.

On a recent night walk around town I discovered that near the canal you can smell the fermentation of beer in the Stella Artois factory. We were together with A. and he told me that when he was still a child, the beer clouds would come as far as his primary school; you could smell them all over the city. It's a sour smell, more like the one of a strange food, and it lingers in the air without being exactly unpleasant, but still somehow manages to leave a sense of discomfort. 

Experienced the city during a heatwave. Felt enormously as if I'm in Balchik. I guess because the heat was sticky and was making my hair all too curly, the way it happens when I'm on the seaside. Spent a whole weekend lying on the grass in front of the house, reading, daydreaming and playing badminton. Have a guilty conscious now, because of all the work I am procrastinating on, but oh well. 

It's lovely to observe how the place I live in is revealing itself layer upon layer as the seasons pass. First, a strange and gloomy winter that never really felt like a winter. Then in January some men from the staff came over and cut the branches of the trees in preparation for an upcoming spring; it looked all naked and sharp. Then late March and the two magnolias blossoming, one of them turned out to be really close to my house. And now is the lilacs time, purple and white, I never had an idea we'd have them around. Sometimes I suddenly remember how these cobblestone streets looked like to my eyes the very first days after I moved here; the sudden rains in the afternoons and the September sun, and that coffee I drank on my very first morning, sitting on the little platform outside my door (same morning when I managed to lock myself out, which in itself was the reason to meet S., who turned into one of my closest persons around). 

I'm happy that A. is back in town. What an unlikely, lucky friendship is ours: we met four years ago in this very city and somehow created a bond over a distance of 3000 km and many Skype calls. It's the first time since we've known each other that we can meet up almost every day; go for walks, go for beer, discuss all the minutiae of being not-so-young-now-but-still-confused, aspirations, melancholies, etc.

A couple of nights ago we were sitting in that little secret park near Groot Begijnhof, and there was a group of people on the other side of the tiny lake, faces and bodies obscured by the dark; one of them played LA Woman by the Doors with such gusto as if almost channeling Jim Morrison; and then something in Russian which sounded a lot like a song by Lyube (I was kind of amazed to hear Lyube over here). Felt kind of important to listen to the songs at that very moment, I guess because of my old obsession for linking different times and places through music. You know, that momentary sense of wonder upon the realization that a 16 y.o. me (discovering the Doors during a weird, foggy winter in Sofia, and listening to them late at night in the room I had at my parents' apartment) and a 19 y.o. me (who had just moved out to live on her own and was falling in love properly for the first time with somebody who would send Doors lyrics as goodnight messages: a childish love that was so right for the next couple of years), and a 25 y.o. me (half way through her first year abroad and feeling simultaneously so lost and so grateful) are all and the same; and that the choices of the 16 y.o. and the 19 y.o. have lead to this very moment, this very bench, park, conversation, etc.; and a thread of the same music is going overwhelmingly strong through it all.