To Avram (I.I)

Dedicated to all those lost and those who are yet to come.

There is a pleasure sure
In being mad, which none but madmen know.

John Dryden

Winter had been blown out like a candle by a strike of heat. Even the Mediterranids felt it, but those of us who came from Silesia were affected by it the most. We became dysfunctional. It was the sort of weather designed to try our endurance. The sky too bright made everything in it dark; even the seagulls seemed to have lost their colour when crossing it. All became dry, all life craved water, and plants grew yellow in the intense sun.

Spread wide and long on the ground, I lied in the middle of a stone-built room, extended across the stone tiles and surrounded by closest friends.
The heat was stirring an unusual collection of ills in me, to which my friends reacted with great amusement. They carried the blood of the Mediterranids from their fathers' side, and thus, in my view, as a pure Silesian, I was in the position to suffer the most.

The only person that seemed utterly untouched by the heat was Akram, the Armenian in our company. Perhaps because his mother took him to his father's land Uzbekistan when he was a toddler where Avram adjusted to heat early on in his life. Looking at our suffering, he started to feel sorry for us and developed a brilliant idea to abandon the house and head for the mountains. Of course, he forgot to mention how we were going to get there, but our apathetic minds focused on our own ills and never wondered. We imagined the mountains and agreed instantly.

Avram, excited by our agreement, exploded his brilliant vision of our upcoming journey in our minds. And if you had been lucky to have known him, you would have understood that there was no escape of his vision. When Avram's strong-willed sparkling personality surfaced, none could have refused his ideas.