Do you speak english?

This is a question I ask, firstly, myself: do you speak enough english to write in english? These days I find myself sorrounded by computers with french keyboards and, because of this simple fact, so alien to me, as alien as walking on the moon. With the risk of loosing those four readers I thought I had, I find myself making the strange decision to write in english. Anyway, I realize now that not even in english is writting easier on a french keyboard!

Do you speak english?, I ask a couple, a he and a she,sitting in front of me in a train beneath Brussels. I thought everybody speaks english in Brussels. I was partialy right, because this couple speaks english only partialy. But the very thought that I am interacting with total strangers in a foreing city makes me feel good and somehow proud of myself. I was probably thinking that if I am doing this, there is nothing I cannot do. Of course, I was wrong, but even so it made me feel good.

Half an hour before this underground encounter I was on the streets of Brussels with a friend and he was driving through the friday night busy traffic. No need to say that the way people drive in Brussels is in no way comparable to the way people drive in Bucuresti. No need to say that Brussels is a beautifull city especially at night. These are facts! What I want to say is something which is not a fact...
The traffic was slow and from the car I could see the people walking on the sidewalk. And they could see me. I was just one guy in one car in the middle of a million guys and a million cars, but even so some people were looking at ME. And there she was, this beautiful girl walking like she was the only beautiful girl in the universe and fully aware of this fact, for two long and delicious seconds looking at me like I was something worth looking at. In a moment I was assaulted with all those thoughts that hunted me first when i turned 13 and still hunt me in the present. Am I cute, am I ugly, or am I simply common? It may seem to be a stupid, childish question, but this is in fact an existential one. Ugliness is an existential category which is in no way less important than let us say goodnes. In fact, being ugly or beautiful becomes the first thing that matters in the way other people view us and relate to us. There may be other that come afterwards, like inteligence or goodnes, or their opposites, but our physical appearance is what creates that je ne sais quoi (to pay a tribute to french language, even though this keyboard is still killing me!) which determines the way we will attract or reject other people.
I find myself looking in the mirror and asking myself not wether I am good or bad but wether I am ugly or not. To state your own ugliness status is not an easy thing, given the high degree of subjectivity involved. In fact, every human being is built so as to perceive its own self as somehow attractive in a suffiecient measure as to not commit suicide. So looking in the mirror is no way to determine how beautiful you are! In this case what we do is creating mirrors of all those arround us. I see myself beautiful or ulgy according to the way I reflect myself in the eyes looking at me. But in this case too we have a problem, because different eyes look in different ways.
In those two seconds while the eyes of that beautiful girl from Brussels wehere upon me with an inviting spark in them that I saw or imagined, I felt pretty, as the famous song from West side story sings, but maybe I should say cute or gourgeous, because my english says that pretty is a word reserved for the girls. But in the next moment i remembered that somewhere in Bucuresti there is a girl which thinks I am so close to being pretty as I am close to being rich or famous, and, I don't know when, confused about how as well, this girl has gotten so deep into my heart that now I find it impossible to get her out. Given these two facts, suddenly all the cuteness that the eyes of that brusselian girl had bestowed upon me vanished into thin air and I found myself as ugly as a frog, almost smelling like one too.
I am still wandering how ugly I am, and I am doing this standing in front of every walking mirror around me. Of course, no one will stop loolking till he or she has found a mirror that creates a perfect image of an imperfect ego. Love is nothing more than two mirrors standing in front of each other and reflecting only the beauty after they have somehow found a way to cast all impurities into a sea of forgetfulness!