One million visitors so far…thank you!
Tonight, at 1:37 Central European Time, Invisible Movement passed the magical number of 1 000 000 visitors. Thank you, thank you, thank you! And excuse me for the further speech. I had to. I apologise if my English suddenly sounds like Engrish. As my personal idol, Courage The Cowardly Dog says, the things I do for love!. So, let this screwball Hinamatsuri-born Pisces have her say.
Being smaller than Swazilend (the capital of which has a funny name – it’s called Mbabane) and almost twice as big as Cyprus; Invisible Movement is currently bigger than 68 out of 221 countries in the world. For someone who lives in a country the population and size of which has been discutable for the past seventeen years and a country that actually broke into pieces TWICE since Invisible Movement was launched, I see this as a whole little world inside of another world. At least I know how many people have been here.
As one of Invisible Movement’s silent supporters would say, it is incredible how something can bring people from everywhere around the world together. I am actually still shaking my migrainous head in disbelief.
As a person I’m afraid that I’m different than many people who visit this site. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. Don’t even mention drugs. I don’t go shopping for fun. I don’t care about any sort of fashion. I don’t buy anything I do not need. I do not rub anything in other people’s faces…and there’s not much of it to rub against anyone’s face anyway. I’m pretty much a minimalist in any way, dedicating my life to making my parents’ senior years as happy as I possibly could and, while I’m at it and seeing how wonderful it feels to make someone happy, trying to be as generous and polite as I can to everyone I know in person.
From my own experience, I know how hard it can be to make some people smile. There’s nothing more beautiful in the world than knowing that you made someone smile. As someone who truly smiled only twice in their adult life, I’m absolutely sure of it. So, as much as this is off-topic (or maybe it is not?), I would like to tell you the story of the second out of those two times. I was riding on the trolleybus number 28 from the centre of Belgrade to my neighbourhod at the centre’s border. There was a woman with a little boy sitting accross the aisle from me. They were playing one of those games involving simple hand movements and guessing. The boy was constantly smiling, his mother too. I do not remember how they looked like anymore, but I do remember their enormous positivity and the love spreading around them in concentric circles. I suddenly started smiling. They were smiling back to me. As we got out at the same station and headed for the big Greek supermarket nearby, I approached them and told them that they just made my life more beautiful. They smiled again and said thanks. As they disappeared from my sight and most likely my entire life, I started crying. And my facial muscles were still hurting as I am not used to smiling and therefore I do not exercise them much.
So, therefore I hope I have given you a smile like that one at least one time when I’d updated Invisible Movement. If I did not, then my existence on this planet and this website truly have no purpose. If there’s someone whom you can make smile, I urge you all to do that right now or whenever it is appropriate in your corner of the world. Their whole life might be consisting of that single moment. Do not keep your lips sealed, as people are more beautiful when they are talking. Do not hold grudges, as the most of things in our own microcosms are fairly forgivable compared to what politicians and religious leaders are doing to us nowadays. Just step out and do it.
If you read it this far, do read on.
This website has changed my life. For better and for worse. It required accepting many things. It required being able to accept every single hit that hits me and not hit back at all. That one took some time to get used to. It required many sleepless nights. It required many It required realising that I live in Europe’s rear end, literally, and that people will be having so much fun at numerous shows until I even get to attend one (I eventually attended three, which I consider to be a true miracle). It required holding my cries when completely unknown people would email me solely to share their own unforgettable experiences. It required trying to be at my best when reporting from Green Fest in 2007. It required being completely zero in terms of who I am as a person outside of the John Frusciante-loving-microworld. People gasp when I tell them that I’m an aspiring writer who won numerous poetry awards, people gasp when I told them that I exhibited my visual art a couple of times, people gasp when I tell them that I’m a young gun at the local department of Lush Limited, doing all of the web and print work, including Lush Times. And being nobody, for the sake of someone whose lyrics and words encouraged me to write again, is fun. If it wasn’t for this website’s subject, I would have not arrived this far in design and coding. I would’ve probably still be stuck in despair. This way, my despair is sweeter. If I don’t get paid (and I was not paid for MONTHS now, though I’m working), I still have my poetry and prose. I still have this website and so many dear and loving people, not counting my family.
Thanks to Invisible Movement, I met one of my closest offline friends, someone who’s a better version of me in many ways, someone who’s so creative and so good-hearted that I can truly say that, if they were the only good thing about having this website, it was worth it. Having someone who understands you, having someone who never said a single bad word to you, having someone who was an on-off online contact, then saw you at the magazine stand and KNEW it was you, is a true blessing.
Thanks to Invisible Movement, I met someone who brought me a little bit of magic, on numerous occasions when I was down. We don’t always agree. They can be downright harsh, they can leave me in tears for up to three months sometimes. But they have made me get up at some point and starting working on my own future. Though there are days when I’ll yell DAMN YOU!…and they’re usually followed by the days when I hate myself for thinking they would actually ignore my cry.
Thanks to it, I met someone who was spending countless days with me though never physically with me, whose dreams I accidentally made true at the point when it mattered, and whom I lost this year and never heard back from. I even tend to believe that they were the water that made the plant that is Invisible Movement grow further.
Thanks to Invisible Movement, I met three people whom I like to call “three wonders of 2007”, one from southern America, one from northern America and one from the Europe and Asia’s lovechild. And they are special, too. In fact, one of them was with me when this website hit 1 000 000.
Thanks to it, I met someone who could change my life if I would let them at my poor state of mind. Someone whom I want back in my life at some point. Someone who is trying to hit me and make me get up while I’m still bleeding. Someone who offered me a hand which I bit.
And there are many other people I would like to mention, but I shall stop right here. They all know who they are, anyway. And the special pick’s keeper was with me when this site hit 1 000 000, too. Also Invisible Movement’s godmother, who’s currently singing manga lines from South Park’s Mecha Streisand episode (the first thanks to… paragraph could be copied and dedicated to her if she’d arrived AFTER Invisible Movement was born…)
Once again, thank you, dear wonderful people from all over the world. Thank you, certain percentage of meanies. If there wasn’t for you, the person who’s writing this as she’s crying her heart out all over the keyboard, would never be what she is and would’ve ended up being just like you – obsessed with making others unhappy. If there wasn’t for you, I would have never removed the last drops of hate from my system. Thank you, everyone who supported and who’ll continue supporting this project; thanks for making the fellow aficionados happy. Thank you from the bottom of my defective, third world heart.
