What surprised her the most was his calm manner that
seemed to border to insensibility. But no, he wasn't insensible, and he's
already proven that, he was just peaceful. And the peacefulness that ran
through his whole being was so obvious that it could turn someone else mad. How
could that be? How could he be like that? It was almost out-worldly the way he
talked and acted. To her eyes he was wrapped in mystery, a mystery that she was
eager to investigate.
They were walking in quiet for a long time that night.
He asked her naught and he didn't even try to find an answer to the many
questions that have started piling in his head since the moment he met her.
Could it be that he wasn't that interested to know how she found herself on a
Saturday night-Sunday morning, sitting at a park, alone and in tears? She asked
him, without words, and so he didn't answer. At the moment she thought he
didn't care, but as he would explain later he was simply letting her to decide
whether she wanted to talk to him or not. He didn't want to blackmail her
answers. Besides, he had already guessed the reason why, so all that remained
were the details. The truth is that she wasn't willing to share those details
with him at the moment because of her lack of faith in people. And if she
couldn't talk to the people who knew her about it, how could she ever tell
everything to a complete stranger?
So they kept silently walking their path towards
nowhere in particular. They'd listen to each other's fade breaths once in a
while and steal glimpses of each other's figures, but no more than that. It was
as if they were walking in the forest and not the city streets. They hardly
noticed the vehicles passing by, nor the voices of the other night walkers.
She doesn't know, she can't tell with a certainty
since time stood still that night, how long that walk lasted, and she could
never guess how much it would mean to her one day in the not so distant future.
That simple walk would open for her the gates to a new life, a life full of
tenderness and hard truths, clashes and reconciliations, love and repugnance.
Now she shuts her eyes forcefully and paints in a
masterful way on the canvas of their inevitable past. She paints them as they
walk, like friends and strangers at once, in the old city streets, listening to
the sounds of the waking day and the dying night, and her inner sight is
flooded with the colors of a rosy dawn and his warm unexpected presence.
No, that was not the happiest night-day of her life,
but perhaps it was the most important of all. It was the beginning. The
beginning that would be followed by many endings. The beginning of everything
and nothing. Of the nothingness that now fills her life.
When I'm away I feel closer to you than ever, he once
said, trying to find an excuse about his proclivity to leave every so often,
for his need to visit new places, meet new people. If I don't miss you then I
won't be able to love you the way I should, like my ideal you, he added, making
her smile, in melancholy. Now she feels exactly like he describes, closer to
him than ever, as he accompanies her from sleep to awakening, as he emerges so
serene, and angry, and stubborn and tender out of her memories.
She regrets it. That she drove him away. That he left
her. But she believes that things happened the way they were supposed to. Did
they though? No, she's not sure about that, she could never be. He keeps
insisting in his letters that everything happens for a reason, and that the
pain of parting is far better than the daily death of life, and things like
that, but she can't really follow his logic, agree with it.
Often enough she loses her head and then finds herself
feeling like she hates him, she despises him, but not long after the mist
clears from her delusional sky, and calmness, though unwelcome most of the
time, returns and then she loves him again. She loves him with a lazy passion,
almost drugged, because he have helped her find her own way in life, and then
vanished like a passing shadow on an unending universe.
She's not kind to herself. She keeps asking him tough
questions. She thinks that the answers can offer her an illusion of salvation.
What would she do if she hadn't met him? Who would she be? Where would she go?
These questions weigh in her thoughts and though she secretly knows the
answers, they are softly killing her. She was saved by his love. He saved her from
her own self and her false passions. He saved her from a self that wasn't hers
to begin with. And she thanks the unknown gods of fortune for that, and she
blames them, for the gift they give her, for the one they have taken away.
She feels strange. It is quite weird how someone like
her, that makes her living through the art of word, cannot truly and clearly
write on the blank page all that she wants, to put all the words in line and
try to express how she feels. Perhaps, in the end, all her words were meant for
him. But, maybe, she really doesn't know how she exactly feels at the moment,
and thus she can't describe it.
Nevertheless, she is certain about one thing: that she
is now poor; poor and rich at the same time. Poor in her day to day life. Rich
in memories of the past one.
She's now wholly wrapped in a veil of sadness and she
has no clue as to whether this self-imposed solitude could be the medicine that
she needs. But, even if it isn't, that doesn't change anything. She wants to be
all by herself. She's sick of people. People who have eyes that do not see,
ears that do not listen. She's sick of them and they are sick of her, since
none of them can any longer stand to be close to this great melancholic. No one
can feel her, or even get her. And the truth is that she feels sorry. She's
deeply sorry not for herself but for them. She no longer wishes to sacrifice
her soul for their sake. She will not wear her fake happy face for them. But
she's also sorry that she can find joy no more in the small and the unimportant,
the ephemeral things in life. She's sorry that she can no longer give kisses in
the air surrounding the ears, and exchange small compliments, extracts of lies,
with the others, as the rules of social contact dictate.
And she's full of rage. A rage so fierce that seems to
rule her every moment, destroy it, and which keeps her soul enslaved. It may
one day calm down, weaken, and turn itself into something else, something
completely different, but probably that's not going to happen any time soon.
Unless, of course, he comes back to her. Or unless she meets someone like him,
an exact replica, someone who will get to know her without asking her anything.
The letter…
The image was taken from here.
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