An immeasurable spell of seconds ticking in a day, defined only by arbitrary footsteps walking down a side-street, where the unmarked doors remain soundlessly closed, their mysteries well-locked on the other side.
I stare out of my window and watch the clouds make shadow patterns on the leaves of the chestnut tree outside.
On sunny days, the concrete city soaks up all the warmth, storing the heat deep within its cracks, in case winter comes early this year.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>When friends travelled, and asked if there were things I wanted, I'd usually asked for a wayward token like a seashell from a beach they visited, or perhaps a particularly unusual stone, or a leaf from a tree. The souvenir that comes back often bears the imprint of the one who has acquired it, their soul's pattern reflected in what they deem worthy to keep.
Or perhaps, I may have just been subconsciously wanting to impose my uncomplicated joys onto those around me. My best memories of beaches have always been the treasure hunt - looking for seashells and stones that other travellers might not have noticed; the special token, shaped just in this way, just this colour, waiting for me to eventually arrive here to find it. But the kind of shells I choose are the ones that are broken, imperfect. It seems more magical somehow, to be able to imagine what the rest of the shell and its sea creature might have once looked like.
I don't usually like cars, but this is possibly the only sensible means to get around the island. I resist the urge to count poppies - they appear like red punctuation amongst the cistus, the Corsican lavender, and numerous other little flowers I haven't yet had the privilege to be acquainted with. But poppies are not found everywhere in the world, and the surprising sight of the crimson petals make me deliriously happy. In higher altitudes, you get the occasional very large, purple poppy, and every time I catch sight of one, it is like a private, purple blessing.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>I'd always believed that we should keep an ample supply of dreams and pick them off like apples.
In the early morning the secret in our hearts stayed home under the covers while we travelled in opposite directions, over distances that don't match, stretching time at different speeds.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>So much later, I saw that you recognised me, not for my face, perhaps for my name, but really it wasn't either of those things that mattered.
"Feel free to appear in my dreams," you said, but I was not certain if I had a say in such things as destinies. I swallowed the nagging feeling, wondering — would the world have been a different place if we had never met?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>For our all creativity and ingenuity as a human race, we still made awful constructs like these: mere rectangles from all sides and all possible vantage points. But it was a small brick house hidden amongst these indifferent edifices that we were aiming to reach, for an intimate evening of folk music.
What would it have been a century or two ago, when we might have gathered in a village square, instead of a modern lifeless desert reachable only car because the buses don't come frequently enough, and even then we wouldn't have been able to see at which stop we ought to alight?
You recognised me in the hallway, but not for my face nor my name, more for something I have stood up for, fought against, have written and talked about. I felt humbled by the sincerity of your young voice telling me that what I am doing is important, buried the feeling of having been inadequate and merely thanked you.
You told of having sung songs around a camp fire, but I could harbour no such childhood experience. The only similar memory I had were those hot, tropical nights when our city drowned in darknesses of frequent blackouts, swallowed by the silence when the electricity stopped humming, televisions left to die like cold chemical bricks of black and mosquitoes provided background melodies to the sound of my piano as I randomly pulled notes from the humid air and spun them into song.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>I took myself deep down to the depths of the gateway to the modern kind of hell. They require you to pay to enter and to make your passage these days; gone are the days of riddles by trolls or the wise old man who guards the boat and lets you cross if he deems you fit enough.
At the newsstand, an elderly woman tried her luck at the lottery, her forehead furrowed in concentration as she carefully scrubbed out squares with the edge of a coin, and I wondered for a moment if this were a modern kind of hope.
Whence comes this unconscious dance, that even chance is manufactured?
In the carriage everyone covered their ears against the noise, or to fill their heads with another kind of noise. Perhaps this is simply the modern idea of choice.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Is it a shadow of doubt that you have painted over your eyes -- finely lined -- a colour matching the light copper of your hair?
Do you expect to charm with the yellow sheet of mathematical exercises over your too-short skirt?
Would it have made us irresponsible mothers for not having been able to explain that no matter what we do, the world has not yet learned to reconcile our beauty and our intelligence?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>The cars that drive by mercilessly press down on the snow in the middle of the road. We conquer you, say the wheels to the snow. But the snow does not feel compelled to reply, and simply expels a soft lingering whisper that sounds exactly like waves at sea on a calm summer's day. The snow banks on either side of the pavement resemble sand dunes, except they are bleached white by winter; their slightly rougher texture makes them glow and glitter under the orange of the sodium street lamps. But every time there is a snow storm I dream of walking on warm, hot sand, the familiar feeling of each step sinking in, absorbing the featherweight of my body, my lightweight sense of self.
I like the winter. I like to say: I chose to live here - even for a little while. I find myself taking it for granted that I walk out of my front door completely wrapped up against the elements, and it hits me every now and again that I'll never be able to accurately describe this experience to my childhood friends from the tropics. "It's like sand ... except, white, and very cold. Melts when you touch it. Sparkles at night. Oh yes, and sometimes it even gets too cold to snow ..." Maybe all I want to say is, "It makes you feel alive because you are constantly reminded of your humanity," but that's altogether too abstract and too vague because I would have to explain why that mattered.
We didn't choose to be born, and somehow, this most often translates into a kind of psychosis that also implies we can't choose how to live our lives, or how we can't influence life around us. Destinies are complex, obscure and shrouded by myths, so it is much easier to not care and pretend our lives are individual little private hives of activity - that your life does not relate to mine if I didn't know your name and if we didn't share the same blood. And so in the metro everyone wears their earphones in forced blissful ignorance, in the subconscious collective bid to isolate ourselves. People drive cars because it is a convenience - but really, a convenient way to create their own, isolated, individual universes, moving towards a destiny they imagined they chose even if the pattern had been laid out by those who came before us. In the streets, strangers pass by one another as mere shadows.
At one point on my way home, there was the depanneur's delivery bike in the middle of the path flanked both sides by snow banks, so I had to negotiate my way carefully between the big white bucket in front of it and the big white pile of snow to one side. The deliveryman was coming down a flight of stairs carrying a big box of empty beer bottles, and we bade each other "Bonsoir!", which, tonight, strangely meant both "hello" and "farewell".
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Each station was built at a time where it was customary to show off our human might, standing high and defiant against nature, so we created tall imposing concrete structures to prove a point, and anoint them with artwork that proudly displayed our intellectual superiority. It never occurred to us then that our intellectual capacities could keep changing, and that art could just be fashion, so everything looked 40 years out of date despite being glamorous on opening day.
A plump, older woman smiled at a mother and her young daughter, wrapped up completely in pink. A young girl walked in, the air around her folded in intensity as she arranged her hair and her things, then proceeded to spread a book on her lap. The people who weren't talking to one another wore white earphones that snaked from either ear to a hidden location deep within their puffy dark winter coats.
This is a temporary place, a temporary existence, so we scorn it as such - we live it as such.
Today, the tabloids tell us that elsewhere, other people are living more exciting lives: look who's having a new baby, who just got divorced, who just got married, who just got back together. They tell us these things so we can forget our own lives have any semblance of significance. Every now and again, the advertising on the walls change, just to give us a sense that time is plodding forward.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Today, you look a serious poet, a black tousled shirt with white pinstripes, a thin book of Poe in your hands, a furrow of concentration on your forehead.
I want the fat man standing at the door of the train to move - at least his belly - out of the way so I could read the title your fingers partially conceal. Another man looks across at me, perhaps noticing that I am staring too hard. Who's the real poet besides the one who wrote the book?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>"Digging a hole," he said, still grinning, by way of an explanation.
"I can see that," said I. "What's it for?"
"A pond. You know, for goldfish."
My first thought was that neither him nor his wife had the time to look after the garden, let alone maintain the health of goldfishes in a pond. They'd bought the property not too long ago, and most of the house still echoed, crying out to be filled with furniture. I supposed the pond was a priority.
I looked doubtfully at the hole in the ground, which resembled more like a dip in the slope on the hillside. My uncle wasn't exactly an accomplished handyman, but I guess determination yields results. Of a kind. Eventually.
This odd sliver of a memory slipped into my mind as my feet took me down a familiar back alley, the kind that exists only because two-storey housing rise on either side; their back doors, balconies, porches, and back gardens facing these forsaken lanes that only local residents are supposed to use.
Perhaps I am a local enough resident by now. Or is it because that I claim this as my home, therefore I belong here? When the women hang their laundry out in their balconies over the back streets, do they see me as a stranger? Or when the men mow their lawns and repair their cars? Does my body blend into the background of the landscape even if my eyes wander, my ears listen and my heart beats at a different rhythm to the soul of this place? I would be a travelling minstrel but for the lack of a harp.
Yet, it was walking by one of these desolate back gardens that made me think of my uncle and the grandiose dream of a fish pond in the yard of his suburban home, thousands of miles from here, many years ago. These unkempt, overgrown gardens will soon face the onslaught of a long winter; what can one strive for, when the flowers will wither like evaporating dreams?
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>I saw you part your lips and closed them again in that twisted agony of inner confusion, caught at the cusp of the urge to speak yet trapped behind the the weight of words ... While here I looked out from the corner of my eye, wondering if I should let you speak for fear of watching you explode, or is it my responsibility to not let you ruin the moment?
And so the words went unsaid, the silence frozen like a story with no ending.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>He followed her, got onto the same carriage and sat across from her. Gaping, making mild pretenses looking down at his book.
The inhabitants of the metro were quiet; it was the middle of the week and the stifling heat slowed everyone down to a state of zombied wakefulness, seeking answers between the lines of the sweet smudged print of the morning tabloid.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Yet I found you. Whose magic was it - yours, mine or that of souls long-evaporated, their blood soaked into the soil, leaving behind only empty beatings of hearts, lighting the way for time-worn lovers, weary of travel?
The cobblestones beneath the thick soles of my boots whispered where my next footstep should go. Perhaps in previous lives when these streets were dark for want of candlelight, I might have not found my way. But tonight, without hesitation, the stars were shining beyond the reach of clouds, aligning my inner compass with yours.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>Every time I come here I get a little frightened by how memories might collide with a present in which I no longer partake.
The old room I used to inhabit had completely changed from when I left it. Her daughter made it her own, so now only faint hints of the time I passed there were visible - some reference books I'd left behind and tiny pictures I'd made still hanging on the sliver of wall next to the doorway. Perhaps I had never read the books I'd read there, never written letters at the desk under the window, never dreamed of unknown futures gazing at the moon that made a low summer trajectory over the bushes in the backyard, now overgrown and unkempt.
She filled her house with things. So many things. It was difficult to identify what these objects were. Since my last visit, additional shelves have been added in the parlour that now held up all manners of things: pens, pencils, clips, knick knacks of all kinds; there were teapots to vases, flowers real and fake, and countless congregations of indistinguishable things. It was as if she'd placed her fragmented soul amongst the dusty porcelain jars, the clay fragrant things bought years ago covered in cobwebs.
It saddened me, but I wasn't sure what it was. Perhaps it was a suggestion of the passage of time that we all get lost in, that the mere ticking of the clock marks our bodies with fine lines and steals them of speed, and that all we leave behind are meaningless things.
]]> Impromptu visit to unadorned.org ]]>