With secret pleasure and pain she imagines the act of writing: with the eye of her mind she sees herself perched on the small chair in her room, her back arched over the keyboard. A glass vase on her desk, a single small violet. She imagines it takes her a lifetime for a single finger to move. In her reverie it is late in the afternoon and she makes up her mind, guided by an unexpected, almost unwanted impulse to jot something down. She does not know what exactly. She can almost see herself as she feels the usual frenzy that overcomes her all of a sudden; the insatiable hunger to pin it down, here, now. The horror of leaving the days hanging out in the rain, every memory drenched, fading, left out to dry in the cold. Perhaps nothing of particular eminence, and yet how important, how important to keep it alive. To rescue it from forgetfulness, or to make it less monotonous, to keep it breathing. Perhaps a brown stain, a piece of cloth, a tear-stained letter.
If she could write. She visualises it, in secret, like a shameful, potent craving. Obsessively, yet fruitlessly. The trail of ink, the train of thoughts, of feelings, each object in her mind lined up like a block of buildings, with ivy balconies overlooking streets, with gardens. With fountains of streaming water reflected in the sunlight. Windows overlooking the movement outside. How achingly joyous to imagine it for a second, yet how fragile - and her hand has not yet touched the pen nor the paper, not one single thought has been milked, drunk, enjoyed. She is parched of tears. If only she could have traced riverbeds of words into which her soul could outpour its tears. She wishes she could jot them down, the words, line them up like photographs hung up to dry, like monuments to her silences, like dried flowers that fall out of forgotten books.
She would be okay if she had a space to write. A white space, yet warm, a large wooden desk, handmade, sturdy oak, so large that if she wanted, she could lie on it and sleep when she feels tired. Just her and a small bottle of ink in a drawer. Yet she would not be lonely. Yet buds would still bloom, the old words curled in her chest springing into the whiteness. Everything around her would be bathed in light, and she would quench most wants forever, and her thirst for everything that is murmuring and moving and flowing in this world would curl up into a minuscule, gigantic will to life.
***
For the tears that didn’t fall you have a moment of silence. You cannot write anymore. Your life is spent quietly, softly, every day elapsing like snow. Who could even write in this landscape, who could have anything worth saying – worth uttering. You remember reading so noteless I could die and it all flows back, the day you read a poem and felt, for once, accompanied in your loneliness. Words that bloomed. And yet, she died alone.
Your body, your mind were an unexplored country. You like to believe that your words, unuttered, are still secrets hiding in a velvet darkness. And yet, not to be spoken, how painful. Torture. And the only way out is a trail of ink which temporarily surfaces on a white sea, perhaps forms what looks like a pattern for a brief moment, and then disappears.
***
It is now growing dark, the ephemeral moment between the fading of light and the entering of night. The moment of sweetness intermingled with despair, of last departing hopes. The moment of illusions, of merciful fabrication. A blue melancholy infuses the world like ink spilled in water. She finds this night, this silence comforting, darkness descending a giant, solemn full stop covering the world like a blanket. Urging the world to take a break from utterability, from meaning, from searching for an answer. Blackness is not the absence of colour; blackness fills this night like the strong, black coffee her mother used to drink filled a pristine white porcelain cup. The colour white, the colour of this page, the colour of this winter is the deadliest colour, the lack of colour; even worse than death, it is pure absence, a white hole which collapses into itself, and where the illusion of a voice gives back its own feeble echo. Words themselves will die, however vibrant, however colourful, however alive they might have the power to be for a while. Perhaps she has given up her faith in words. And yet, this pain is so intense that she cannot utter it; she would only be able to write it, but all she can do in her state is write a row of Os
OOOOOOOOOOOOO
and this already takes her unimaginable effort. When she was younger she had the spirit to write down every truth. Now it is just a line of Os, unutterable, a row of cold zeros, white emptiness encircled, marked, pinpointed. White holes she might fall into. A gaping, open mouth too horrified to utter the sounds that are stifled in the throat. Wells filled with snow, piles and piles of snow.
***
Words that make you feel time, despite the blindness of forgetfulness, words that like a smooth, marble handrail guide you through time into the darkness, the illusion of a miracle, solid ghosts. I can picture you there, the same spot next to the river where we used to meet during those densely scented summer evenings.
That memory, an old photograph whose corners have been curled by the vagaries of time, is now slowly dissipating into whiteness. It flickers, it shifts like a drawing in the sand, and becomes blindingly empty. Not total blackness, the blackness would fill the night of a last comfort. It is a sea of white emptiness. How painful it is to stare at it for a long time.
Until it turns into a white screen, a page. An emptiness that whispers and calls your name.
We were held within tongues, encircled by words. When I lost you, all languages all tongues became a language of mourning. If these words could be whispered into an ear, screamed from rooftops. But they are words of the unliving, of the dy-ing.
These are just words. And yet, how they slant in their longing for you. Perhaps it is because this is the only place where I might be able to find you now. Perhaps if I tread carefully enough, if I manage to sew a net strong enough, this tapestry of words will be able to hold you up, for a while, not make you disappear. Floating on a surface of spinning, murmuring memories.
***
Another attempt to write to carve a space a word out of this winged whiteness. Her words are crumbs she ingests on a trail of grief, aiming nowhere. Soon it might snow. Soon it might emerge, from the Whiteness. Faceless, mute. A Name.
She carves it into the ice. Letters, frozen. One by one, a trail of snowflakes. Syllables on her cold, cracked lips.
Mine. My. Name.
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