The experience of new love is always tinged with
melancholy: the long hours spent musing on a
stranger’s face that appears mysteriously and lovingly
familiar, the agonizing pleasure of dissecting the
minute particulars of what is yet to come, and already
you are trying to forget. It can happen any time,
apparently out of nowhere: whilst you are sat by
yourself in a café by the window, upon your wake one
morning, during an afternoon walk in the park.
A memory tiptoes into your mind, a bitter-sweet
revelation. It feels like exhuming the corpse of a
recollection; it is the beginning of weeks of an
inexplicable grief. This recollection is more like the
memory of a dream and apparently fully unreliable,
yet you know that memories are prophecies. You
know that a long period of confusing and painful
numbness is near. You know that the ghost that has
just started haunting your mind and heart will shortly
be born from the grave, strangely intimate. I kept
having dreams about him months before I even met
him. I spent sleepless nights waiting to finally drown
into his eyes. One day his name crept up into my
mind, not ex nihilo but from the future: X. I miss X.
And I still do not know him. I know that X. will enter
my life soon, because the pain and remorse – for
what? – are becoming stronger, more recognizable, less
easy to get rid of. It’s harder to fall in love than it is to
fall out of love. Yet I cannot help but partially rejoice in
this pain; pain is the capital cure in this world where
happiness is an omen of catastrophe.
♦
After weeks of agony I finally found a clue about him:
it materialised itself from a bunch of ashes that
suddenly set aflame in my back garden. As soon as
I saw the fire I felt a healing energy pervade me. Fire
does not destroy; it generates, it restores back to life.
When I had mastered the fire with my fire collector
there it was in front of me on the brown soil: a
crumpled picture. I straightened its edges and had
a good look at it: the face I would grow to love and
which now only aroused feelings of sadness and anger
mixed with a shameful disgust. I nevertheless decided
to keep the photograph, and I carried it inside where
I safely stashed it into my bed stand drawer. I would
find myself wanting to look at it during the following
evenings. Many more pictures would come, magically
materialising themselves outside my house, always
roughly on the same spot.
♦
And then the letters came, white as doves, immaculate
on the outside except for the black ink spelling his
name, from the trash can. The love letters that
contained the crumbling remains of our decaying
passion. Yet what I read into them was a future of
young love. The most curious phenomenon occurred
when I sat at my table, from midnight to afternoon,
turning copious lines of pain and resentment into
whiteness, and magically erased every word. I felt like
an amanuensis, meticulously working in a monastery,
with the exception that I did not preserve words but let
them evaporate before my eyes; an occupation which
resembled prayer and brought me some consolation
from my love pains.
♦
The park at sunset is where I first met him in person.
I instantly perceived a glimmer of mutual recognition
in his eyes, as if we’d known each other for months,
or had lived together through the pain of a war or
the excitement of a shared secret. He embraced me
quickly and coldly, his body stiff and emotionless,
and said goodbye. Then we started walking side by
side, and held hands occasionally, for reassurance. I
recognized the park from my dreams. It was winter;
the snow would soon revive all the trees and the
flowers. Their petals would spring from the barren
earth in no time and re-attach themselves to their
stems, already changing from brown to green. Winter
always brings a vague sense of hope and upcoming
rejuvenation, the feeling that the earth is yet again
pregnant with life. What a skilful trick it all appears to
be, and yet perfectly natural! Birth and rejuvenation
from sterile, white snow. I often think about writers
as mental manufacturers of snow globes. Meticulous
creators – or merciless destroyers – of tiny worlds
that are totally under their control. In their carefully
constructed fictions, even snowstorms are monitored
artifices, and time can be pulled in every direction,
perhaps fully stopped. And yet how much they yearn
for life, life only! And so I felt it, there and then, the
future promise of new love. The sun had just set: we
had a whole day ahead, it was not even afternoon yet.
♦
The first time he kissed me his lips were clumsy, tired:
a passionless touch. A routine kiss: scarcely made
aware of its own existence. Whoever thinks that first
kisses are supposed to be magical is a romantic fool.
In fact, our love began with a fight. Yet it is a tested
truth of experienced lovers that tears and fights in
a relationship are a mere prelude to love and
understanding. Falling in love is a process of
embracing and getting to adore the little quirks and
odd behaviours of a person you initially despise.
The beginning of our relationship was certainly
characterized by many arguments and disagreements,
which yet always terminated in mutual understanding
and a calm reconciliation, as if the initial problems
had never arisen. I would often cry profusely, yet
I would always manage to control my tears which
streamed back inside my eyes. The more we argued
and the more we made peace with each other. When
we made love for the first time I already seemed to
know the whole geography of his body. I could trace
home to his scars, the nape of his neck, every single
spot of his ivory skin. A love characterized by such
passionate ecstasy and yet so tender and sweet! After
a long, quiet, satisfied embrace, a quick yet entirely
satisfactory climax, followed by soft, slow kisses, more
caresses and more sweetness...
♦
I see him less and less often now, and yet look at how
happy I am, and full of joyous premonitions. The less
I know about him and the more I am attracted to him.
The final stages of a relationship are a dedication to
hope. An abandonment of all resentments, to the glory
of a new chapter, a white page. Here and now his eyes
and mine meet for the last time. New and familiar. I
smile and he smiles back. Such innocent, unaware
smiles. Things just follow their course. I forget his
name now that I know him fully. He does not know
me any more. Something good is about to begin,
and something horrible, but I have already forgotten
what it is. The long-expected epiphany, time stopping
finally. The seemingly eternal heartbeat, the final,
longed-for, all-encompassing whiteness... I know I will
not miss him. ♦
Illustration by Margherita Eccher.
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