a request

somebody asked me:
"i'd like to see you write a post about life and what you find beautiful. i know you won't do it (and despise me for asking such a thing)".

i must confess i was puzzled (also slightly amused about such a mis-representation of my - otherwise undeniable and unshakable - cynicism) : about life and what i find beautiful? what on earth have i been posting all this time? no matter how hard i looked at my pictures, all i could find there was: amazement at life and what beauty does to my heart.

i had been pondering for long and was about to give up my (inconceivable, as it seems) intention of fulfilling that request when this revelation struck me: i would make a post about Sunday mornings at my mother's.

a moment of fullness, not yet tinted with melancholy: the first moment when i open my eyes, only half-awake, the vision still blurred. neither wild passion nor ecstasy of happiness: the simple and quiet joy of breathing. above nothingness and below the conscious mind, the zero point at which a self starts taking shape. i am the first breath and the first vision, long before a word falls down into my flesh and makes me aware of silence. i am at the center of the world, because i am at the center of nothing: i can quietly slip back into my sleep, cradled as i am in the warm safety of night. or i can keep my eyes wide open until what has been only possible becomes firmly rooted into the ground: the only real. yet i delay the moment of choice. indefinitely, i savour the richness of this "not yet" - which was not a 'not' and not a "yet' back then, since time hadn't been invented, neither mine, nor that of the world.

this woman hadn't yet been invented who, years after, reading a sentence about the first brush stroke of a chinese painter, lifts her head and quietly gazes at the play of snow by her window, the book forgotten on her lap, vanishing away into the dim light of the afternoon:

"At the junction between the two, it is both the stroke of emergence and of ascent, at the starting point of every variation of later lines, and of submersion and return, with all previous lines culminating in it, becoming confused and losing their individuality."

is every moment of her life this starting point of all variation of later lines - yet also the ending point of other countless lines which could have been, or are just tired of being? why does she have to choose?

yet implacably she chooses. she chooses now. to look at this walnut tree which is the same as it was back then, when its huge branches used to tap the high window of her room.

muffled sounds come in from the courtyard and the light sharpens. soon, she will be wide awake.

she doesn't know how old this porch is.

it was not here when i was a child. my grandmother also had never seen it, that much i know. every time i push the door handle, i have to pause for a while, as if my gestures, too slow to follow through the history of my blood, were still amazed and reluctant to begin. there, at that precise point of time and space, memory refuses to be born. an enclosure, this porch, for sure. yet whose body is secretly kept inside, nourished as if in a wooden box?

oh, but not so in the kitchen, not so.

i remember her in the long winter evenings, her white hair a radiant halo in the shadow of the gas lamp. you think you know whiteness yet you don't, if you haven't seen her in the small kitchen, light gathered in her hair as if the rest of the world had all been carved in darkness. a cake was being baked, we were waiting. then it wouldn't turn out as she had wished, oh, her love was forgiving but who could ever have measured the precision of her attention, and she would immediately take it out into the night and throw it into the snow, muttering angrily all to herself and how delighted we were, and how we secretly wished, every time, that the cake would be burned again and again, and we got to witness her white upon white, once more, and listen to the melting song of snow.

you do not know what is behind this curtain. oh but i do. only i do. the wooden floor upon which i found her lying one day. i took her in my arms, wondering at how small she was. she is so light, like a doll, i thought. crepe paper feet. she had always had beautiful feet and i was happy to resemble her. they said i did. i put her back into her bed, she had already lost her voice by then. she had no gestures left, only her smile.

the floor is bathed in the same light, now as it was then, almost aglow, flooded with silver and so smooth, i almost wish i put my face against it. only the curtain is different. we had a brown one, with scattered green petals which would change into flowers if looked at from a certain angle. you see the red one now, yet i still see the brown curtain, and all my angles are now flowers.

once, a man wrote a poem about a calla lily between my breasts. all callas smell like him since then. i don't remember when my mother has started to grow calla lilies. surely, it must have been before that poem. or have i just invented it myself, gazing at this flower long ago, unaware of the future hand scribbling down a few words on a piece of paper, as white as my breasts? this flower i haven't imagined, that much is sure. or have i? what is its time then?

which moment is the true one? which hand and which word? which white?

ribbons of past float around me, my past, the invented past, the past that could have been mine, that could have been ours, all of them torn apart from myself, swirling freely through the hazy air of this winter afternoon, as if they had never belonged to me. as if they had never been lived by me. by her. by anyone.