Is everything finally perfect enough for me to write the ending of Ladybirds and Unicorns? I have just opened my notebook, the one with handmade paper, tiny flowers pressed between its pages. Their scent mingled this time with the jasmine flowering close beside my armchair on the terrace. I took a sip of warm cocoa.
It seems even the jasmine cannot write for me.
I sank deeper into the soft cushion of my armchair, as though it were meant to replace the embrace that had just passed through my mind. The daily concert in my garden completed the perfection. I caught myself wondering whether it might be recorded. Put away somewhere for January. For one of those mornings when the garden lies silent beneath the snow and one would give anything for a single bird’s voice.
It has grown warmer. I no longer feel the need to cover my shoulders. The white shirt can stay where it is. Only the oil on my skin has changed its scent. Even that does not quarrel with the jasmine. Nor with the scent of the notebook’s pages, at which I have been gazing for quite a while now, savouring my slightly cooler cocoa.
I wanted to see the unicorn off. To wave him a literary farewell and let him vanish somewhere into the distance. After all, the emotion had cooled. Just like my cocoa. My mind needed an ending. My soul, a dignified explanation.
But the unicorn is a myth. And always has been. Perhaps this piece should now continue with a defence of my conduct. A defence of the unicorn’s existence. Of passion. I feel it before the thought I am trying, at this very moment, to smooth into sentences on the fragrant paper. In a body that receives it in with every breath. And with every exhalation surrenders to it a little more.
I never wanted to leave him. That myth composed of faces of various forms and characters, with names that change, and a singularity that does not. A game of two intellects that brings me to life.
For three weeks I searched for an ending, hoping I would not find it. It would have been an amputation.
The soft cushion I had chosen so carefully, through tones of colour to the very properties of its fabric, embraced me in that moment more intensely still. As though every written word were sinking me deeper into its softness. And my body responded.
And not only my body. Passion gives the mind no peace. It usually comes to me at dawn, at the hour when my world is still hushed and my body incapable of any movement. A single sentence wakes me, and will not let me stay in my position of warmth until I give it what it asks for. The early evening, meanwhile, has tilted. A gentle breeze, with a single breath, returned my body from the cushion back to my thoughts. The jasmine’s shadow has stretched across the terrace to my chair, and its scent has begun to deepen. As it does every evening, when it prepares to perfume the dark.
The light has yellowed. Not yet amber. But I already know where it is heading.
And the ladybird?
She is real when she writes.
I closed my notebook.
It, too, begins here: Ladybirds and Unicorns