Outside, the wind is blowing fiercely again, as though autumn were arriving instead of summer. And clearly, it is not only outside that it blows. I closed the window. If only the same could be done with what is within me.
Ever since my world began to turn white, my bedroom has surrendered to it too. The amber glow of the bulb summons at once that perfect sense of evening intimacy. The softness of hand-combed cotton bedlinen completes the purity of the colour and, after a few minutes, begins to take on the scent of body oil. Bourbon vanilla and frangipani leave their essence upon this white cotton weave, a fragrance that, by evening, becomes my own skin.
It is ten o’clock at night, and my phone has just slipped into sleep mode. My space. The hour when the world around me falls silent. And even if it has not, I shall no longer know. Nor will the world know anything of me, for it believes I am already asleep. Sleep mode lets not a single notification through, with one exception only my daughter’s number.
The silence that spreads, almost habitually, through the whole room is grounding. I can even hear my cat breathing , somewhere close by, through those tiny nostrils I cannot fathom air passing through at all, as he snuffles contentedly in his sleep.
And so the world has finally fallen still. Or perhaps it is I who silenced the world.
Just before my phone fell silent along with it, three dots managed to flicker. “The funeral is on Wednesday.”
A ladybird surfaced in my mind. The one from years ago, above another grave, crawling along a black coat. Since then, I have known that they never arrive by chance.
It is time to answer.
“I shall be a tiny ladybird, crawling along your sleeve, and I shall be there with you.”Send.
From that day on, he has called me ladybird.
There is something extraordinarily familiar in the architecture of his mind. His way of observing the world. His relationship with silence. With words. With solitude. With attention. In a composition so close to my own language, he creates a closeness that arises beyond everything by which we ordinarily measure it. Without physical presence, without shared time in a single room, without touch. It is rare, and at the same time unsettling, for it contradicts everything we usually name as its condition.
Pauses hold a meaning of their own. The moment between two sentences catches in the throat and settles low in the body. Breath is heard. And in that instant it is better to keep speaking, because to listen would already be too close.
And without ever admitting it to ourselves, a strange kind of tenderness and trust began to form between us. Between me and the person on the other side.
A unicorn is a rare creature precisely because it need not be caught, nor shut inside the paddock of ordinary days and expectations. It lives in the purity of what remains unnamed. And so we have not yet let it cross into ordinary life. We guard the myth from banality, that it may remain untouched.
But in the depth of night, beneath the amber lamp, comes the sharpest cut. What if, in truth, we are not protecting each other, but only our belief in the unicorn? What if I have merely learned to make poetry of silence, because poetry hurts less than admission? A unicorn knows nothing of the cold that remains.
And yet. The ladybird is real. She has weight, tiny though she is. She crawls along the sleeve at the very point where poetry ends.
I am part of voice notes recorded softly into the dark. In the calmest form of my voice at the close of the day. In the trust with which I let another hear me in a state where, for that day, I am building nothing of myself any longer. When someone becomes part of my quietest inner space, and we both begin to handle it, perhaps, with too much care.
The amber light casts soft shadows on the wall. I pick up the phone. I press record and speak into the dark.
“A lovely evening to you too, my M.”
Essay continues: Beneath the Amber light