I stopped. Light reaches through the glazed frontage of the old townhouse all the way to the far end of the long room, though the glass is dirty now. Even so, it reflects the image of a woman in a white jumper and a scarf of the same colour, falling almost to her knees.
I stepped closer. Behind the reflection, which moved as I moved, people passed along the pavement. They entered it and disappeared again without stopping.
I once owned a bookshop. A small space on the ground floor of my parents’ town house, entered through a shoe shop. Bespoke solid-wood shelves majestically lined three of the four walls, from the ceiling down to the dark carpet, which occasionally left customers slightly perplexed.
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.
I caught myself listening once again to my own article, recorded in my own voice. An article that was meant to be a kind of confession to myself. Or not only to myself? In any case, the moment it transferred from my head to paper, it changed its character.
Were I to wrap this fact in a perfect excuse, I would name as the culprit that large amber bulb above my armchair.
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.