We –
I was on the other side when it happened. At the end of the age of pink. I wanted so dearly to be there where I was born, between the walls darkened by smoke and unrest of the years, at the kitchen table where we gathered as we had been young, and then no more. I would have liked to be there with all of them. To inhale my mother’s ambition through the trail of her smoke, deliver the bottle of tears to the northern seas she had dreamed all along her beaten-down life. To hold my father, who had seen the mountains for the first time at fourteen, when he left home to go working in the capital. He had to learn how not to choke up when he told us of that time, still overwhelmed by the taste of another air and the sudden freedom, so vast he didn’t know what to make of it. He wanted us to know had never crossed them, for all he had wanted to. He had to come back; he was still needed.
I would have liked to hug my brothers, hold hands as we were anointed with the wordless gift. As the age of blue began I learned that the older one, the stag, had left behind years of acquaintances, his own wife, to be with them as it finally dawned. But even before I knew he was going back – they knew I was still behind the wall. My brother - I thought: the world is finally catching up on our secret. I was glad everyone else could feel it, too. I wasn’t jealous for a single minute.
It was too late for our parents, we had been told, but not for us. We had a real shot at making it. They watched over us, pretended not to see the light in the room long after dark, paid for the first English lessons, then helped us move into the city, then anywhere else. We knew we could make it. We needed to. All of mankind could be saved, if only we tried hard enough, if only we didn’t talk about it too much. What a singular balance we had to keep all of our lives. Grew up to commit the mistakes we were told belong to young people - not knowing how much power you hold over others, how deep you could be hurt - because we were going to be the last to be able to experience them. Our own vantage point on history, some of us were already at work: the studies said afterwards – the great afterwards of human time – that in no other period of history had so many memoirs been written, for as much as we can know of those ages that had not been redeemed. None of it would happen anymore. We trained all of our life, incessantly.
And still when it came it came as a surprise. I couldn’t hold my parents to myself. As we shed tears and learned all the words of the world to describe this rift, this sudden divide – when the wall broke down I was on the other side. And I didn’t get the full grace. I am still able to speak – speak as I do now – and I cannot sing like the others. But maybe that’s the price to pay for evolution: somebody has to step behind and tell the story, even when there is no need to tell it anymore.
It is hard to tell now how long the process was – words are always late to the world’s heart – and how long it lasted, when it came; if it happened in a day, an hour, during a commercials’ break. I know when it ended and when we had been saved. I knew just before it happened and I regretted being far from those I loved first and wouldn’t make it. But I had been on the other side for so long. For them I was the lost daughter, the photo hidden in the drawer. My freedom could only be bought at the cost of everything else, I thought.
When the wall was being torn down I took my companions’ hands in mine, those I had found in the corner of a dream, the back street of a story you’ve heard before. I met all of them in moments of grand splendour, the desperation on our faces suddenly outshined by the impossibility of the encounter. All of us forlorn, all of us lost children in a shopping mall, all of us in exile out of fear of suffocating. All of us aware, terrified of the steps we had to take. We saved each other because we didn’t know what to do on our own, because we couldn’t do otherwise.
We were a tight-knit group of everchanging faces and we had rules. Angels themselves, everyone had to confess to angels in disguise. Those who looked for us failed. We had to be chanc’d upon, at the end of a glass, stumbling across the roads of Prague at night or in the parks of London. Kids at the end of the world, we wanted to be friends with the world and we learnt quickly that the world wanted to be friends with us. And the story is always the same: you drown in someone else’s life, stolen or imposed. Memory and regrets slowly but surely coagulate in one’s own cradle and then, one day, walking back home, taking the long way around, you find out the air has become lighter, because you have left already. The steps that follow are mechanical, instinctual.
No - we all fled. There was so much grief in our recountings. It is important to say this, because it cannot be anymore. We found each other in our exiles, more or less desired, more or less forced, and it did feel like having known each other since forever, or for the eternity to come. The story was always the same and everyone’s story changed, over the years, as we each travelled back to that original telling, to that story told in the dead of the night, on desperation’s high, a dream’s vertigo, to find new words to say the same old things. Making sense of it all, once again, all over, forever. Until came the no more.
We stole from the books on communes and went dumpster diving, amassed the knick-knacks zu Verschenken!, sofas from friends that moved out, back into the old word, and ancient wooden furniture where life in the shape of the smallest of things had never stopped existing. We laid in the multitude of pillows amassed on the floors and took turns to read aloud the late Hesse to proclaim us pilgrims, crusaders, and friends. We called a few of our flats Everyman’s Castalia, then The Tribe of the Rising Sons, sometimes nothing at all, sometimes we had seventeen names, one hundred. I was their Sinbad, their Pinetree, the smallest paw. They thought I was guiding them, they had been my star all along.
That evening I took their hands and I repeated their adventurers’ names, the ones they had chosen. I asked each one of them to tell their story again as the world shifted, broke, and found air and meaning again, that ancestral truth. I asked them things old and rusty, of the fresh, green years when they hadn’t been hurt, of the key the had found in the meanwhile. I asked about the prison, those who kept them inside, unwillingly, guilty mostly of having been too close to one’s heart. The escape attempts before the last spring, when everything becomes quiet and you could almost stay. Then the jump – then the phone calls in the darkest hours, heart in throat and someone’s hands on the shoulder, finding the courage to say: I’m not coming home. We were on the other side of the door, born on the threshold between two ages. We were the last to know the pain of having to find the right words, the right time, to communicate what one feels. The balance between what you tell others and keep for yourself. We could only suspect it would be different. As the world changed colour, some of us took their stand and refused to share, hid in the corners, left our shipwreck. But we forgave them, we forgave them immediately, because we knew they were taking advantage, for the last time, of this innocent reluctance, of the space between me and us. There had been pleasure in that too - in pain, heartbreak, closure that never comes, or if at all, never as you’d like it – and soon there would be no more.
When the walls came down we told of our first encounters again. The messiness of every start: when we didn’t know each other and now that we knew each other so much more than we ever thought we could. Getting used to the shift in perspective, in subject, in conjugation. The way the heart becomes a horizon, expanding as the light does. That night, riding a feeling we can’t describe, still can’t describe, we admitted to ourselves we had been naïve. Hand in hand, as the world awakened differently, we all made the same discovery: that there had never been a wall. There had been distance, that’s all. And distance can do great things, as much as an exile has to be maintained to be true. We had build mountains where there had been none and across the years we pilgrimaged above them until we crossed the epoch and we woke up in that blue morning. Everything was leading there.
That night the embers lost their light and, suddenly aware that it was coming, we stood there, in our apartment, swarmed against each other, our throats rough with telling and crying. We were so tired – many of us asleep already. It was so dark and we could feel it approaching. But it didn’t hurt and we never were afraid. Then morning came, it was powder blue, and every wall had been abolished. We learnt the most simple of truths: that we are a universal body – light and dust of the cosmos – we flow in the same blood, soar in the same breath, inhabit the same rooms of the same dream that is actually the world.
The soft blue had risen from the ground and swallowed everything. It was the first daybreak without war. The chemical blue made everything quiet and soft. The world echoed like rain on the rooftop. Slowly? at last? fearfully? it died down. A coward man’s fear, the useless god, even love, the last altar, the one we had spared. We went out into the sun and found its awakening more beautiful that it would be – cool, boundless. There was no I anymore and we went into the city to celebrate with the students that had been living there for a month, six, stranded for a lifetime. We knew all of them and they all knew us – we had always known each other. We laughed and we cried, we told each other stories, we remembered Natalie’s word and we agreed with her that it is the most pleasant thing to hear one’s own words coming out of the mouth of a friend. We caressed, kissed, and then we played, eventually, as we never could, like kids, like kids again.
Because it wasn’t too late.
In the airport the air was festive. Names were shouted in every language, tongues damped with silence and distance and the curiosity of a new idiom being formed; over the course of a few months, we would stop talking and we would start singing. I carried with me, as preparation, the stories of others, of myself. As the airplane left, I dozed off and we woke up multiple times in a terror, fearing for the worst. I closed my eyes and I heard all of us, the tether strong but yielding to the wind. I worked my courage up by repeating their stories until they became music and we were less afraid. As I was about to fall asleep, I could always see myself opening a door, always the same. In the dream the voices came back to me. In the wonder without astonishment of the dream they intertwined to form a new one, where each and every word was one and a thousand, where every name was a melody chipping away at the unending dunes of hot sand in the desert, howling through the caves of the mountains under a blanket of snow, flying through the vast prairies, cascading through all the waterfalls of the world and becoming one with the water of the sea, of all seas.
It was my father’s dream watching the Alps and my mother’s, waiting for the sea to drown Cavalleggeri. But they had been cruelly divided. Forever singular.
I told ourselves this story so many times, before the door. Eternity passed at that threshold and I couldn’t bring myself to knock. Between me and that home was the compact boundary of abandonment, of the worthlessness of words, those thrown with anger on the floor and the truer ones, the difficult ones, that hardly let themselves be said. The ones I couldn’t say when I was younger, when I was still I.
.
I open the door and they stand in front of me, as real as a thing. The two of them alone. Everyone else has left. For a moment, my father doesn’t see me, and I watch him unwatched. His face is stained with age and grief and he hasn’t been saved. They haven’t been saved. He sees me now, but he doesn’t recognize me. I have seen his face so many times – he has never seen ours, and it frightens him. My mother turns towards me and believes for a split second to have seen the photo of my father she kept on the living room’s wall. But we have become so much more than that.
She looks at me and cries, with composure. The only wall that we have left is the one we couldn’t break – between us and them. My father cries his stupid man’s pride as I open my arms. I apologize. I stay at the threshold.
He says, It’s been ten years. The silence in our throat explodes and I cry, too, as the world cries with me. We ask them to forgive me for leaving them behind. Even though I know I didn’t have a choice, and this is what we wanted, what you wanted, what they all wanted.
I know now something has gone wrong with me – I have remain at the threshold. I can feel the fuse, I can feel its warmth calling to me, needing me, but I’m not close enough to melt and become one with it. Still far enough to talk. I say that I’m sorry to them as I did then and I will always be doing.
I say that I’m sorry to dad for not helping him die and to mom for having run away from her eyes, for not having replied to the letters from the other side. But it was too late, and too early already, and the blue was too big and beautiful, and I ask them to forgive me for running away, for wanting to give myself a shot in the big city, for the privilege of being hurt, to be in danger and to be the danger, to want to be anything else besides your daughter and your sister and the girl at the end of the tobacco shop. I wanted to know fear, because your love was there, your love was everywhere, and everything was allowed.
Because I saw the world and I couldn’t come back because I was on the road to become the woman I was yesterday, this poor woman who isn’t scared anymore. I came back with my eyes full of lights and colours like you’ve never seen around here, because I have seen them all, because I was there all along and because I was awake when the blue morning came, when I understand it all, the middle and the beginning and the end, which hasn’t come yet, but will, because I have made my mistakes and I get it now, this is what you wanted for us, and now the wall has fallen down and I came back to tell them, to bring my eyes and my tongue back, because soon there isn’t going to be a voice anymore, and all of the loves I’ve wasted and the kisses I’ve given, and now the wall has fallen down and you look at me and I cannot speak, I cannot tell them, it’s too late, it’s always been too late, even if it was early once.
We became what you wanted to see – we became what you wanted for us and what Dora had promised – that the path, spanning throughout the centuries of mankind’s illusion, would have completed itself. We have been spared the futility of years, the numb pains of growing old and more alone. We walk with death now and we shake hands once it’s time to go. Everyone is implicated with everyone else. Someone is always dying. Someone is always being born.
And they don’t understand and they accept it. The wall was there, then it wasn’t, then there were them and us, on the other side of history. The letter they had passed on to us without opening it made it to us and we already knew what it contained.
I cannot cross the threshold of this old home as long as you stand there. A ghost walks there, and we wish to speak with him. I will wait as long as it takes. I will sit down here with you. I will not touch you, but I will be with you.
If you blink, the centuries pass and you can die peacefully now. I can tell you– I came back because I needed to tell you. I needed to tell you what was said to us in the blue morning that it started all over again: that the blue dog that watches over us all said everything is going to be fine. He promised.
You go now. You’ll find out in a short while – we haven’t forgotten you, we couldn’t. Walk into the blue.
.
.
We step inside.
A ghost walks here.
.
.
Our brother
The sediment of your rage has changed these walls, has become your ectoplasm. The world has been freed. Did you know? Chanc’d upon. I’ve been trying to tell you, through a glass darkly. Brother, we cannot reach you. Why did you have to go? All the world knows of you now and it loves you. It has been longing since the beginning of time to love you. Why couldn’t you wait? Everyone was waiting for you. You missed the party. You blinked at the wrong time. Was the pain of the world too much for you? We were on the other side. I’m so so so so so sorry
Our brother, we hope you can hear us. We made it. We have reunified the cosmos, we have learnt how to sing like the stars. Do you hear it? Please come back I need you. We are playing for you. Can you hear us?
All of us are light now – the air is not the same without you - we walk upon an enlightened earth. We are making progress you could never imagine, we are speed-running perfection. I can bring you back. In a couple of thousand of years we will become a prism and make the light a thousand-fold. If the plan doesn’t change – if we don’t change- even if I lose everything -
Brother, the light cannot reach you. We are everywhere and everyone now. But you are amongst the departed and you walk upon a dark earth. Why did you have to leave me alone?
We are sorry to disturb you. The room hasn’t changed – you traverse it, it is your realm. Forgive us. We came back because we wanted to tell you that we made it. We really did.
.
Brother, do you remember when we were just kids and we didn’t have the words for the love we had despite it all? Do you remember when you would hold my hand before sleep? You were the only one that could make the boat of the night sail away. We have become the night now, brother. You held our hand when we wanted to say feelings that were too big for words. The fabric of the cosmos. Stars of unspeakable brightness. We told you once, on the phone, after one of our long silences, that only kids could speak like that. But I already knew we were wrong. Did you know? Can you please tell us, one way or another, that you knew?
We wanted to tell you - all of the world knows our secret now, the matrix of the stars. We are waiting for you. Come back to me.
