A year of goodbyes and farewells.
A year of new encounters and lost bonds.
Life this year. And death this year.
The struggle to gather both and all in a simple smile sinks me in a quiet mood.
“Educating Rita” tonight on the screen. By chance, as by chance is much of ordinary life, whereas in choices only we hide our struggles and our strengths. “Educating Rita” is a movie about a woman’s personal and professional growth and a more successful man’s strive to move on. I catch only the last scenes: a farewell full of affection and compassion. The story of the student and her teacher, backed by utmost respect and appreciation, unravels all in their last hug.
A hug, unlike a letter or a phone call, calls for no answer. It is an instant, and can mean re-encounter or can mean farewell. Sometimes it can even be undefined, if held in silence. But no lie can survive its squeeze.
A yellow stone glows against the darkness tonight. Stuck on top of the roofs, cut in half. Its shine is beautiful. Its stillness and incompleteness are ugly. Yellow like a rotten apple, half like a broken tear.
Quite ironically, one week ago, the moon welcomed me with another face. Its glow, white and full, shone through a Viennese apartment. Ironic because tonight too has been yet another arrival in a capital of Europe. But its welcome mismatches my expectations: after having followed me through every Austrian night, behind every palace along my walks in the central streets, or in a warm evening at Museums Platz, outside of the pubs or across the window along my trains’ truck, the satellite is now stuck against my window, in its persistently dirty gold shade.
Someone says that when the moon joins the earth in a lunar eclipse, everybody lift their noses up the sky to watch them overlap perfectly against each other. These nights I’ve been myself chased by the moon and tonight it seems to want to overlap with my own thoughts in a pensive look. I can’t help to glance at it and interrogate its magisterial stillness.
Until, like the rest, I let it sink in, over a serene smile. The rotten yellow shades into pale okra and the cut elegantly sharpens up against the darker sky.
I choose the silence.
