As the sun sets, the birds nicely bustle to grab the best branch, willing to profit by what this piece of land offers.
I have a provisional desk right near the window, from which now, after the heat of today, a pleasant fresh comes in.
I’ve been here alone for a few days. It’s not easy to make it happen, but sometimes it happens. It’s just the way I am. As much as I’m alone for most of the day most of the year, I need periods in which to be alone even more, especially in a quiet place. It’s something for which those around you pay a price, but the art of reconciling the various needs of life without losing identity has never been painless.
There would be much to say about this situation and this moment in my life. For example, how important it is that my wife finally had the opportunity to revive this old house, whose pine tree that guards it was planted exactly on the occasion of her birth. Or that another life cycle closed, but that the next one seems as close as the other bank, beyond dangerous currents. Or that my identities, however all authentic, have multiplied again like a rabbit family.
However, I don’t feel like talking about it. There would be too much to say, too much to enter the private, too much to involve other people, without even doing justice to what cannot simply be told. And then what?
Maybe I’m just not a writer. A writer shouldn’t have these fears. They say. But is it true?
Does anyone ever really know who we are? Do you ever tell everything, absolutely everything, about you?
The truth is that who you really are, your most profound experience, lives and dies with you. Something transpires. Something you share. Something passes to those close to you. Maybe even something is handed down. But only something, never everything. Even if someone remembers you for a while, only a small part of you will be.
You don’t even need someone to really know you. Others rightly need and care about only a few parts of you. Although sometimes it hurts more than usual. But it couldn’t be otherwise.
And even if, absurdly, someone went along with this selfish need of yours, really knew the complex path that led to who you are, would something really remain?
Now, I feel that it’s useless to say what goes on in my head on this evening, an evening that I imagined the first evening that I was here alone, and in which I was transported with a time tunnel, as if the days between were spent in a story lived by someone else.
Yet, I was here. Yet, the time has passed. And it will pass again. And in a week it will seem strange, and sad, that this evening has passed. I’m here and, at the same time, I’m already not here.
This and dozens of other thoughts, even more compelling and trivial, form the complex and temporary scaffolding of my self today. Only lived by me. That will remain in me, as long as I am there, and no later. That would remain only in me even if I tried to share them.
So this I, who is now here, but who we know is gone already, especially when these few lines are read, now stops typing and lets silence and darkness invade the room. Which, sooner or later, will happen anyway.
It’s time to let the chirping of the crickets enter.