The calm slate

My days are tinged with tiny contrasts, with ripples licking the hourly beach as if nothing was going to happen, as if everything had to be done. It’s not dawn or dusk, it’s nothing, and it’s all there.

I’m learning a melody from Fauré, Mai, they’re lace notes. I also learn the choral passages of Babi Yar, Shostakovich’s dark symphony. I observe these people who, like those two works, oscillate between happiness and knowledge of Evil. And I haven’t had a voice in four days. It comes and goes when the lungs succeed in counteracting cough.

I am also waiting for a response from a publisher. He raised his eyebrows out of interest, and his reading committee is expected to make a decision shortly. I would like to hope, I am currently unable to do so, for fear of seeing fate run away if I try too hard to attract his favors.

I am neither in the eye of a cyclone nor around it. I have work to get bored, I have work to do, I have singing to inspire me, I have ideas for several stories. Everything spreads like a calm sea. Silence in my anguish swirls in my stomach.

To be happy, all you have to do is firmly erase the slate. When I reach the river, I will decide if and how to cross it.

It’s raining slowly. It is neither flood nor drought.