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Ole Herlyn

Vereinsamt

From up here I can see the couple on the other side of River, where Day's last light slowly sinks into Grass, emitting a blue hue across wet green. The couple is drowning in Evening's gloom. A purplish shine around them tells me that they are of one mind - at this moment, at least. I dare not judge for anything apart from the moment. I have seen lights change from purple to yellow and grey so fast it taught me to mistrust the image of love.

Although maybe I should not talk about blue, purple, yellow or any other colour. But I learned from years of careful watching. And listening. I learned that my colour is black.

This is it, I ponder. It is not much of a place, really. It is not the house with the snug fireplace and walls painted all different colours, a door leading through willow's leaves right into the wild garden, overgrown with a surplus of green. No, it is not even a flat full of mirror shells and pictures and a kitchen where the morning's sun feeds my generous plantation of herbs. It is a small room with five walls, the plaster peeling off four of the walls, the fifth is merely window, and so far I have done nothing but look out of it.

A box of English literature, Dickens to Hemingway, whom I have never read, serves as my seat. Elbows on my knees, I have watched the night cover all the strangeness of this place, melting unfamiliar colours and sights into an image I could understand.

Next to me the shoebox full of letters and postcards holds an ashtray and a glass of wine. I will not light a candle. It is not the inside of the room I want to see, nor the reflection of my face in the window, dim darkness in my back. By now I have forgotten what the outside looked like. I merely notice the stars which show the same constellation as yesterday, when I still knew what was before them. They create the same distance between me and them. I know I can't reach them. Reliable.

Yesterday, I would have known that with the morning's light there'd be a once red brick wall, blackened by generations of car drivers. A cat's tail vanishing from sight across the roofs. A flower pot with dead benjaminis rotting on one of the sheds underneath my window. I could look up. I could look down. It had a balance. Now staring into the darkness before me it seems I can only see the past.

It had been a sunny day. I hadn't noticed the rain until I found myself staring at the dry square your car had left on the street. I still feel the empty space you have left in my life. I wish another rain could set in and wash it all over.

The last drop of wine still sliding down my tongue and tickling my throat with a sour sensation I feel dawn approaching and start to feel numbly curious about the image I will discover. I am trying in vain to recollect the view from this window. I imagine a beautiful tree spreading its generous branches across the yard, drops of green sprinkled around its roots in the moist earth. A thick green ivy spreading its arms along the wall behind it.

In my attempt to forget all the yesterdays, I have successfully forgotten where I moved. I cannot remember where I came from, and what I brought. But I remember you. Me. Us.

Memory is like a world on its own. It offers a map of all the places we have been. I have lost the desire to look at the photographs again. They show not only our smiling faces, but now seem to hold the threat that we have not been there together, walking apart in our different worlds. No happy memory is left unshaded with a doubt.

On the bench when you held my hand and I would free it to offer once more an explanation of the crows' behaviour, so regulated and yet so unplanned, it seemed. Late autumn sun. And when their calls reached us across the river we both understood and kissed. What did you really hear? What thoughts did you carry in your heart when darkness fell across the grass and led us home?

It will be cold soon. I wonder whether they know. I know, that is why I'm here. They are wearing short sleeves, showing their naked arms to Warmth. When Snow sets in, where will they go?

Morning has broken the dreams I had. Outside my window a grey light paints the outline of a thin birch tree, bare, dark and dying. I recall the clean swept concrete of the minuscule square around it, broken only by two dustbins underneath the branches. A shabby grey wall with broken bottles on top of it completes the view I have been waiting for all night. You would have told me that this room was as far away from my visions as the stars from my ever longing eyes. Now this room is as far away from you as I could get without losing everything, without losing myself. My boxes still packed, the bed unslept in, I bury my face in my hands and sob red wine tears into my sleeves.

I am ready to leave. To move. To lose.

But I know no place to go to. Any place is as bad as this. Every place an illumination of emptiness. I watch as a crisp sun crawls into the space between houses and bins, touching the branches with something like light. Cold light. My eyes wander across the walls of my room. I have not bought a pot of paint. I will not put up my decorations, pictures, silver trays and candleholders, all acquired during our journeys.

The old paint of my room matches with the wall outside. It matches the colour of the winter's sky. It matches the emptiness inside. My room offers nothing to remind me, and nothing to distract. Just cold. I must admit, it suits me well. I do not want to be happy. I do not want to forget.

The couple attracts my attention. It is not only because of their colour and the beauty of the hidden sunset before them. I watch them talking, absorbed in their thoughts. I think they are watching me. Us. My family. They are trying to understand the game we play. The game we call Life. They wonder what rules we adhere to. I see their hands drawing different explanations into the air, as they are inventing stories about us. It pleases me.

Our shoes were wet from the grass we walked upon. Under every bench in the park lies a poem, I mused. And underneath the autumn leaves a kiss, you said in reply, and your kiss was wet and stuck to my soul. I would like to bury it now, underneath the damp foliage in the streets outside. So I could say I lost it, for good. But it's stuck to my boots and I drag it around with me, even carried it into this room. Brown and torn, useless, it settled into a corner spreading autumn's death in my thoughts.

I will tell them. I think they will understand.

We are simply watchers of Life around us. It is the simple things that call for our enthusiastic applause. It might be a leaf I have been watching until it finally gave in to the wind and the weakness of its tree, and after a long and struggling flight touched the ground in a damp patch, soaked and earthbound, another victim of earth's necessity. It is these moments that make me break into laughter and acclamations. I set off screaming the story into the sky, telling my family of yet another cycle fulfilled. And we all fly an excited looping of honour, to settle down once more on our lookout places balancing on the top of the trees.

The lines we spoke now sound like a pop song to me, cheap and thoughtless. Maybe we were simply reciting something we'd both learned. Maybe our last Sunday together has simply been a recitation of love and romance. Maybe someone found the last poem I left, under that bench facing the last blue light of the day. Watching a thousand black wings.

I will never drop a poem again.

The couple's light is turning yellow, a hue of grey around their heads. Yet another cycle fulfilled. I fly one more looping, but somehow it leaves me sad.

Soon it will be winter. But I will not reach for the big red woollen blanket, that offered warmth and comfort, that felt like home. I don't know where I will go from here, or whether I will ever settle down again. I know the snow is coming, already I can feel the first freezing flakes stroking my face.

With stiff fingers I open the shoebox next to me. I find some paper. Now that the day broke I would like to light a candle. But for lack of a light, I begin to write.

Soon it will be cold and I will want to hide my head underneath all my feathers and pretend I could not hear. But we never stop crying and I never stop listening.

Cold - but alive.

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