bells and flowers

Today I got lost in other people’s stories, on waking my head was light from having fought mosquitoes during the early hours of morning. I walked around the tarmac-ground softened from the heat and wobbly like sand, and thought of everyone far away I love. One man greeted me and I was amazed. Have a good day, Sir, you mistake me for somebody else. I crossed the iron footbridge over the Basarab railway station and looked down through the gaps that remained, stubbornly, square, in the smoothly worn brown-red iron trodden by many feet over a long period of time, each soft step taking with them a molecule or two. What I was looking at was mizerie, smelly garbage. I was half expecting to discover the body of a decaying dog. I did not. An old woman was complaining about the dust, and it settled on my body like a silky surface, mixed with the transpiration (that word choice should make my status of ‘ladyship’ quite obvious), and later on could be rubbed off like flaky skin. I could not stand the sight of one child standing at a crossroad and breathing into a bag. The world is too loud, too indifferent. One big man sat on the same spot as yesterday, talking to a quartier neighbour, an old lady with white hair elaborately strung together in a bun, carrying many shabby plastic bags. I had an acute sense of loss on Calea Grivitei, walking past a curtained shop window that a billboard with the opening times in these kinds of stick-on plastic letters, and a basket with a stuffed white cat plus several kittens with scary stary eyes. Looking through the ruins of one once majestic corner building, I could see through the holes the twinkling sign of a hotel, newly risen into the sky. Another project of modernity, only the context, this time, being capitalism. This environment, momentarily an extension of my self, decaying just like my body, and would not remain until I return. A fragment ‘il y a longtemps que je t’aime jamais je ne t’oublierai’ rhythmed my heart. It rung in my head like the church bells in the village, with the characteristic tierce that render them so distinctive. ‘… each hung bell's [Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name’ (G.M.H.). It made me understand separation, time, and nostalgia. A moment of lucidity in a fog, rhyming, producing consonance, while working towards that project-of-little-importance. In the meantime has become the work I do, because that’s what I get up for in the morning. My dreams, however, were flying off with the ceiling, I found myself looking at the stars. I dreamed I am going to explode, and I held my arms in readiness. I was certain of the cause: a flower was growing in my stomach, and I sat down near the piano and waited. I think I was smiling.