a bottle stopper for a heart, round at the one end,the other one sharp,perfectly balanced, if you hold it just rightfitting my neck to a T – I’d always found it difficult to admit tothe obvious sin of not being perfect, a painstaking shame in the face of failuremeasuring myself against the Trees of my […]
A week ago, a train carried me from the pine-covered hills of Southern Italy to the sleepy station of my hometown. When we crossed the border at Chiasso, the sky slowly turned purple behind the mountain ranges. The transitions seemed seamless; the gradient of dusk, the train moving from one country to another, my being […]
I am rediscovering time as if it were made just for me, tailor-made, so to speak, a unit of existence that I can stretch and distribute however I like, rediscovering the beauty of just being, without pressure to achieve everything, anything, all the time, all at once, I am spacing out space […]
Manchmal, wenn das Licht goldig ist vom Sommer, und die länger werdenden Schatten der Dämmerung die letzten Sonnenstrahlen aus den Strassenrinnen waschen, während der Wind etwas stärker weht und es nach frisch geschnittenem Gras riecht, und du schon bald ins Bett musst, obwohl du gerne noch über tausend Träume nachdenken würdest, dann hörst du das […]
a pathetic fallacy, I hear him explain, while I also hear the crackle from the iridescent bubbles on top of my coffee, freshly-brewed on our old stove, and see the steam rising light and airy from my cup, which overflows on mornings like this one – Sunday, overnight oats in a mason jar and fresh […]
Ali Smith said: all novels are about society and time. They can’t be a novel and not be about these two things. She also said many other interesting things that mild April evening at the bookshop below the British Museum, about curlews, and locks, and what to do when we’re stuck in our writing (wait, […]
Two things happened today. For one thing, I woke up with an unsightly bump on my nose. This makes it sound like the bump was new, which is not true. In fact, it’s been sitting on my nose for a while. In a sort of existential dread at the prospect of turning twenty-five last September, […]
das Haus ist überfüllt und leer zugleich,nur hie und da ein leises Echomeiner selbst,die Räume dröhnenin der sich ausbreitenden Stille nur die Gemäldehängen weiter dort wo sie sollten,die Gesichter, umrahmt von Gold und Silber, drehen sich zu mir,folgen meinen Schritten undscheinen mir zu zwinkern und die Blumen ranken sichauf ihrem grauen Grundwachsen weiter, wachsen weiterihrer […]
I saw a runner jog past my window, on the dark and empty street below me and I envied him his freedom to go running at 9:31 p.m. without a care in the world I’d wanted to go for a run, too, today but I was working and when I was done, it was […]
some vignettes from this year, in no particular order; The people in it; being each other’s shoulders to lean on, trusting each other with our heavy hearts as well as theinappropriate belly-laughter, whether we’re oceans apart or living across the hall from each other. A clever man once said: “The world is truly round and […]
I’m sitting in the orange-tinged reading room, with its high ceiling and wooden floorboards and what I can see from here is this: a couple sitting on two easy chairs, he immobile and she drawing him and the sweeping staircase behind, only stopping sometimes to smudge some of her charcoal lines and I think that […]
I grew a map of myself in my head and I changed it constantly according to my fancies and your whims, resenting myself for the way I grew in unsteady fits rather than perfectly ripe with the warmth of the sun I drew a map of myself on the back of my hands and I […]
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit it; I failed. When I set up this blog before the new year 2018, I’d promised myself that I would be consistent with it. That I would take no chances and make no excuses, that come what may, I would write, and I would post something on this […]
She was almost indistinguishable from the dark, and the only reason that Harold noticed her was the gold of her wrist watch flaring up when she moved her arm. Other than that, she was completely still, standing in his back garden and looking up at the house, at the window, at him behind the window. […]
When archaeologists started for the first time to systematically uncover the ancient city of Pompeii in the 18th century, they were met with a riddle. They found strange cavities within the thick layers of pumice and ash that had preserved the city for centuries, littered with bones. It did not take long to figure out […]
