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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

when I was feeling homesick, on a beach at dusk, with the sound of waves lapping up to the shore, half a world away from the life I used to know, in a place that was so similar yet so different, with unfamiliar faces around me and humid air that I was not used to […]

Leichtes Blau und Sturmhimmel, Regen am Abend und Sonnenschein am nächsten Morgen. Ein verschlafenes Dorf aus Stein, welches einst einen weltberühmten Dichter beherbergt hat, aus dessen Werk man die Gässchen fast schon erahnen konnte, bevor man sie sieht. Bleierne Mittsommerhitze, Altweibersommer auf den schmiedeeisernen Balkonen, Hundegebell in der Gasse. Hesse muss es hier gleichermassen geliebt […]

Another year is over andthings are rushing past me while I’m standing still in the middle of it all –it’s been the year of everything and nothing at the same timeworry, sadness, frustration, a bit of too much for so many, a shared affliction that goes through cells and borders it’s been a year lost,a […]

I own a small photograph of my grandmother, it’s almost quadratic and on the sides you can see dark strips with rectangular holes from the film roll. It’s a black-and-white photograph and my grandmother looks beautiful, standing slightly turned away from the camera, her gaze to the far right, facing something or someone I’ll never […]

The house looked almost as if it were unreal, perched atop the small hill, rising old and mighty against a blue and cold December sky. It was early morning and not many people were about, and those who were did not seem to mind the house atop the hill so very much. After all, it […]