hidden

I know there are silent retreats where people go days without saying a word.

I am silent, but I always feared the extremism of this practice: listening to the roar of my head all the time would be a risky experience.

However, I haven't spoken in days.

Nothing weird happened - I just came back from too many places and I don't feel like getting to the place I'm at.

So I hardly speak.

The one speaking is actually a part of me that I don't care about.

I live withdrawn in a leafy silence, a silence like a bliss.

Someone who is not me unfurls the sails and blows them wind and adequate temperatures to reach the end.

I don't care which one it is.

I walk, I look at the sky: an exact construction, a mathematical formula.

I understand things that I know I will never understand again, that I will soon forget.

But now they are magnificent.

I don't mind knowing that I'm going to lose them, that I'm going to fall asleep again.

I write with the determination of a train and, at the same time, as if I were swimming underwater.

All that I am rises to the surface and hides again, leaving a crystalline trail, an empty pentagram, diaphanous scales.

Today the cat climbed onto my lap and stayed there for a long time.

It was like a devotional ballet, an offering.

I caressed her without distraction, immersed in my portentous silence like a glass vase.

I am, no one sees me.

It is little that gets to touch me.

I follow the thread of what I think and what I think has no shape or time or is made to be said.

My house, my books, what exists interests me little.

I can stare at things, though I'm not sure what that means: how it's different from the way I used to frantically stare at everything.

It is a silence of chastity and detachment.

But, as Jack Gilbert wrote, "I wonder if the silence in me now will be a beginning or an end."

More information

Falklands 4.0

50% off

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber