It is night and he looks out at the open sea. Until now, he has ignored this beauty, this glitter on the water – he didn’t even wanted to notice it. But now that the emptiness envelops his body and takes over his soul, he suddenly pays attention. How a single fire, a blaze within and around him can change everything with the snap of a finger. Before, he had been blind. Wouldn’t acknowledge his feelings and what her smile triggers in him. She is the one who elicits truths from him and doesn’t sugarcoat anything. She is the woman he doesn’t really want, because she only makes his world shake even more, and at the same time she is the only thing he has left.
This trip, which was actually only meant for work and where he could not have used any distraction. But in the warm June sun, there in the tall grasses, in the house with the too-thin walls and the leaky roof, that’s where it happened. That’s where everything turned. From top to bottom, upside down with a manuscript scattered in the sand and insights that came to him far too late.
Shaking his head, he listens to her recite poetry in her annoyingly lovely voice: It is by Heinrich Heine, yes of course it is Heine, who writes of how the beautiful sultan’s daughter sits daily up and down at the fountain at evening time, where the white waters splash and the young slave grew paler and paler every day. “I want to know your name, your home, your clan!”, the princess approached him one evening with quick words. And the slave said, “My name is Mohamed, I am from Yemen, and my tribe are those Asra, who die when they love.”
In his mind, yes that’s when it happened. All the pain, all the tears – everything remains forgotten in his head, because love will make us blind and one last look will be enough to make up for everything unspoken. There on this terrace, when he looks out from behind the bushes and into her eyes.
Perhaps then he had finally learned that mistakes were human and it was how one dealt with them that mattered. An even reclined chaise longue-ness, like the aftershock of a storm, a quake, a fire. There in the red sky, they could be infinite, like two dying lovers, hand in hand and arm in arm, as in ancient Pompeii. Here where nothing was as it was before, they would flare up even more. And burn down the entire forest together.
