I still remember the fogged glass of that window that belonged to no house, hardly a sheet of light held in the air, and the way your fingers, my past self, traced circles to open a clearing to breathe through; outside the city was a warm shell, the streets slept with a murmur of water rising from the sewers as if the world were dreaming for us, and on the sill a mandarin peel, freshly twisted, left a sweet, biting perfume that seemed capable of setting sorrow in order… then Aurora arrived without announcing herself, not as an hour but as a person, her hair full of golden dust and a melancholic gaze, and when she spoke your name she loosened it a little, turned it to vapor. I do not remember there being violence, what I do remember is the irresistible invitation, a hand brushing your nape and lifting you with delicacy, like damp paper, and you felt on your tongue the faint taste of a copper thread you did not know you carried within, as if an old bracelet had frayed in the blood.
She abducted you and it was a swift, subtle abduction, the room stayed in its place, the mandarin peel kept shining, but you began to belong to another collection, to those uncanny images she keeps without keeping them, because in her kingdom nothing lasts and nothing is lost entirely, so I saw you from far away and from within, turned into a photograph, into the reflection of a traffic light still unlit on a puddle, into the shadow of a dove passing through a wall, into the brief flare that lights the rim of a glass, and the strangest thing was the beauty, that rare beauty without comfort, like a light blanket that does not warm.
I would like to tell you I understood the bargain at once, but I grasped it with time, which in this letter has no age, because Aurora does not kidnap on a whim, she kidnaps out of hunger for the gaze, out of that need to gather what is fleeting before the world turns it into routine, and you were then someone who looked as if everything were about to reveal itself, and in one of her scenes, you walked down an endless office corridor where the screens showed neither numbers nor emails but repeated dawns, one after another, as if the work consisted in copying light until it was spent, and each click left in the air a golden dust that clung to the eyelids.
You wanted to rest, you set your forehead on the desk and another micro scene appeared, that of a train stopped in a field, the seats empty and an old radio murmuring a song that did not exist, and there Aurora took you again, with a patience that frightened, patience is a form of power. Since then I think of memory as a room with very thin curtains, where the wind decides what is shown, and of the body as a fragile archive that corrupts when we try to keep everything, because they promised us every image could be saved, that a finger on the glass was enough to preserve what we loved, but life does not allow itself to be filed away without collecting its tax, and that tax is usually presence, and you, abducted by Aurora, learned the opposite, that presence too can be a form of disappearance, because in becoming an image you became everyone’s and no one’s, luminous and exiled.
Oh my dear, sometimes, when someone raises a blind and the world ignites with that first clarity, I smell again the mandarin’s perfume, no longer so fresh, more bitter, and the copper thread returns, not as taste but as a hum in the teeth, a vibration that reminds me there are instants that do not want to be possessed but crossed through. Oh my dear, if I could reach you on that edge, I would ask you not to defend yourself, but also not to surrender without asking which part of you wishes to be seen and which part needs shadow, and then I would let you go, because perhaps the only fidelity possible toward ourselves is to accept that the truest beauty lasts as long as a blink, and even so it changes us forever.
The voice is built as an intimate letter in second person to tighten closeness and doubling, so the present self can speak with its past as with an imaginary character, a place where semantic fields of light, glass, perfume and archive prevail, with Aurora personified to embody the fleeting and the absolute at once; the rhythm alternates long, spacious periods with brief strikes, seeking a warm, dreamlike cadence without losing narrative sharpness, synesthesia and recurring motifs are used, the mandarin and the copper, to anchor the surreal drift in a melancholic emotion of belonging and exile.
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