There is a house planted at the edge of the field, it looks like a white, frozen bone, it creaks when the wind combs through the stubble and the sky seems like a lid of lead, there are no roads, only shadows of roads, there are no neighbors, only dogs who dream of something they never see and in the hallway, the closet door breathes old wood and damp wool, and I have tucked the lamp in there, small, yet it still weighs, because outside someone is measuring the night with slow steps, and when the house shivers at a faint knock against the wood of the front door, my body remembers before my mind, my mouth fills with a metallic taste and my heart begins to beat.
They sniff your breath, I tell myself, a phrase written forever on the underside of my tongue, to know whether you have said I love you, to know whether you have lied, to know whether you have asked forgiveness with your voice or only with your eyes, and I am afraid that love has a scent and that someone will come to collect it in the middle of the early hours… these are strange days, darling, and I do not know if I am speaking to you or to that part of me that hides behind the furniture when it hears a name, because light does not only illuminate, it also betrays, and the hidden has an appetite for clear things, the hidden is a mouth that learns fast. The one who knocks at your door at midnight, I feel it with a rural certainty, with that knowledge that comes from looking at the ice in the troughs and understanding that every surface breaks, has come to kill the light, and in my throat a plea is born… we would be safer if nobody knew what shines in us, it would be better to hide the light in the closet, let the world think we are dim wood, one more house among sleeping fields.
When I was nine years old, my sister took me to the sanctuary of Masumeh, and that scene returns with a precision that still frightens me today, not because of what I saw but because of what I smelled, as if the past had been stored inside a single molecule and it were enough to brush it for everything to flare up; it was beautiful, yes, there were mosaics that looked like motionless fish, and a murmur of prayers that moved like a river beneath our feet, but I will never forget the smell, a mixture of sweat and the rosewater they sprayed on the faithful, it fell in fine drops onto the head, onto the nape, it clung to the skin and made of each body a weary flower. I believed only the most devout smelled like that, that holiness was a kind of perfume earned through discipline, and I watched the men with rough hands, the women who clenched cloth between their fingers, thinking that fervor had the same chemistry as the rose.
My sister squeezed my wrist so I would not get lost, her pulse was a warm rope in the middle of that crowd breathing as one, and I remember the instant when someone, I do not know who, leaned toward me, drew in breath near my face with a frightening naturalness, as if my air belonged to them, and I felt for the first time that the body can be questioned without words. They sniff your heart, I told myself then without fully knowing it, and that idea stayed under my skin like a splinter, because there, among columns and glints, I understood that faith keeps watch and has a way of counting purity by the trail it leaves, and that love, if you say it, alters your breathing, changes your pulse, betrays you with the slightest dampness.
Later, already outside, the cold air of the street gave the world back to me with its ordinary dust, and even so the rosewater stayed caught in my hair, like a signature and a sweet mark, and I walked feeling that the sacred could smell of human weariness, that prayer was work for the body, a task that left sweat, and that perhaps the divine, if it exists, comes close through the senses and not through ideas.
Now, in this farmhouse where the phone signal arrives like a wounded animal and the screen lights my palm with an indecent glow, I think of that sanctuary as if it were a secret room inside me, a chamber where someone keeps spraying rosewater even though there are no longer any faithful, and I wonder what part of me still believes there are eyes and noses devoted to tracking what I feel.
There are nights when the modern world seems like a dark rite, notifications that ring like tiny bells, algorithms that guess desires and you get used to living with the feeling that everything leaves a trace, that even silence has a record, and yet what frightens me most is not the machine but the gesture of coming close to your face, of inhaling your truth, as animals do when they recognize their own. I still long to say I love you without it showing, in secret, but every time I speak it inside I feel my scent change, my blood grow warmer, light climb to my cheeks, and then the knock returns at the door, that presence returns that never quite takes shape, and I convince myself that the hidden does not pursue our guilt but our clarity.
If I write to you, my inner self, it is to ask you not to betray yourself with an unnecessary shine, but also to beg you for the opposite, not to live so long in the dark, because darkness teaches obedience that later gets mistaken for character, and you end up calling prudence what is really renunciation… even so, tonight I push the lamp back into the closet, I close it slowly so the wood will not speak, and the smell of stored wool mingles, for an impossible instant, with a memory of rosewater and sweat, sweet and human, and in that mixture I understand that my faith was also a hunger for refuge, that my weariness was also love, and that light, even if I hide it, keeps seeping through the smallest crack, like a breath no one can ever quite sniff out.
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