Arcadia

58

Last summer, my father took me to see the mountains, and I learned that clouds don't have a country of their own, after all. Up close, they look like smoke, and envelope in a white blindness - deadly white and beautiful, out of which trees emerge, taller than Jack's beanstalks and silent like sentinels of Paradise. Except there is no Paradise up in the sky, no giants that smell out the blood of Englishmen either. Up in the sky, it only gets harder, and harder, to breathe. I asked the mountain-river if she would hide my secrets, like she hid the secrets of lovers who gave up their lives for each other. The mountain-river told me I had better go back to the city, where I belong and don't belong. The city that engulfs in its ambiguity. Mountain-rivers are forgiving of mountain-people's candour. She is clean and flows with a rage delightful enough to destroy, and I found myself longing for the stink of city-debris and, strangely enough, of home. A moon-girl waved at me from the other side of the world, close enough to touch, but not enough. I recounted the story of the lovers who had died for each other, one jumped into the river after the other. A Romeo and a Juliet. I found blue mountain flowers that didn't have a name by the side of the road. I found a man as beautiful as the flowers who smiled at me and I withered into lilac-sand in all the shades of Spring. A smile. A tragedy and a smile, that's all I brought back with me.

That was the year I unlearned my childhood. That was the year I learned to forgive.