It took me a while to get to the field. Not because the journey is difficult. In fact, it was so simple and so delicious - black earth and scented with life, dressed in soft scarves of dense green. That was the curious quality of that land: everything seemed so horrifyingly easy. It is frightening, when the world takes so long to affirm the value of difficulty, to go back inside itself and realize the virtue of the uncomplicated. I walked, bare feet, and no thorn hurt them. I walked through the darkness, and it had no sword. Just silence; a sweet taste of nectar in the air. The night was a vaporous body around me as I walked slowly down the hill. It was about to fade and give way to dawn, but that was just a prospect weighing in the atmosphere, the serene becoming light and a warm breeze sweeping the grass, creeping. The sky was still an immaculate black velvet blanket and the moonlight silver was the only source of light for my steps. A magnificent stillness accompanied me all the way. And in it, I got lost in that old, dreamlike memory. It was, after all, one of the many things I sank into during those two years of youth, a silence that hovered, musical, in the back of my mind since my fifteenth birthday. No, I would say it hovered since the day, years ago, when it happened, but I was only able to distinguish that silence from others when Mnemosyne so desired.
My earliest memory is when I was three - almost four - and we still lived in that cottage near the cliff. A memory that, in the interval between acquiring and understanding it, seemed to me like a dream, too blurry and eccentric to be real, too ethereal to have belonged to this world. However, my mother assured me several times that she remembered that day perfectly. I spent a lot of time undressed - to be more precise she didn't return to my mind until I was fifteen. It was almost like a birthday present from Mnemosyne. At the time, we lived in the apartment in the city. It was a high penthouse, and my room had a small balcony that faced the avenue. I liked to sit with my legs out, my arms hanging from the railing, and watch the traffic and the people and lights in the building ahead turning on and off at night. I never lost that childlike haunt by brilliant things; jewels and lights and stars still hold my eye today. Now, I understand where this reaction comes from, but at the time I thought it was just one of the many scars and gifts that my opulent and privileged creation left behind, a consequence of having the eyes that my mother trained. On my fifteenth birthday, a date I feared for a long time, little happened. It was a Tuesday, after all, and I had an important exam the next day. French, I think. Then, after spending the day studying at my desk, the sounds of the city escaping through the closed window, muffled and distant, I got up from my chair and stretched, watching the windows of the building ahead light up and go out. It was close to seven, and the sky was still shining a fragile blue light, but turning on the lamps was necessary. I always liked that time, when the sunset has passed, the orange and red phenomenon has already died out and all that remains is a melancholy and weak color in the dome, and a delicate, insufficient light. A light that seems to transform the world into something terribly unstable, something that could come apart with a breath. I think I always liked that light because it was beautiful and absolutely unnecessary, and it didn't exist for any reason other than it did. Beautiful light that does not illuminate. The fine art of being a beautiful and useless being. To tell you the truth, I never understood why the world seems so obsessed with being useful. Being beautiful always seemed to me much more important and overflowing with magic (which sounds futile, but it's not my fault; the useful obsession that transformed the sense of beauty). Maybe that's why I got up, stretched, and gave up my handouts and summaries. And certainly for that reason I walked in silence to the door, opened it, and sat on the porch with my legs out and my arms resting on the railing, my long dark hair spilling out towards the avenue below, as well as my gaze. Everything is very softly quiet and bright at seven in the evening, as well as at seven in the morning. I've always lived better at those times. Watching the glow of the cars moving below, trapped in an almost dreamlike trance, the memory flashed through my mind. I was three years old and was walking through a field of flowers. My mother was sitting near the edge of the forest, which, by the cliff on the opposite side, delimited the contour of the field - a crescent moon. She looked like a nymph in the trees, a long white linen dress spilling around her and her hair, so dark as mine would become, braided with flowers. Spring danced around the world, and flowers of all colors and types bloomed in the buttery morning sun. At that time, we did this a lot, waking up early in the morning to visit the landscapes around the chalet and just there, in silence, flowers in our hair. Mine, then too short and too thin to braid, were decorated with a chamomile wreath. My mother described this scenario to me a few times during my childhood, but a detail of my memory has always eluded her.
