La vie est une cerise
La mort est un noyau
L'amour un cerisier.
- Jacques Prevert
old friends come and say with relief "you're still the same!" and with soft sweeping movements, our hands weave the old with the new as we sit side by side, shoulders touching, endowing this with meaning by the simple act of doing it. as a performance, as a continuation, our conversations string together the nostalgia of our childhoods with the strained effort towards patriotism and pride in who we have become, who we are always becoming. your sleep-talk drifts into sweet-dreams as soon as we say "i love you," truly. nothing has changed.
you say you read to learn more about yourself, to identify with characters and feel that you are not alone in feeling that way, but i disagree. i read to engage in a conversation with another, with the author and the characters, yes, but mainly for the process of holding, carrying, looking, turning the pages. i am not driven by plot but by character; i get caught up in details and linger on the style, tone, punctuation and metaphors. it is a conversation, too, of words with words. i read to learn more about the world. (today's reading list: the newspaper, oscar & the lady in pink, eluard's surrealist poems, justine.)
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