Chiara Valci Mazzara

Yes, I am warm now,

but my mind is clear and my vision sharp, as I remember the days without light.

I was preparing for a dinner party, dressed not yet in white. It was almost noon again, I had waited for one hundred days. As the door bell ringed just on time, I knew this was my life.

On the porch of my house I find him today, the priest of my dreams, the father I never had. I kept my linens in my only free hand, and he walked into the room and challenged me to dive into myself.

Many trees have been cut down (I think he was a lumberjack), and many things have been said. Some things have been said many times, and I too am young in life. I may be a child of yours, I may be Gods own, but that nothing springs from nothing, is a truth I know not alone.

I look him in the eyes and I ask “Is this where it is?”, somebody points to me, and says “It’s his”. Across the river I shout “What’s mine?” but I am too late, here it is no longer noon.

At noon Orpheus ferried across the Styx, to a land meant only for the Dead. Me, I am swimming here, but time was not on my side to be had. 

The water had risen above my shoulders now, but panic still not on my mind. All the varieties of experience in the world, yet death, this impossible divine. At least Orpheus didn’t have to balance laundry on his head. The Ancient Greeks had style.

I closed the door and went before my mirror again, there I knew where I am. Here I see myself in full portrait, for a hundred days or more. I come back and I come back again too fixate in the glare, every time I see myself I’m not afraid because then I know I’m here.

“Artefacts” was the title of the book, but it was nothing but echoes in the dust. “Artefacts” was the book I read, starting first page as soon as night lost to dusk.

But just like the sun dies away in the end, and leaves all in the dark. We too, must leave a day behind us, leave all artefacts without light.

I, for one, cannot read, but I guess it’s many ways to do. My memories were of course photographs, and in some sense also my idea of unworn white linen, of thyme, of you.

Rasmus Kjelsrud