Our marriage is a constant misunderstanding although I cannot say we’ve stopped loving each other even now. On our wedding photos I look so heavy and big, and she looks so small, so that others may none the less, see us as father and daughter. In that white shirt I look silly, really silly, totally tied around like a sack and the tie just hangs out there as an object, misplaced against its will, to make me seem even sillier.
We love each other from a distance; it’s only at nights when we get close to each other, mingle our legs, arms and necks and then we fall asleep. We wake up in the morning finding ourselves in the most peculiar positions. There are times when my legs are wrapped around her neck. Sometimes her lips are touching my elbow. Our love is weightless.
In the morning, not fully awaken yet, I hear the sounds of her wake up and the movements of her walking around the room. I do not open my eyes, intentionally: I want my imagination to determine the precise position of her body in the room. In those moments, I believe, she liberates from her human appearance and she takes on animal shape, a doe as a matter of fact. Those eyes of a doe examine every angle of the room, searching for places where our love has built up temporary shelters, her own hiding places, so as it can last, and never get scattered away.
Long and deep she can tell the fortune from the bottoms of her empty cups of coffee; she can navigate through that dark sea. The neighbors and other women weigh up every single word of her, but all she sees are stars, more stars and occasionally a cloud. I listen to her and I try to believe her, although I was able to assure myself, oh so countless times, to her excessive lying. Opposite to other women, she gradually transforms her ways of lying into a conviction that this actually might be the truth ready to roam free and even speak up with a human voice: “Hey, sandman, where are you?”
My love towards her is hard to determine and has, it seems to me, a taste of fruit. I often touch her dresses scattered around the room and I try to find presence and shape where obviously there isn’t any. Her appearance is so unstable and I just wonder what prevented her by now from transforming into a wind- one that weighs on her shoulders, and it’s unstoppable. Maybe, our marriage after all, is not a misunderstanding but a chain of contingencies tying one to another making us always alert, with wrapped around fingers, so that we can never get lost.
Translated by: Trajče Bjadov