Cherry Cream

If I were deaf, the last thing I’d like to hear would be your voice singing a song without fear. You talk to me. Loud and clear I hear your voice. Sometimes you quiet your voice, as if you want me to strain myself, to hear you with every tensed muscle of my body, with every tissue and even the smallest cells of my body. Your vibrating voice touches my skin, penetrates it, gets underneath, deep into my self, pervading softly, not disrupting my inner harmony and peace. I listen. I don’t interrupt you. I am hungry as a hunter for your voice, its timbre, volume and depth. I don’t interrupt you, as I don’t want to spoil the moment. I am an egoist now; I fill my heart with each and every one of your words, each sound and every gesture you make.

If I were blind, the last thing I’d like to see would be your smile staying forever with me. I stare into your big, deep eyes. They shine in the light of a night lamp. I watch the shadows your body casts on the wall. I watch them like a reflection of wax superstitiously melted at a St Andrew’s Eve party. They say you can foretell your future in the shapeless mass of the wax as it hardens in water. A future that is so much changeable and so unknown. I don’t wish to see the future.

I’ve bitten my tongue. I wanted to disrupt your story. To impudently put you off your stride, change your way of thinking. Destroy this precious moment, when with such a concentration you tell me yourself bit by bit.

I fall asleep for a short moment. I fall asleep, though my eyes are opened. I watch you, watch your ragged hair. I watch your lips, as they open slightly and close and open again. I peek, as if I was ashamed of myself, at your shoulders, arms, hands, breasts, as they rise when you speak, when you inhale and exhale the air. I watch your belly when you innocently stretch to dispel the tiredness of the night. I watch your thighs hung over the armchair’s back. Your feet suspended in the air, tapping out an inaudible rhythm. And I wonder, why do I dream this all. Why do you let me dream this dream?

As I sit in front of the computer screen, I see you in every pixel of it. Cooking a dinner for myself in a hideous saucepan bought from IKEA, next, eating it from the only plate I’ve got, I think to myself, how it would be if you were sitting in front of me, with a fork in your hand, chewing bite by bite. It drags me to you. Drags me like iron filings are dragged to a magnet. Any moment now your photograph that I am going to steal from your shelf will find its quiet way into my wallet. I’ve already imagined it there, for me and only me, and how, with embarrassment, I cover it with my fingers at a cash desk in a supermarket. Because, you see, I find it so naive and frivolous to have someone’s photograph in a wallet.

I threw a slice of bread onto the ground. I hardly noticed as it touched the soil, when, out of every direction, came a grey cloud of pigeons. Ravenous, greedy birds of prey tearing the bread into pieces in the blink of an eye, pecking and scaring each other with a flutter of wings and ominous cooing. If I were forever asleep, the thing I’d like to dream would be that the day we met was as sweet as a cherry cream.

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