My Body and I

I am alone in my room. Alone. This trip, I have wanted it so badly and for so long that I have often doubted it would ever come to pass. But this evening, my desire finally realized, I find that I am here with myself. No bridge connects me to the others. Of those I loved most and best, all I have to remember them by is a flower, a photograph. The flower, a rose, is almost done wilting in the toothbrush glass. Yesterday, at the same time, it was resplendent on my coat, the buttonhole high enough for it to surprise my face at the slightest tilt of my head. But with every movement, my late afternoon skin, before astonishing itself with the plantlike softness, had a recollection of carnation. An entire winter, an entire spring, didn’t I deliberately confuse happiness with those petals with their torn edges, against the nocturnal obedience of a piece of permanently turned silk? An entire winter, an entire spring. Yesterday. In a train station, eyes shut, a flower condemns me to go on believing in carpets, bare shoulders, pearls. Therefore, I no longer dare hope that solitude is possible. Yet it was solitude alone that I sought so desperately in the theaters, where the red velvet on the seats for months seemed to me the very color of boredom. Solitude alone I searched for in the streets, when the houses at the end of day grew bright for new temptations, their stone blouses a complicated pattern twisted into unreality.