Heaven and its saints swing upside down at the bottom of a coffee cup where great-grandmother sees the future. Calling him names, talking to him, flirting with him, anything, just to tame him. “There will be people on your way, the line of life will lead you far.“ From the door of the house, where purity protects the filth of the world, my path stretches with her every word. This memory is so vivid that I hardly put it into words, untrue, though I rest in its light day by day. I don’t know what the last day with my great-grandmother was like – every time we parted, it was the last time.

Her death flooded me with the power of all the hopes she had placed in me, the first sign of a secret power. She lived a night of vigil as long as a lifetime, and I used to take her eyes away from the suffering that inhabited her, to draw her away and at the same time close to me, to transfer her gaze to the echoes and the future to the present. He only cried in his sleep, and when he put his hand on my knee, there was no place on earth to hide from the rush I felt. After her death, the oddity began to thin out, so I continued to keep her alive. I still haven’t forgiven myself for making his dream come true.

I’ve gradually moved away from the place where wedding dresses stay shiny because time wanders between the layers of blue paper they’re covered with. I was not old enough to be seduced by peace, and I talked frantically about my youth. My restlessness was often disguised as discontent, a pseudo-intellectual buffoonery to fuel the reboot, when in reality I was dreaming to mask the reality of my attitude towards life. And I became attached to life in the oval-frame house where my great-grandmother cradled my future, exposing me to a form of attachment whose intensity continues to be the force that keeps me on my path.

The first days in another country would be the first days of normalization of the extraordinary, the first days of rest. I’d rather be an emancipated expat, and I was, when we give ordinary life an aura of abundance just because it’s happening somewhere else. It was an exercise that tired me out. Even then I suspected that somehow I would become bigger, big enough to encompass two realities at once, and this is what happened. However, when I could treat the other reality as something independent of myself, when I could observe it without debt, I don’t remember feeling bigger, but, finally, the little one.

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