Luando

The morning will be so real, so perfect, like a dream, the taste of a dream to be remembered by a dreamer woken in another dream. Will she really be there, and will it still be her? What kind of customs and performances will she follow? There will be as many versions of the memory as there are people to remember it. Why will she turn away, and why will she then look us straight in the eye? Ivy will climb up the columns, and atlases will be filled with numbered figures. Nascent shadows will spill across the terraces, and one’s eyes will grow accustomed to the symmetry. Where will the images spring up from? From which layer of consciousness will they emerge? Will anybody remember the riddle of the maze, and will anybody be able to finish the unfinished sentences? Perhaps it will be a Sunday in an odd year in an even century, and it will happen to be the day of the equinox. She will begin her sentences with ‘I’. We will list the names of colours: cyan, umber, ochre, burnt sienna, but we always begin with violet... Everything will return to the way it was; the rotation of time will carve an arc along the marble of the sundial. It will feel like we are leaving the objects behind; we will pause to feel time lingering above our heads. I will say ‘the smell of time’; you will say ‘the taste of time’, then go quiet, or maybe you will not utter a word. Above the hot terraces, where past and future meet, in the lonely coordinate system of expectation and memory, the air will start to vibrate; we’ll stare, squinting, at the setting sun. ‘Wasted, wasted time’ is what you will say, or you will fall silent, searching for a word, some precise expression, a word the dead cannot know for as long as we say they are alive. The dream with perpetually be in the present, a series of pictures with no beginning and end, no reference points, no hierarchy; we will be like the protagonists in a strange film. Time and space will cease to exist; both will merely be part of a ceremony, of a contract, some strange rule of a game, the origin of which nobody can remember. Creation will be suspended. The person who will give it a name will not have arrived yet. Itzván Orosz