✦
She would write it down later, the whole feeling of it — the precise quality of
the afternoon — though she suspected the writing would lose what the moment had
kept. The way a pressed flower keeps a shape but loses every shade of colour it
had when it was alive in the field.
Still, she thought, the attempt was the only kind of fidelity available to her. To
set it down, however imperfectly. To leave a mark on the page that said: I was
here, and the light was thin, and a word arrived, and I tried.
She closed the book. Then opened it again, as if to be certain the page would
still be there. It was. It would be, for as long as the book lasted, and longer.
— Marina Levinas
— 43 —
Chapter II · close
And so the season turned, as seasons do, without announcement or apology. She
closed the journal, set it on the windowsill, and watched the late light slip
beneath the rim of the world.
Some chapters, she had begun to learn, end not with conclusions but with weather.
The cat moved once, then was still. Outside, the garden held its breath the way a
held breath holds you — close, attentive, waiting on a small thing not yet named.
She turned off the lamp. The room did not protest. It only seemed, in the small
dark that followed, to grow more attentive to itself, as though it had been
listening, and was only now permitted to remember the listening.
The kettle, on its iron trivet, ticked its slow cooling tick. Somewhere a clock
kept time for a house she did not quite live in.
— 40 —
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