I was at the window. The Balkan dark, smell of stone and citrus and the nearby sea. I’d been there a while, not thinking about much of anything, which is a thing Sarandë seems to produce without effort.
The cat came over the wall, moving through the night with the authority of something that had done this before. Up the stone wall. Across the terrace. Into the branches of the lemon tree without disturbing a single leaf — the kind of entry that belongs to creatures who understand that the physical world is a suggestion rather than a law.
I watched it cross the garden to the lemon tree. Watched it climb. Deliberately, branch by branch, like it knew exactly what it was looking for. Through the branches until it reached a cluster of blossoms, white in the dark, their smell stronger at night than in the day. It sniffed. Once. Deliberately. Something passing through it. Something received.
Then it looked at my window. Came to the window. Breathed.
The smell changes first.
Not stronger. The word is wrong. The citrus opens — opens into rooms that were always inside it, infinite rooms. I am in the smell the way you can be inside a sound. I breathe and the breathing is not separate from what I’m breathing.
Then the dark. Someone has arrived in it. I haven’t seen them but I know.
She is there.
She is the air. She is the dark. She is the weight of lemons. She is the smell with its rooms. And she has a face that keeps changing, not stopping on one face. A wheel I keep trying to hold still with my hands and can’t. The wheel is also sound, a low pressure I feel behind the eyes more than hear, and the faces come through it one by one.
My mother. Not any age. The underneath face. Here long enough to be real.
Then the wheel. I try to hold it. She lets me try.
Things arrive before they’re understood. This is the grammar of it — the result before the cause, the knowledge before the event. I know my mother chose me before I see the moment of choosing. The seeing is confirmation.
The actual moment: before language. The world making a decision about me I wouldn’t know to call a decision for years. Wanted. Before I knew what wanting was.
I laugh. From somewhere lower than the chest. It tastes like the blossom — citrus and something older underneath, something that has been flowering in the dark before I was old enough to smell it.
The church women arrive. Women who saw something in a small boy before he knew there was a thing to be seen. I never thought to ask why. She shows me.
What they recognized was real. The choosing wasn’t arbitrary. They could see what was in there before I could.
They chose well, the lemon tree says.
Then Kelly. She does not spare me.
The street show. The fire hoop making its circle. The skull mask. The crowd behind me, the camera in my hands — cold, its weight specific in the way only physical objects are specific in this state, I can feel the exact grams of it — and then she is moving through the space and the space knows it before I do.
She looks at the camera. At me behind it.
I see her face when she makes the decision. Not my memory of it. That version is already wrong. The actual moment. The clarity of it. She has seen what is coming in this man and decided and the decision is complete.
I have never seen this moment before. I was behind the camera. I am always behind something.
I cry. The tears have a taste. Something older than salt.
Then the years.
My velocity. The meetings and the pitches and the napkin calculations and the next thing always just past the current thing. Kelly at the center, holding the shape of everything I was building on top of what she was building. The boys arriving. The house. The bank on the phone.
Kelly was not “in the background”, the lie I told myself for so long that I actually had come to believe it.
Her face in the morning light. Two cups of coffee. The cup placed in front of me with the precision of someone who has done this ten thousand times.
Okay. I have heard okay as yes my entire life. I had never heard it until now as I am still here and you are still not seeing me.
The okay fills the room. The word has weight — I can feel the weight of everything it was carrying that I never bothered to open.
I cry again. The kind that comes from the place where carelessness lives. It’s not far from the center.
The others now. The theater girl. The teacher. The girl boss. Others I can’t name but know by the frequency of what they gave. Each one a moment of choosing. Each one swimming against the current to reach me, as I’m going with the current.
The absurdity and the grief arriving in the same breath and I laugh and cry and the two are the same note played in different octaves simultaneously.
Then she is Chartreuse. Briefly. The earth mother wearing Chartreuse’s unique way of entering a room. As though the room already knew she was coming. Then she is the mother face again.
She offers blackberries. I don’t ask. Dark and glistening. Slightly warm. I eat them. Wild.
The tart arriving before the sweet, which arrives before the underneath that has no name, which grows on a thorned vine — the thorns still present in the fruit somehow. She watches. She does not spare me the taste of it.
The faces again. All of them. The full inventory. I try to look at each one. Not file. Just look. She lets me try. Then she is gone.
I am at the window. The dark thinning. The cat still watching with the calm of a fixer that has completed a task and is waiting to see if it has taken.
I look at it. It blinks. Once. Slow. Steps off the sill and is gone into the early morning.
Below, the garden is still. The lemon tree in the pre-dawn gray, heavy with fruit and blossom. The residue settling into whatever ground is there to receive it. Deeper than I knew.
After a while I make coffee. Stand at the window with it.