A woman halfway

It has been three years since I met her, and I can't say how much I know. I wish I could say otherwise, but I haven't yet found a way to get as close as I would like. Sometimes I feel like I'm where I want to be, but I realize I'm still not close enough. That I'm still far away.

So I trust my feelings and I imagine what might be there. I remain seated outside, waiting for the doors to open. 

She has had the strange ability to carve out a space in my memory. Every little thing she has told me is there, waiting for something new to arrive to grow and complete at least a piece of what I do not know.

Some people are passionate about travel, and others about books. I am passionate about what I feel through some women I meet. They are journeys that allow me to go far and explore distant and wonderful worlds. Just like those places I used to end up in years ago when my body and mind allowed me to do so.

I could just say that she is one of these. But at this moment, she is one of the most important. I can’t say how my perception of her will change in the future. I don’t know if she feels it. I don’t think so. I don’t know. At the moment, I am not able to judge her silence. But because of her presence within me, I talk with her beyond her physical presence. And this began after the tumor.

When I met her, she was a frightened person, unaware of her own worth. She was scared. Even at the thought of someone getting close. I approached her without awareness. I had no idea who I was facing. I only knew what I had been told. I imagined it would be difficult for her, given the weight she carried and her fear of letting me in.

From that period, I remember some calls in which I felt she was the creative center of the projects and the point of contact between different worlds. And others in which, overwhelmed by work, she risked collapsing. She was, and even now she is, a wonderful mixture of strength and fragility. What impresses me when I think about her.

She was one of the first people I worked with as a coach. I had no techniques for managing the emotions that came to me. After the calls with her, I started to feel unwell, and then very unwell. I would take showers to wash away the pain or cry before the next calls in an attempt to empty myself. It wasn't easy.

I thought that the idea others had of her, and the idea she had of herself, had nothing to do with who she truly was. There was so much distance between the cold image she showed and the emotions that were pressed inside her. Inside her small body.

What I didn't imagine during that journey was that I was growing too. But I wasn't just developing a technique as a coach. I was following the path I had left when I stopped painting.

For me, painting was a way to tell stories about women and the emotions between me and them. Until I realized that this journey forced me to experience those emotions too intensely. I had to confront parts of myself that I didn't want to see. So I had stopped. I was scared. With her, that work on my emotions, that journey inside myself had started again. 

If I had understood it, I would have stopped. I would have told her that I didn't feel ready to continue. I would have found a way to do so. But I wasn't aware of it. And I carried on.

To me, she was just a colleague who needed help. The work with her was about her, not me. And in those moments, somewhere in my memory, she was building a small, finely furnished studio apartment. A large bookshelf, paintings, ceramics. I like to think so.

It makes me smile to think that I have almost only images of her from our calls. From the waist down, she doesn't exist in my memory. In person, I only remember a few quick exchanges. Like when she and another colleague of mine were standing on either side of an office door. Her shirt had a phrase in her language. I read it without having any idea what I was reading. When I did it, I remember she laughed. She knew that I didn’t understand the meaning of what I read. But I read it correctly. Enough to be proud of myself in front of her.

So, in my memory, she wanders around without legs and almost always behind a desk. 

A woman halfway.

Then, In mid-February, almost two years ago, I was diagnosed with a tumor. So came the hospitalization and the surgery. The end of a period. 

She was a colleague with whom I had worked, and I exchanged a few messages with her to keep her updated. Just like other colleagues. My return. What I would do upon my return. My non-return. What I would do upon my non-return. The end.

After my non-return, I started filling my days by writing. I tried to express what I had experienced. I wanted to find meaning in that experience. I shared what I wrote with some colleagues. Private messages and messages in groups. She was in one of these groups. I didn't expect a response from her. She was just part of it. She was there.

Then I received a message. Without telling me anything beforehand, she sent me a 14-minute-long message about what I wrote. 14-minute-long.

I don't know where Telegram stores audio messages. I don't know if she has a studio apartment on Telegram with a bookshelf, paintings, and ceramics like in my memory. If she did, I think it should also include space for that message. 14 minutes of reflections on what I had written. I think that if I had read my pages, perhaps the message would have lasted less.

During the time we had worked together, I realized her worth. But that message changed my perception of her. She probably didn't even realize it. In that message and in the subsequent ones, I received so many references and images that her studio apartment in my mind was asking for new space each time.

I had limited myself to calling a good architect and a team of builders to carry out the requested changes at each step. I just told them I would stop to check on the work. And now I know that it was a bad mistake. I didn't imagine that the space occupied would grow so much over time. And now in my mind she has a big villa with a pool and a golf course. I see the gate. I know someone lives there, but I don't know much about it.

But I'm anxious, and waiting in front of the gate is so hard for me. I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait. So I want to figure out what I don’t know, by scrolling through some of the images I have of her.

I may lose myself in the process. I hope I won't. She will read this text, and if I do something wrong, this text will be burned.

But if you are reading it, she has told me that everything is okay. Probably out of desperation. She knows that I only stop if I do it or if I have got a tumor. I hope she prefers the former.

From this moment on, while she reads I do believe she is afraid. She hopes not to end up like the floating protagonists in Chagall's paintings. 

A high quote to satisfy her hidden need for beauty and complexity. I hope it captures her attention and approval. And both are important for the survival of this text. As I mix elements, I might use other compliments to cover up the fact that everything is going to hell. Faster than she would like to know. 

Recently I discovered her passion for literature and for one author in particular: Erich Maria Remarque. I didn't know this author before her. But while she writes his name to me on Telegram, I mention six or seven others, hoping they will be enough to make a good impression and to fill the gap. Of course, among them is Marcel Proust. "La Recherche" is always a good way to appear more knowledgeable than one really is, even with simple casual quotes. 

Fearing questions about Remarque and not being quick enough to find answers through any AI, I admit that I didn't know him. I understood from the speed and number of her messages, that I've made a mistake in saying I didn't know him. And she added that I couldn't truly appreciate her if I didn't appreciate Remarque. 

But my goal is always to please her. And given the importance of Remarque in the judgment she might have of me, I could only say that he is very talented. I had never read anything he wrote. But I was sure I would appreciate his work. Yeah. For sure. I couldn’t say anything else.

The following night, ‘cause I didn’t want to compromise my image, I pushed myself beyond what I had been able to do. No, I'm not talking about observing the world around me and pretending it exists. That’s too much for me.

I downloaded the book onto my eBook. I flipped through the first page. I flipped through the second. I checked the total number of pages: over 900. I flipped through the third. After about an hour, I reached the one hundred fiftieth page. After a couple of hours, I got to the three hundredth. I didn't know whether to sleep or continue. But she was worth it. I carried on. My goal was to finish the book in about four or five hours. It was a challenge. For those who don’t want spoilers, I recommend skipping the next paragraph because I'll give a brief summary of the book.

Ravic, the protagonist, meets a woman by a lamppost. She was with a dead man in a hotel. All the hotels in Paris are quite dirty and full of foreigners. The dead man seemed perfectly at home. Ravic falls in love with this woman, but he is not very convinced. In the meantime, he drinks several bottles of alcohol. Occasionally, he has them brought to his room because his blood alcohol level might drop during the night. When he’s not drinking, he smokes. There’s a German who tortured him and is in Paris for something entirely different. When Ravic sees him, he has an urge to kill him. After all, he drinks all the time. Even while turning the page, I imagine. In the end, he kills the German and buries him. Then he drives to Paris. Finally, after about 900 pages, he thinks it’s a good idea to tell the woman, who lived with the dead man, that he loves her. Of course, she has already figured it out, but she pretends not to notice so as not to lower Ravic's self-esteem, who is still the protagonist. When he tells her that he loves her, she can finally die in peace. He then gets himself arrested, and I think they kill him afterward. I don't know if he drinks a bottle of wine beforehand.

That’s the book. It’s a pretty good story. Maybe when Remarque wrote this book, he didn’t intend for me to read it in one night. But while I was apologizing to him, I want to clarify that I didn’t do it for him. Okay, maybe I made things worse here. I don’t know. 

Another thing about her that has impressed me is the images of her small sculptures. She told me she made them without studying any particular technique. And what I have seen relates to beauty once again.

Beauty is something I can find in front of me. Perhaps at a certain time or distance from home. Beauty can be a person I meet or the sea just a few hours' drive away. In these cases, I expect beauty. I am prepared. It doesn’t surprise me. 

When beauty appears before me unexpectedly, what I see leaves a strong imprint in my memory. What happens is no longer a simple knock-knock at the door of my memory. It is a ram that breaks it down and rushes in.

While I write these lines I don’t have to look at any images of what she sent me. I know them. But I have to translate my feelings into words to share them. 

I want to paint a picture of one of them, but I don’t want to describe what I saw. What I saw wasn’t an image; it was a message about her. I could be wrong, but I like to write something that gets lost in poetry and fades away. I want to write it spontaneously, so I won’t change it. What you’ll read are raw lines:

A moon is just a moon as long as it remains still in the sky. A moon remains just a moon until it can open. A moon remains just a moon until it has a nose to puff. It stays in the sky and only appears bright at night. 

But when it finally finds itself small in front of you, opens up, and starts to puff, then it is no longer just a moon. It is a way of expressing something about yourself. You can pretend it doesn’t matter and perhaps deny it. But that little moon helps you touch the beauty that lies within you.

I love the idea that everyone who reads this text may have seen something different. This perhaps applies to her as well. It holds true even if she created it. I hope she saw not only what she made, but also something that was tainted by what I wrote. Something she didn’t expect. I like that she sees that what she creates can inspire. That her creations can be more than just small, useless objects, but a source of inspiration for others.

I know she might tell me that despite everything I’m writing, it lacks substance. I don’t know if I’ve once again hit the wall that protects her from the madness she hides somewhere. And I’m sorry to admit that for now, that wall has its own reason for being so hard. I am not concrete and I offer no certainty.

However, when I think that these pages I have written are thanks to her, I like to think I can tell her she is wrong. Each of these words is a seed that could create something greater than just a few pages. 

At the moment, it’s just a hope without any concrete form. Not only does it lack shape, but I also have no idea what shape it could possibly take.

I struggle to move in a space I cannot define. I am a person so troubled that I can barely leave home and must invent a way to survive day by day. Yet, it is also thanks to her that I have gained greater awareness of a part of myself that still scares me. 

And she may think that I’m exaggerating. But it is through the lives of others and what they convey to me that I feel and move. She has been a way for me to reflect and explore within myself. Perhaps because I see a piece of myself in her. Perhaps because I see so much to explore and fill with new experiences.

But to go further and connect with her, I need her help. I need her to open up and allow me to pass through. To guide me toward what I can see of myself through her.

Because I know that until today, I haven’t been able to find the right way to communicate with her. Too many messages. Long silences. I know that if I continue to move without being guided and having her help, I will make mistakes. I understand that I can’t just act chaotically. My instinct tells me that I need to stop and listen, hoping to feel something. Because there are relationships for which it is worth stopping and asking. And this is one of those.

It’s up to her to choose to take my hand and guide me. For now, I remain seated outside.