Written and illustrated by Julietta Gramigni
These houses are all the same. Each disappears from view in a second. The sky is our constant. Ocean said his novel is born out of poetry, like the beautiful birthed from the broken. The fact that the last sentence of a book is for obsessing so that I forget the power of the journey. So the books collect dust, bookmarks unmoved. The fact that really one’s voice is formed from the rubble of many collapsing together. The fact that the best view is always someone else’s, in the next carriage. At the airport Waterstones; Penguin Modern Classics; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He ruminates on a blurring. Sanity and madness. Soaring away forever from that maze of cut off fields. Hedges and borders and walls. Then there is the cage: be normal. It contracts, inhales, exhales, so that you might have the illusion of breathing freely and seeing shifting horizons you will never quite trespass. Take off is tense. The fact that I took off with such an idea: that months of Rosetta Stone Italian might replace for my brother the march of his words, into eager newborn ears, a bellyful of phrases grounded like pebbles. Now we rise together with the sun, The Sun Also Rises in my seat pocket, afraid of being forgotten.
The way each person’s shell, that houses them long enough, grows like a reflection grows into view, until really it is impossible to ever lose them. Preserve the shell. And learn, finally, that reading each title is like uncovering a piece of him. Nonno was into sci-fi. But maybe surrealism more, but maybe not. The way catching – for a moment – the performance, the stormi di storni, is fleeting and stretches through sky and time with the logic of a dream. Stormi and each bird is the eye commanding a tempest, a concerto that dances and erupts, rips and floats.
Landing is worse. Lucy told me trauma is written best in the present tense, more urgent, gripping, publishable. ‘Space Oddity’ on repeat. Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. We hugged goodbye too many times, but not enough. The fact that I should have called; but there is no signal in the sky. The fact that he wanted to call but it might seem silly. The best New Year’s resolution: call an old friend out of the blue. I hope we make it out. Eunice takes our tin can forcefully so that stomachs turn with the clouds, rising fold above fold, sublime. In the last dream before departure, windows opened like great doors to a heavy silence, somehow indescribable.
The fact that hitting ground hits stronger than wrestling turbulence, realising how tightly you were wound up, a ball of shivers. Applause. Wave of cold relief. Safe now, we look out at other planes taking flight and time clicks back to when we set out the week before, so that the memories in between spill through my fingers like a mere forty minutes.
