“Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.”

– Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

I once wrote that I’ll know I’m free of you when I stop listening to your song to fall asleep. When I stop searching for your arms in everyone who shares my bed, stop searching for your sideways glances — always appearing to look just beyond me, too afraid or uninterested to look directly at me. When I stop digging back into the depths to feel again that imprint that is us together, like a small relief left on a down cushion. We were an imprint, you and me. It’s all you let us be and really all we could be. I know that now. We were something beyond time, only to exist in a liminal space, not fit for the relentless rhythm of life.

I don’t think of you anymore to fall asleep. I think of my white room somewhere in Greece, or Spain, or maybe Portugal or Italy — I haven’t decided yet. For some reason it’s always in Greece when I visit it, the only country of the list I haven’t been to, perhaps that’s why.

It’s not bright in my room but it’s cool with white stone walls and through my window, though not a large window, I can see the blue of the ocean expand before me. In the morning I can hear the sea birds and I have an unlacquered wooden table that faces the windowed wall and an equally old wooden chair, the seat polished and worn down from years of use. The floor is also stone, maybe wood — no stone. There’s thin linen sheets with delicate lace patterns on the bed, not the loose modern linen you get these days but the thick fibered heavy starched linen of your grandmother. On the floor there’s one shabby threadbare rug, I think of all the many people who once stepped on it, wherever it was — now only I step on it.

There I can breathe and I wear dresses and I smile at strangers and take the time to look people in the eye. Because there I’m whole and I can gently smooth out the impressions they leave on me — they don’t chip pieces of me away. I have so much to give and it pours out of me. Here I don’t mind the light, I live in harmony with it.

The way it dances in the morning rising over the water and quiets everyone around mid-day with its brilliance. Its firm, fiery hand on you in the afternoon — flattening you and forcing you to move slowly, methodically. It’s pressure which makes it impossible to rush. If you fight against it you will never win, only throw yourself into a tizzy of your own making — better to save face and accept your fate. So you wait and watch, and in the evening the shadows get longer and still you wait. Until the final hour and the dusk brings a tender melancholy of another day passed, another day coming soon to take its place. The relentless rhythm.

Here I rest lightly and freely. I can hear myself breathe and my hair is always thick and wild and full of sunlight and salt and emotions left to linger. Here they are allowed to stay, or go, just as they please.

It’s true before I had my room I had you. You weren’t much light but you beat the darkness. I liked your simplicity, like my room you were traditional, blank, and sparse really — straightforward. I didn’t have to hide and you let me be.

Your song, how did it go? The buffaloes? The delicate guitar picks and droning harmonica? “All roads lead to roam with the buffaloes. And the buffaloes used to say be proud of your name… be what you are… roam where you roam… do what you do. You’ve gotta have a wash but you can’t clean your name. You’re not called Jimmy you’ll be Jimmy just the same. The keys are in the bag in the chest by the door, and one of Jimmy’s friends has taken the floor.” We never figured out what it all meant.