The world was orange and turquoise, sunlight playing on labradorite. There was a man in front of a canvas, painting an ever changing field - wheat, poppies, sunflowers. Van Gogh at work. Orange and turquoise, again. Next, I was in a museum. It was quite dark, but there was an illuminated sphere in the middle … Continue reading Sixty-Two
In a wintry forest, in the night, the trees were dancing. Their black bodies stirred in the wind, a frozen flow of shadows against the white. I looked up at the light above. Couldn't tell whether it was the moon or a lamppost. My face was slowly covered with snowflakes ready to melt. I could … Continue reading Fifty-Three
It was almost night. At the edge of the forest, I saw a woman dressed in heavy fabric. On top of her head, there was something embellished with pearls, stones and gold. She was climbing a hill. A vast landscape below. Then, like a drawing on the sky, electric lines. She looked at me as if to check whether I noticed.
I saw locks of hair attached to a line, blowing in the wind, like clothes to dry. There was also hair lying around on the floor in my mother's kitchen, and outside, all over the yard, half-covered by sand. Suddenly, they became butterflies and flew towards the cemetery where my father is buried. I wished … Continue reading Fifty
I was in the water, ice above me. I could vaguely perceive some kind of commotion above me: people or animals running all over the place. Then I was on my feet, the Siberian man behind me, holding my shoulders. I was staring into my belly, it looked frozen: turquoise and light purple. Next, I … Continue reading Twenty-Eight
Then I could see a pulsating light, like a lighthouse. We swam closer. The light seemed to have antennae or tentacles, rising and sinking in a gentle rhythm. Like an octopus. As we went closer, I was suddenly sitting on a horse in a carousel.
I tried not to go numb, but it hurt. I was chasing after the numbness, trying to catch it within my head. Suddenly, I was in a snowstorm, at night, in the middle of endless plains, chasing a figure wearing a white fur coat.
I turned back to the woman, but she looked older now, around my age. I must have made a mistake a minute before. She looked at me for a second, then turned back to the sea. I watched the water, too, and the sky, and the flowers rocking in the wind. When I turned back to her again, she seemed to be in her fifties. I realized she was ageing in front of my eyes.
And I asked: "What is it like, being a hybrid? Is it like being sick?" "No" she replied, "when you get sick, you had a "healthy" self that got somehow distorted by sickness. But I was born like this, it's not a distortion, it's my being. When you are one type of being or another, you have a home in the land of this or that. When you are a hybrid, like me, you live at the crossroads, your only home is your skin, not even that, because even that might be forever changing".
"Why are you so ambivalent about your gift? your vision? You come, you run away, you come back and walk a bit further, then run away... this is not your father's head, you know. whatever he started to see, and whatever you saw within him, whatever it was that scared both of you... (and now the Siberian man looked me in the eye and bent so close that I could feel his breath on my face, and said very slowly) you are not your father".
