Still Life

STILL LIFE











She was old enough now to feel nostalgia without it being just a passing thought of something that she used to like or do. The memories of the days past and the events, people and places that had defined them had melted together and been wrapped into that sepia-coloured veil of an old photograph that gave everything a gentle, warm lustre and muted the harshest contrasts. The distance provided by the passed time had allowed her to forgive and concentrate on what had mattered; or rather, what mattered now. It was rather interesting to see the things her brain had chosen to remember and how even the happiest of them now evoked a sense of melancholy in her, sorrow almost; not because of the things itself but because she knew it would never be like that again, those days were gone, remaining still in the tide that was time when she was constantly being pulled further away from them.



Will I, she wondered sometimes, eventually forget? Would there be a day when she would have been stripped bare from all of her memories and thus relieved from the burden of her past; would the time come when she would have only the future in her reach? It seemed difficult to believe now, especially as the memories from long ago often felt more vivid than the recollection of yesterday; and yet she had no way of knowing the amount of things she had already forgotten. Perhaps there was a vast reservoir of memories that were stored away between sealed doors in her mind; perhaps there was a whole life behind her she no longer knew of. There was no one to tell her anymore or nothing solid she could have attached herself and the memories to. When she wandered in the empty rooms of the flat that once was filled with life and now only with silence, she couldn't help noticing that some of the objects surrounding her did seem foreign; she no longer knew where they had come from or what was the story behind them. Could there then be a day when she wouldn't know where she herself had came from; and should that day arrive, would it matter? You don't know what you've got until it's gone; but if you don't know what is gone, does it make a difference you had it in the first place?



She sat by the window, looking down to the street through the glass that would have required washing. The afternoon sun filtering through the stained, dusty window had turned the apartment too warm and she knew she wouldn't sleep well that night. The air was still and thick and she felt the heaviness of it on her like it would have been a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the weight pushing her posture down. She had never liked too much heat and had always opted for spending the boiling hot summer days indoors, never ceasing to wonder that need most people had to go out and enjoy, as they said, the sun. For her it had always been tedious, obnoxious even; and after every summer that passed she greeted the first chilly autumn mornings with a relief stronger than the year before.



The sun shone straight in and forced her to lightly squint her eyes as she observed the world that opened outside the borders of her own existence. There were few people on the street below and she was just far enough so as not to be able to make a distinction between their faces; to her they all were one and the same, but of course they were everything but. Each one of them with their own lives, a whole history behind and a future ahead; and none of them would ever know that she was up here, behind the window of her second floor flat, looking at them. In this city, in these lifetimes this was the extent that her existence would probably ever cross with the ones of those people. Brief, light, unnoticeable. Irrelevant by the odds of it.



She lifted her eyes from the people and looked further ahead, to the scenery she had over the years grown so familiar with. There was a little square, maybe not even big enough to be called as such, more like a widening of the narrow street that ran past the building she lived in. Surrounded by apartment buildings very much like her own, their colourful walls hovering over the small space like protective shields and furnished with two simple benches and a lamppost between them the little square had an aura of determination. Me against the world, it seemed to say, unapologetic in its existence, refusing to be taken in as a parking place or a storage area for rubbish bins. It just existed there, through winters and summers and springs and autumns, and it would continue to do so independent on whether she was gazing at it or not. It would be there, for her to come back to whenever she wanted or needed to, and when she no longer would come back, the square would still be there. The thought was strangely comforting.



"You're like that square" Her husband had used to laugh, "You are just as stubborn." And she had always sneered but secretly she had been pleased.



On that square she had sat with him and their daughter when she was still just a baby; on that bench she had taken refuge when they had had an argument with her husband about something she could no longer remember. During uncountable, long afternoons that now seemed like such a long time ago she had sat on either one of those benches and spent her time reading a book, drawing, or just thinking; and those walls surrounding the little square she had stared at longer than she now cared to think after his funeral, seeking comfort in their steadiness and solid, unshakable existence. That little square, with its worn-out benches and hand-laid cobblestones between which now grew grass -- it had acted as a set-up for so many of the important and the not so important events of her life; and it made her a little bit sad to realize that when she would be gone, those memories would be gone too and the little square would lose a part of its essence. It would still be there, of course; but it would not be the same.



She got up, her movements slowed down by the weight of her age, and closed the curtains thus blocking her view to the street and to the square. Behind the window, on the street, life continued as if nothing had happened; inside the flat the old woman laid herself down and thought about the past, travelled back to the days that could or could have not existed. It didn't matter to her any more whether the things she now longed for had actually happened, if the past she so missed had even been for real -- for what is a memory if not an interpretation of something you once thought worth remembering?