“You can never confuse real tenderness
With something else, and it is quiet.”
Anna Akhmatova
I love this City early in the morning. When no one is yet awake. When the streets are empty and the roads stretch unruffled like neat tablecloths, fresh from the laundry, without a single crease. When the wet asphalt cools the heels of the few figures, walking quietly across daybreak. This dullness has its own poetry, its own rhythm. And it exudes a delicate tenderness that dissolves later in the bustle of the day. I love this city—a private, personal love. A little voice inside me whispers that this is my City, and none other can take its place in my heart. All it has, all it is, good and bad, is mine. It is my reflection, and what completes me.
This love doesn’t hurt. It’s not what you feel after a long separation or during those minutes of impetuous lyricism. This is the calm, confident, quiet love, which is so hard to express in words, but is so deeply felt.
I love this City in the early summer mornings, when the sun hasn’t seared the asphalt and concrete. When your whole being, every cell in you, feels fresh and born anew. The green leaves reflect off everything, and everything becomes green, as if that is the only color that has the right to exist. You reach for a piece of paper and write. About something. Anything.
You feel this love for those who share your existence—your beloved, friends, some coworkers, people who are as much a part of your life as this City. They know you better than you know yourself sometimes. Every moment with them is a smile and every parting a sweet torment by that cruel Time which quickly passes away, yet always holds the promise of more to come.
In those quiet moments, vanity disappears, time is suspended, and silence becomes the only sound. You look in his eyes and the love is more real than your existence, yet no words can describe it—just a glance into the soul, through the eyes, the touch, or the quiet sound of your living beings. Breathing. Hearts beating. Tears slowly trickling down your cheek. A sweet tightness in your throat.
This is love. Inside us. Around us. Beyond us. Everywhere. An infinite universe which lets our souls roam free into spaces unlimited. Even when we don’t recognize it with our intellect, or remember it. It still surrounds us and sustains our souls. Yet how happy we are when we are aware of it.
I love these minutes of quiet tenderness in the morning, when you are tête-à-tête with the whole universe, and you can hear how it talks to you, in absolute silence.
May 27, 2001
