Between Heaven and Hell

By finding this Heaven she knew she had also found some kind of Hell.

'Hell is other people' had said one of  the character in Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Huis Clos'.

These words had intrigued this dislocated, wild and mute child. How hard to deal with the world and with the others.

She didn't speak. Or, so little.

She thought that silence was quite powerful, invulnerable. That it contained at the same time the 'said' and the 'unsaid'. She thought that everything was there, in this silence. The words, ready to open, but still protected. She felt protected. With an eagerness for the world. 

She was on the look-out.

Then came the phase of doubts... If Hell was the others, did it mean that loneliness was the Paradise?

The girl, after several hours, several days,several weeks of questioning, assumed that things were much less simple than they appeared to it.

She became aware of Time. She could 'see' the Time. She felt it gliding under her veins, in her whole body. She felt it wrapping her thoughts and settling on everything which surrounded her. The Time. It was it who connected her to her hell and to her Paradise.

At the beginning was the breath... The breath was the end of everything! 

She had understood it, one evening, when she was 5, suffocating with sobs under the sheets of her bed and then, calming those of her daughter, later, at the same age.. She had kept her there, in her arms until she fell asleep, calmed.. Calmed but grown up. Older now already by her consciousness of things...

And him, was there, by her side. Resigned, remorseful sometimes. And sometimes not. He could also be loving in his way. There, In his own space of doubts. A space of a false harmony. She knew that they shared the same disrupted dream. Which, over time, looked like more and more a deformed mirror.

Every time she opened her eyes on her Paradise (which happened several times by days), the pleasure took her. She knew it so strongly, so powerful but so short-lived. She would have wanted to take it in full hands, to hold it proudly, to savor it in plenitude. She would have loved to straighten things. Make them how they could have been, or how they 'should' have been. Redistribute the roles. Rewrite the scenario.

It was as a perpetual, recurring, magnificent motion in its mistrust. Waves, always returning to the same, but every time modified shore.

She had first wished and looked for a 'constant'. But there wasn't any. But she had found the inestimable richness of an unprecedented trust. It sometimes gave her the feeling of certain power. A power at the mercy of circumstances yet, but from which she had learnt to savor the happiness.

There was this Paradise, suspended, impalpable. An ever touched Paradise, already lost however. And, strangely, this Paradise opened her again to the world. She found her words again 'to tell' the world. To compose her own symphony. In this strange absence. She 'was'. She was becoming who she really was.

Inaccessible sensations, sublimated in the secret alcove of her desires.