Frida...

Beyond the fiction of the real: A hymn to the barefoot stranger and the lights that listen.

October 8, 2017

​I have always envied those who knew how to write fiction. The fiction I adore and enjoy more than anything. That same fiction that detaches me from the real world and introduces me to the world of someone's imagination. Fascinating…

​I cannot write about things I haven't felt or experienced. I don't know how to write or describe something that happened to someone else. Events I haven't passed through, which I didn't create as a lead or supporting actor, would never be so convincing; I wouldn't know how to give them emotion—every false letter would be felt, it would look like I am desecrating words that would sound so wonderful if someone else wrote them. I have never managed to write a poem because I turn poetry into prose, which I eventually kill with dead question marks. I am capable of writing for hours about a drop of water sliding down a shoulder to the upper arm, about the sounds rain makes, about footsteps echoing on cobblestones, about the night and the starry sky, about waves and seagulls creating a symphony through sound and image. About the blue sky and the sea competing to see whose blueness is bluer. I know how to breathe and feel them. I love writing about feelings that create themselves, develop, and grow. About feelings that a grain of pride turns into dust, where a touch leaves a trace but not a print. About a moment that tremulously threatens all of eternity—that same moment that created a revolution while simultaneously destroying and creating itself over and over because eternity is just a popular name for everything only that moment is ready to do. I could write about the deserted squares of forgotten cities where silence echoes acoustically. A silence like nowhere else, crawling up the back, embracing vertebra after vertebra of the spine with its icy fingers, seeking the hollow in the neck where it snuggles and becomes a pleasant shiver—a moment in which you admire all your senses for allowing silence to overwhelm them so strongly that every micron of the body feels it, even though it is neither seen nor heard. Night street washers taught me to believe that street lamps produce magic light and keep secrets. They will never reveal someone else's fears to you, nor can you hear someone's long-forgotten sobs, but you know they will always flicker when you stand under them a little longer. No one ever noticed that they communicate with you in that way and that they want to listen to your story too. Street washers know this perfectly, which is why they work only at night.

​I could write for days about the barefoot street musician with long black hair who began his repertoire with the song Frida. He knew how to create music just by standing in that place without a guitar or voice; I could clearly hear the first few notes even before he played. His voice echoes through that square even though he stopped playing long ago. Every time I stand near those walls, I hear that Frida was his queen. No one ever knew how to sing and play so realistically—so realistically that months later you still hear his voice and the sounds of the guitar. No one will ever understand that what amazed me wasn't his appearance or the songs he performed perfectly, but that genius that only nature can produce, gathered into a single point: a barefoot street musician with long black hair who began his repertoire with the song Frida. That is why I know I would never be able to describe him even though I experienced him, so completely and truly, because the barefoot street musician with long black hair who began his repertoire with the song Frida created a fiction that detached me from the real world and introduced me into his world of imagination.

Since I've been a waitress my whole life, I feel like I must have a tip jar even here .