A Story

It could not happen otherwise! All through the hours of the day, I kept you in my mind! Your presence was essential to me both when I sat still and when I walked… we usually always walk together. We talk! I keep you in my house of memory, of feeling. You often sit, but you are also in motion, sometimes appearing and sometimes hiding in my rooms of thought and taste. We even drink our coffee together at the café facing the sea. You sit across from me, and we both face the sea. The endless blue of the Aegean is deep, just like our constant conversations, as blue as the very desires we hold in the sea of the soul. Far away, deep in the distance, a flock of seagulls draws love poems on the paper of the sky with their beak-pens. In beautiful ballet movements with their bodies and wings in the wind, they create unrepeatable artistic figures. We watch, drink our coffee, and dream.

People always see me at the same table, looking out at the sea, and they tease me:

“Well, Pilo, alone again today? Couldn't you find anyone to keep you company in your life? Or do you live on the inspirations of creation? Life isn't just creativity!”

I smile and stay silent, because my smile speaks, and only you understand its words. I am never alone, we are always together, but they do not see beyond my desires and my love. You hear their words, and you like that they don't see you; you hear them and see them perfectly well. Then you stand up, shake out your long hair, twirl it over your shoulders, and turn into a fairy for me, part dream, part reality; you act playfully and dance. You undress, and shame covers me, even though I know full well that only my eyes can see you. I call out to you, “Don't… don't… because they really don't see you, since you are hidden inside my dreams, but they are looking at me!”

You take off your clothes and pour the beauty of your body out before the sea; the sea holds its breath, the waves come to the shore and stay, forgetting to return where they came from. You run, you run, and you enter the deep sea of my feelings, but also the real one that is right beside us. You don't swim… but you walk on foot across the surface of the water… I get scared, it is December, it is cold, but today the day is beautiful, the sun gets tangled in your thick, golden hair and forgets to return to its home. I stand up and call for you to come back; my voice echoes in the depths and the great dome of the sky like the great bell of the Hagia Sophia, but you laugh, slipping away like a distant poetic vision. Then you spread your arms as if to fly, you wave to me, and instead of diving into the depths of the water, you fly far away, high up, turning into an angel for me. I return to my table and find your clothes there, the scent of your body, the flutter and rustle released by the petals of your fragile lips… I gather the pieces of my battle, turn over my coffee cup, and leave; I leave the seashore to go to the shore of my song, of poetry. The motifs I take from my meeting with you give me inspiration and poetic details to fill the fields of art with my poetic flowers… but they bear your name, your beauty, and the beautiful voice that comes from your chest…

***

Through the pages flow my songs, my loves, and the impressions from my meeting with you… one, two, five, and so on. I am used to combing my poems, combing them just as a beautiful girl combs her hair in front of the mirror when getting ready for an evening date with her lover. I want poetry to be beautiful and fragile, to have your scents and your beauties. And as always, the hours flow like the little spring at the root of the plane tree in the village where I was born. The plane tree sways its long branches and rustles with poetic spring and new inspirations. I am rocked in dreams and I feel sleepy… ready for a sweet, lullaby-like sleep… like the songs I create for you, recited with her voice and resonance by Merita Smaja and then by Drande Xhai. Their voice is sweet, soothing, like the fairy tales in the mouth of my late grandmother. I travel, I live, and I find happiness in another world that only the artist owns. I drop the pen from my hands, my only property in the world, and rest my head on the desk. Meanwhile, I hear a tap on the glass; the window opens, and in you come, along with the moonlight and the cool breeze. You are completely covered in light; your eyes look like two lit lanterns swaying gently inside the beautiful hollow of your eyes. On your lips you have caught the waves and their murmur, while over your naked body you have draped the beautiful light of the moon and the faint candles of the stars. It seems to me that the stars were once suns full of light, but they grew faint from your beauty, melting away and turning into candles out of the deep longing of their love for you. You come, take me by the hand, and whisper to me:

“Get up, my love, you've fallen asleep at the desk!”

You take off my clothes and lay me down in the endless kingdom of the bed. Then you give me kiss after kiss, to wake me from my daydreams and make me realize that you have truly come. The shadow of your body spills across the walls, and it feels to me as if I am living in an unrepeatable fairy-tale world. I forget, I get lost, I escape from reality and enter a dizzying world where taste and feeling reign over everything. Strange desires are born in me; I seize the lanterns of your eyes with my lips and extinguish the light of your gaze to awaken the light of your feeling. I kiss the springs of your chest deeply, deeply, deeply, and you whisper… the echoes of these babbles fill the small room, bounce off the walls, and do not know how to get out… they echo in my ear:

“Don't stop, my love, drink the whole spring of my joys, all of it… all of it! Don't leave a single drop for tomorrow; tomorrow might not be ours! Lower down too, and higher up, I want the roses of your kisses all over my body, all over my body! And tomorrow I will go out before the world naked… without clothes, so they can all see my body turned into a kiss, or a flag with thousands of kisses, fluttering through streets buzzing with passersby. I want your marks everywhere, your feelings, so that tomorrow you will pour into your poems the truths you have kissed and touched, and not dreams. Dreams are beautiful, but they remain abstract, untouchable, virgin. I do not want to be a virgin poem, but a woman, a mother, from whom desires are born, from whom life and the future are born!”

And I, obedient and driven by undefined desires that overcome me, forget myself and fight to make you happy, and under our gasps, under the beating of our hearts, we fall into the world and the quiet of the soul. The kingdom of beauty is conquered, and we rest peacefully in the rocking arms of our feelings, seeking another, deeper voyage in the ocean of the beautiful world and spiritual happiness. Our voyage is insatiable, my love!

The moon slips away from the window, yellowed in the face like a large quince. It gets lost deep between the sky and the earth, in the waves of the sea that roar and call to it. A beautiful concert of nature, a breeze blows, and sways the silken curtains of the window. Far, very far away, a vision of light appears. You stand up! Your body is covered in kisses, like red roses planted everywhere. Two large roses on your chest and another at the base of your belly seem more in bloom, more blossomed, more open from the warmth of my lips. You kiss me, and then, as if afraid of the light, you snatch the sheer curtain and throw it over your fragile and beautiful body, step over the windowsill, and fly toward the dawn like an angel covered in the beauty and taste of life itself… you melt away at the edge of the horizon, opening dozens of horizons for me in my soul, in my feelings, and in my art. I spread my arms and realize that I have inspiration, joy, and happiness itself right beside me. A stream of song springs from my soul, its notes sweet, its words honeyed by your lips… I knew you would come one day… but this unexpected arrival was even more beautiful…