you’ll never know dear how much i love you
She subscribed to one of those services where every morning a newspaper
from a different city appears on your doorstep. There is a limited version
of this service, strictly US/Canada, but she splurged for the full
package, and on the mornings the paper arrived written in a language she
could not understand she was content to look at the pictures, small
smudged clouds which must once have signified discrete objects. Some
newspapers had no pictures at all, just rows and rows of angular text, and
here she contented herself to see images in the negative space within what
was to her white noise, certain that the true meaning would manifest in a
form she could understand. This was the single axiom of her belief system:
an answer will come in time. Today it was a German paper, and she tried to
remember what little high-school Deutsch she had left in her, so that
short phrases — “around the corner”, “one hundred automobiles”, “the
Berlin laundromat-road” — fell upwards to her, rising from the rest of
the text, from the same smudgy images that could be from anywhere, of
anything, except one, on the back page, larger than the rest, which she
thought looked like her, when she was younger, maybe just after college.
But different, obviously not her. Right? How could it be her?
(12:26.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #