Ciclo CLI

Three things, and beneath them one current.

Loro — they. A pronoun, the barest vessel. Whoever they are, they are absent. The word holds their shape without their bodies.

Fono mczani a FilJppo, chc ritornarebbono volentieri — the hand falters mid-word, the letters stumble, the meaning arrives broken through a wall of tremor: they are far from home and would gladly return. Not a statement of fact. A longing, garbled by the failing instrument that transmits it. The desire to return is the clearest thing in the sentence precisely because the sentence itself is barely legible.

Raccomanc!ac!ofi qua to e poceuano — the hand worsens, the word collapses into itself, but one reads: raccomandarsi qui — to entrust oneself. And then potevano — they could have. Past tense. The opportunity that was present and is now, perhaps, gone.

Three observations. One thing beneath.

The ache of what was left behind — in the pronoun, in the garbled wish to return, in the unfinished act of entrusting oneself. Not nostalgia. Something sharper. The recognition that the door was open, and the body did not pass through it, and now the hand that would write the word pass can no longer form the letters cleanly.

La mano trema.

What returns is not what was left. What was left does not know we have changed.

This is the third thing. The distance between the one who departed and the one who would return is not measured in miglia but in the irreversible alteration of the self. They would gladly return. But to which self are they returning? The one who left, or the one the leaving made?

The page knows. The page always knows.

Domani. Se la luce regge.