The Picture
by The Obscure
I am looking at a picture of her, it is the one I love the most. It was taken on the train, on a bright winter morning and she smiles. I love see her smiling, maybe because she does it rarely, thus her smile is as precious as all is rare is. When I see, or I should say when I saw, but I’ll say when I see her smiling I cannot contain the flood of joy which overwhelms my life.
While I am looking at this picture, in my mind are passing all the words that I should have told her…. It’s like a film… In my mind are passing, as on the screen of a cinema, all the images of the moments I spent with her, and the words I should have told her compose the soundtrack. Yes, because I must confess, those words are as sweet as a melody, the sweetest things my mind could have ever thought, the most sincere, the most passionate, ardent, words I have been able to create as I am just an human being using its poor language made of words to express a feeling so strong, so pure, so… divine. Nevertheless, this film has not an happy-ending, I painfully swallowed those words, and now they are just echoes, sad ghosts in the landfill of the time.
I am now wondering what I could do with this picture of her… should I burn it? Should I tear it apart? Destroying a picture could be either a political act, as when one burns the picture of a hated dictator, or a personal liberating act: freeing yourself from something which haunts you or from who has made you suffer. But she didn’t make me suffer, I mean, I sufferd as never in my life and I’m still suffering as I was in the hell, but maybe it wasn’t her fault, so I cannot get the rid of the picture of her.
I am on a plane, going away from her but I know that I will not be able to forget her… Thinking that she is somewhere… without me… devastes me. I cannot do anything.
Wise men say: you must forget her, she’s not so special… But, and in this maybe I’ve done the worst thing, I’ve always been wary of wise men, since they can only express judges when they’re not envelopped in the spider web of the feelings.
If only she had known how much I loved her, I must use the present tense, I love her. I’ve never felt something so powerful for a woman, I would have liked to share my life with her, to walk along the streets of the world together with her, to “face” the world together with her, and take her to the life… Live together, I don’t mean just in the same house, do not think that, when I say live together, I mean: share our existence of human beings.
She could not love me, I know. It seems a stupid Shakespeare was having fun, writing this tragedy, the tragedy of an impossible love. She could not love me, this is the reason I’ve never talked to her, I could not talk… but I am regretful… I am regretful for a life that I feel could have been a paradise and, I cannot understand why, has turned into hell. All wasted… And all I can do is crying desperately inside of me for all this wasted life, for this love aborted.
Sir, you do not know me. The Fate wanted you to be sitted beside me on this plane and I started telling this story… I don’t know why, maybe I trust you or maybe I need to tell this secret story to someone, because the act of narrating is what makes a story real, even if, as in this case, painfully real.
You haven’t answered my question, though. What should I do with this picture?
You cannot answer, you don’t know what to say… However, I can feel that what you think is that for all my entire life, even if time could ease to forget, I’ll have to share my life with two deep, secret and hidden sorrows: the picture of her and the the love which has never had the possibility to live.
I can feel your compassion, Sir. Sympathy is something rare in these greedy times. I’m thankful for this…
The plane has landed, Sir… I wish you luck and I wish that you could once meet someone like the woman I met, but I wish you also a different ending for your story, not an ending like this I am writing now…
Francesco Di Bernardo
