This day of all days...

It’s that time of the year. That very month. It’s the day. This day of all days and I’m miles away under a radiant sky and around glorious palms... Elsewhere the sky is heavy and overcast, the ground glazed with ice, trees, magnificent buildings and broad streets covered in snow...

Yerevan, gray and dull in February, almost lethargic and yet how much I miss it right now, on this very day, how much i miss the mood, the state matching with the month. Nostalgia, a wistful longing for a moment in the past, a particular event, a mood, emotional state.


Two years, two whole years and I am still having seconds thoughts, still allowing myself to return to the event, living through it, speculating over the outcomes other than what followed, what has shaped my present now. My heart still hurts when I think about it, that time, the house, the city, the gallery, the artist, our meetings, the snow, the cold and me, dazed and restless, sleepwalking and yet awake, only wakeful in some other kind of reality where I was free of circumstances binding me... and yet, even in that life i would to be bound, not as much to the idea of him but to my own solitude.

And two years ago I wrote

"I open the door to chaos and let chaos in. I plunge myself into it headfirst, letting it consume me more and more. I become a tiny ripple caught in the storm, swirling rapidly in a downward spiral.
Drifting away from what used to hold me once. Drifting away from the future that lay before me unfulfilled."

"I draw a scene. It's dull and barren. I color it gray and let shadows swallow the light. I watch the light grow dim. The outlines blur and the air thickens.

I create a mood— I let the mood create itself out of the scene.
I draw the mood... I draw myself in it— small, dark, brittle, almost transparent.
I watch myself from above, I watch the mood drift through the thick air. The entire scene is on my palm. I let long hours pass as the slanted rays slide over the scene and there I remain, shivering in the wind, looking dolefully at the sky."

And today I write

"February and the sun is bright. Outside my window palm trees stretch towards the sun. The sky is blue, the kind of blue that can only be seen in a place that does not know cold. And yet I think about a place, that place under a different sky, laden with heavy clouds, the world white and trees covered with snow. And i long for winter, for the snow. Somewhere there, under a different sky, I could’ve had a different life. Somewhere there I would be waking up to snow and not to sunshine. Somewhere under a different sky I would be in the city, with a chance of running into him in the crowd. Somewhere in that other life i would be living in one of the old buildings made and carved in stone, and somewhere in that other life there would be a chance that he’d come knocking on my door only to be gone the next morning. But as long as i lived that other life, under a different sky, there would always be a chance of running into him in one of those art galleries - giddy with wine, he would take me home with him, and maybe, just maybe another masterpiece would be born of the outlines of my curves in bold strokes on canvas that he'd cover by a cloud of golden mist..."



I am repeating myself, over and over again, the same thought, dressed in different clothes, made of different words, appears again, and again and again, and i walk in circles. with this idee fixe. Will writing it down set me free? Will i be able to leave the event behind, to hang the canvas on a wall of some unknown gallery of the past and walk away?

I feel like I'm running out of time, and I'm full of longing, the most painful longing and wistful nostalgia for a place that stands now as the very symbol of my freedom and solitude.

Yerevan...