Hélder Gêmo Júnior’s Reviews > An Instant in the Wind > Status Update

You stand so still beside me. Here are the vultures. Round us there is nothing. You are filthy and covered with dust; sweat has drawn patterns over your burnt face; your hair is caked with dirt; there are lines of suffering round your mouth, and your eyes are bloodshot and scared; your breasts are sagging, your nipples scorched black. I recognise you. And I have never loved you as I do now.

Someone show it to L

What do I want, ultimately? Is it so much? - something permanent in a world of change, something certain in a world of possibilities:
I believe all your lies unconditionally. We're naked; we can easily fall to our death; we can break a bone on any stone. Deceit is safe: to pretend to love, to go on unhurt. Dare one be fooled by that? I love you, here is my life, I’m holding yours in security.

And now the skeleton (of the snake, green) lies bare and very white among the rocks of the pool, a long curve of small crescents of bone, each rib shaped perfectly, heraldic on the stone: nothing vague or obscure about it, everything precise and delicate and uncompromising, no longer subject to change, danger, desire or fear, but defined with serene finality, inescapable, and very beautiful.

Here am I, there is the world. And then, perhaps through the slow motion of the sea, to experience the sensation of moving through that world and that space, yet not to touch it anywhere: to remain myself while the world remains the world.

He looks at her.
Yes, she would like to say. Yes. Allow me to say yes. But something inside me still clings to that ultimate safety, something inside me is still wounded, I'm still scared. How can I give myself up if I don't know to what or whom?

Somewhere, somehow, it should be possible to touch someone and never to let go again. To hold someone, not for a moment but forever, in a world where everything is fleeting and painful and treacherous.
And for the sake of that small possibility you must be willing to risk everything, to break through, to walk into the night naked.