It’s been a day. It’s been thousand years. And I still recognize you every first time.
Sometimes it takes you longer, sometimes past “Hello” and past “I love you” all the way to “No, please don’t leave,” and then the clock resets.
The first kiss is gentle; the first kiss is desperate; the first kiss is inevitable.
It’s not so much life as existence and then there you are and I remember, somewhere south of my throat bubbling up into the facial muscles forcing a smile or a cry or just a shocked jaw, unable to close, because now it’s living. Now it’s “Hello” like a new language that I can’t wait to teach you.
Robert Walser, from Fairy Tales; “Thorn Rose, The Sleeping Beauty” (trans. from the German by Daniele Pantano and James Reidel)
[Text ID: At twilight, I would spend the time / thinking of how gentle you were and / sweet, and how wonderful it would be / to stir you, for me to look upon / you a little, to draw you toward me / tighter and tighter and you thinking / of me, that I am good enough.]
“You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago.”
