I came here to speak of my disillusionment. I want to be free of it, at last. Do you mind keeping the curtains open? I don’t mind the draft. Thank you. 

I apologize in advance for dwelling on my childhood. Nothing is sweeter to me than words which taste of those times. But I have my eye on the clock. I’ll exercise restraint. 

I did not speak a word until I was eight. Between the ages of five and eight, I didn’t grow. Most things drifted above my head, indistinguishable from the clouds, while the faces of the other children orbited me like moons. They waxed and waned in the fluorescence which is all I remember of that school. The sterile light. 

You probably wonder if I was made fun of. Never. “There was something about you,” my sister said, “so small and silent. But with such gravity. Like the light haze scientists use to spot black holes.” She’s a pharmacist now, across the Atlantic. 

My childhood was studded with moments of bliss. I loved, for instance, eating melon. My mother would cut it into perfect cubes with her surgeon’s fingers so that, in all its translucence, it did not look like fruit but like platonic fruit-stuff as yet un-fruited. Ah, such simple ecstasy!

I sense that you’re confused. Why smile to hide it? I’m a connoisseur of confusion. I can spot it a mile off, but it doesn’t hurt me anymore. 

Anyways, when I was six, a tornado destroyed our house. We huddled in the basement, where it was darker than the darkest darkness. My sister screamed for hours. 

I was still. I lay there, limbs dissolving in that perfect darkness, and imagined the storm. I saw it drifting towards us, searching for me. I could feel the noise subside as it hovered above. Then a perfect silence flooded my mind’s ear. I, my eyes and the storm’s eye aligned in a threefold vision so powerful that I saw up, up, up, straight up to paradise.

I fell asleep as my sister screamed and the storm tore our roof off. I believe that, in the darkest darkness of the basement, my dissipated body started moving with the winds, silent in the middle and violent all around.

You, who are acclimatized to madness, must see that, as a child, I was not of this world. I had illusions by which I lived parallel to everything, never intersecting with it.

I will try to illustrate this for you. When my mother came back from the hospital one night and said “she died today”, glancing at me because I shared the name of a red-haired girl with leukemia, I did not believe it. Whatever I read in a storybook, I believed. 

Of two mutually exclusive realities, I chose the wrong one. It’s an easy mistake to make, don’t you think? 

My disillusionment was not sudden. My birth into the world was preceded by many painful contractions. The clay I molded refused to become a bird: the flower I plucked one moment was dead the next: eyes on the sky, I crashed my bike and saw undeniably my own cartilage, bone, pain, blood that dripped on the white pavement. My mother sewed me shut. 

But enough preamble. It was a school outing. We walked through a white forest, pausing to watch a late migration. The teachers pointed, everybody threw back their heads. I did not see the birds. 

I was busy peering through the trees, at a sunray that slashed the greyness. In that ray the snow glittered fiercely, as if all the world was disintegrating and setting itself alight. It had the appearance of a miracle. 

As I stood transfixed, my classmates started to drift down the path. I was jostled by a current of elbows and parkas. Then there was stillness. 

I turned and saw the group, detached from me, shrinking in all its seething babble, teachers busy breaking up a fight, friends tangled up in each other. Nobody looked back. I felt invisible and it was thrilling.

The group crested a hill then fell. I was left with silence and the vaulted whiteness of the pines. I stepped into the forest. Waist deep in snow, I stood in the sunlit patch, amid the crystalline flurries, breathing in an ecstasy sweeter than melon. I stared into the light until it was branded on my retinas. 

I grew cold and I sought the path again. Blinded, I failed to follow in my own footsteps. The path I found was not the path I had been on before. Bare branches whispered above me, frayed, forked and strange. The miracle drained from everything and, for the first time, I was afraid of my own aloneness. The tears froze on my lashes. 

I walked until I found a cabin. Inside, there was a woman behind a desk. “I’m lost.”, I said, “I was with a school group, heading north. There were about thirty of us.” It was the first time I’d heard my own voice. 

The woman was as shocked as I was. My power of speech, kept so long in utero, had emerged fully formed, older than the tongue that had borne it. She gave me a blanket, made a call, and we waited. That was it. Strange, isn’t it, how in this sober summer air it sounds like nothing? I had fallen from grace as softly as the snow.

That summer, I grew seven inches. Me and my voice became inseparable. “You’re insufferably loquacious”, my sister once said, mispronouncing every word because she had opened a thesaurus to mock me. 

Here lies the problem: as I entered into conversation with the world, I realized that I had not been found, that in that forest I had become perpetually, irrevocably lost. A pilgrim with nowhere to go. Wandering, always, wandering. I grew old, I worked menial jobs, I taught, I wept, I loved. 

Now I’m here, in your office, wreathed in the scent of lilac and sewer, on the sort of night that poets would die for and on which I would wish to die, baring my soul to you because I’m paying you to fix me with your searchlight eyes, here in the city of seven hills, near the river.