After the exhibition

What came back to me after I read his story out loud, overwhelmed with emotion, or later coagulated around it:

• I feel that loving writing is constantly failing at the thing you love.
• The magic of us, what we can do together.
• Prague in February, when I was alone but I knew that someone was waiting for me back in Berlin, in the room where the apple tree that Steve gave me will, surprisingly, survive a whole winter, a bit of spring too. The last months before leaving home: all of its beauty and terror, the long hours of preparations, the time carved away for my friends. The last week, singing at the night with I., the hours at the bar, which advanced slowly; the month I lived with B. and I felt the pull to stay, to move in a little closer. Beginning of an October past, when F. came to visit and we walked along the same life for a little while again. The morning I’ll arrive in Paris, battered and confused, and S. will pick me up from the station and organize a huge breakfast that will go on for hours; days later, when I’ll smoke with F. on the balcony and try to explain the kind of life I’m preparing, what still scares me. What came out of the exhibition – it will be too early for this, and I will fail, again.
• The sunlit evenings of the first lockdown, when I forced myself to write every night and something came out of that, too, even if it didn’t have to.
• The night out when me and Coco rejoiced over learning that we had used the same word to describe the particular electricity of the exhibition, magic. Not an uncommon word, maybe not one a writer should use proudly. But I was drunk and sentimental that evening and I must protect that feeling, too: the wonder of having carved the same word to describe the same time - a tautology of magic, inspiring, confirming itself.
• Writing the first draft of this and trying (without success) to define a difference between remembering and reminiscing.
• I’ve interlaced my heart with yours. Doesn’t matter for how long. Ribbons of yours are woven in with mine. Traces; I hope you feel the same.
• Thinking a lot about memory, my hometowns. In the first year in Berlin I missed the sea the most and I tried to make the first image of my previous life out of it – gathering lines of poems, pictures real and imagined, the words of friends, too, born by the sea, to make a figure of my own. All along the sea was there, unchanged, with the after-image of me and my brother staring out into it before he left. Me, wondering when meaning would kick into place, fill in the experience. I remember the narrow, internal streets of Pozzuoli – the ample ones of Naples, opening (with a gasp) towards a sudden sky, the sea. What does missing mean? It’s only the heart adjusting. In my first months, I lied to it and let myself reminisce, promising to come back, until it didn’t matter anymore. Corners of Berlin make me cry, now. Every time I walk along Potsdamer Strasse I think of you, of us. The time me and Agata walked three or four bus stations from the Kunstraum and talked about twins and doubles of many kinds and it was sweet to have someone to speak in Italian with.
• I’ve tried to talk to each of them about the specific shape of this magic. This is what I’ve landed on: the magic was the magic. You should’ve been there. This magic was the magic of us. Of our time: the days of our meeting, the few months we shared, that sacred week before the opening. This magic was the magic of us, doing the thing we love. The magic was us and emanated all around from us and it came and went in waves, because pure feeling is unsustainable, but never went away. I remember blue make-up powder being put in a old salad bowl and then shared. The kitchen, our retreat, which Richie’s costumes made into a backstage, a theatre of its own. Then we went into the exhibition.
• You must develop a technique. Then you must develop another. You must have a method for summoning and you must not abuse it. You must learn how to distinguish between what must be summoned and what suffices to be recalled or imagined. Don’t call what doesn’t need to called. Dream new dreams.
• The magic reached its peak in two moments: when I read Tommaso’s words for the second time, after Véra instructed me on how to gather my words. Then, afterwards, when we hosted the second guided tours for strangers who would, in one day, see three or four exhibitions, who knows how many labours of love. We guided them and I felt like, for how much we tried, for how much they wanted to, they’d never be part of the magic, because it belonged to us, it emerged from these months of contact, the daily company in the week of the installation. And I felt we were like children of the same kind, strange and aslant, swimming around in a tight pack, in and out of the swarming schools of strangers, as we hyped up those for whom the time had come to explain their work (with words reasonable and intimate enough), until the moment was over, the light moved to the next piece and we reabsorbed into our group to be congratulated and held. Always a good word, always a work of love. We all hugged in front of Eze's glass trinkets, reflecting complex lights, or maybe not at all.
• When I called Mattia the last morning of the installation because nothing worked and I was ashamed of being so unprofessional and in the same room with you all he calmed me down and promised me we’d find a way. Mascha helped me put up the pages, stayed with me, patient and with unshakable faith in the success of our endeavour.
• The last day, before we had to leave, I went and sat down in Lu and Coco’s embryonal space. I closed my eyes, I let the sounds of water and whispers align my breath into a kinder rhythm. I made space for memory, for being there.
• I knew that something in my heart had shifted (like an old cosmic mechanism commanding the eclipse and the seasons of the moon) as I read the last words of Tommaso. I knew then that, despite my imprecisions, my rushing, my shortcomings, the slips of my pen and my mouth, despite myself, that Tommaso is alive, that he had made it through, that the ritual had been successful.
• I realized last week, getting sentimental again with Lula, that I’m not done talking about this. I don’t want to exhaust the magic, to say it all.
• Happiness is honey dripping into the heart. I move around our group like a zealot (in the blue coat Jean-Noël said made me look like a gay wizard), I want to know of everyone, I need everyone of us to know; then I step out of our swarm to see my friends, my boyfriend, to send messages to the absent and the unwilling, because I need to tell everyone that the magic was happiness and I found out that happiness gifts time back.

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