Sela

Sela... her name sounded just like a melody.

I miss her so much! We used to talk for hours about the differences between boundaries and horizons and seek holiness and mystery in the natural world. Sela loved horizons as much as I love deserts.

I know where my love for the desert was born, where I was gripped by its spell: it was in the city of dreams and legends, where imagination is law.

Past donkeys and camels, veiled women and snake charmers, there was a man in a white robe. He played the strings, and the rhythm would take me on a magic ride, into a tale of mysteries and myriads of wonders. I was transported beyond the horizon of this world, into tales made up of ancient myths and myriads of wonders. Into a garden of freedom, where ideas about life are not true and wrong turns do not exist. Where silence is poetry, and I was able to accept all that had to be.

I love the desert, so much that is the place where I choose to be buried. But not just yet. 

I want to tell you about Sela. I wonder if these eternal sands hold a memory of her. She believed so. She would look for a well, lean over it, and whisper something to it.

-“What did you just say to it?” I asked.

She would look at me and smile: „A secret! The water will commit it to its memory and give it back when I return.”

-“Will you?” I wanted to know, “Will you come back?”

She did. She always came unannounced, her hands trembling, stained with ink from sketching words.

I never looked for her, I always ended up finding myself instead. I know, “always” means something different to all of us.

Sela was a person, not an idea. She was a paradox made from sky and sand. I would have to be a poet to describe her.

But you have seen her too. Oh yes, you have. In one of your friends perhaps, the one you pretend not to know when you´re in the company of colleagues or family. Or maybe a distant aunt, who fell out of the family´s grace years ago for obscure reasons. Or even in a stranger crossing the street.

Sela was nobody but herself. Colors surrounded her everywhere she walked.

Even though she was born up the hill, everybody said she was from the bottom. She was always called by her opposite. She was like a fiery embrace, uncatchable.

Maybe that is why she felt at home in the desert. There is something exquisite about the unknowing. Like Sela, the desert is a trickster of fairy tales. An appellation in Arabic, the mysteries of love…

If you´re named for something you´re not, can you truly be yourself? Or do you dissolve just like your real name?

-“I´m me.” she would whisper. There was an uncanny power in her words. Me; a name only I can have, same as everybody else. Her words carried me beyond the horizon, or maybe it was just a mirage.

Sela overturned logic. You had to meet her in a dream first, a chaotic shudder between the mundane and the archetypical. Though her art had no form, she was an artist.

-“Look!” she would say, and point to a trail of cleft hearts: camel prints. She wrote and rewrote and let the desert erase it all and build it into something you can only sense beyond another horizon, wherever the wind chilled it to. Somewhere it could hide and reveal at the same time. somewhere there is nothing left to take away.

She asked me once if I was obscure to myself. I did not know the answer.

-“Then tell me your heart´s desires.” She spoke.

I didn´t dare to move. I kept silent.

Sela belonged to the desert. In rose gold evenings. She was mesmerized by the savage beauty of the huge crescent sandbanks, that smelled like buckwheat honey. She would divine marvels in these pathless eternal sands in the never-ending dazzling dune chains. She took free reign of everything, made love for the sake of making love.

 Untamed and unfettered, her soul was restless and wanted to reach the unknowable. She danced, endlessly, like a dervish under the stars, hoping to uncover a secret forgotten in a well somewhere, or a dream.

Her face was almost unreal. Her dark eyes beneath a perfect arch of eyebrows, indulging and bewitching.

She wanted to be able to remove her skin and reveal the warm loam and the glint of gold leaf of her inner world. She loved nobody but herself. She was completely free, without a center. She enjoyed weaving stories.

-“What kind of stories do you write?” she asked me.

-“The kind that fill the belly and pay the bills.” I tried to satisfy her question.

-“Give pain a voice through the written word.” She said in a melancholic way, “Let people know what it is to be wounded.”

-“A murmuration.” She pointed to the sky. Hundreds of starlings were carving up the sky into complex geometrical volumes. She kept following the birds with her eyes.

-“Mystery is the real condition in which we live.” She sang, “I want to genuflect before it. Merge with the landscape, beyond another horizon.”

Sela was never a question of personality but a measure of philosophy. In her world, aberrations were a part of nature.

Sela was an echo, an immolation of an apocalyptic tale. She was the name of Solomon’s beloved, the woman whose lips dripped sweetness. She was a dancing temptress, a swirling dervish, a ray of light.

What became of Sela?

Maybe she returned to the city of dreams and legends, where imagination is law. Pat donkeys and camels, to the sound of drums and the music of an old man in a white robe, playing the strings whose rhythm takes her on a magic ride beyond the horizon, where stories can exist in her head and nothing is certain, but everything is possible. Where thousands of things arise and return to their root, ideas about life are not true and no wrong turns can be taken. Where everything that has to be can be accepted and silence is poetry.

Where the water from a hidden well will recognize her when she comes back, in a rose gold evening amidst savage beauty.

Sela… a paradox. A dizzying spin between here and there, treetops and low places, hilltops, and trenches, always called by her opposite. I remember Sela. But you know her too. Of course, you do. You have seen her before, in one of your friends perhaps, the one you pretend not to know when you´re in the company of colleagues or family. Or maybe a distant aunt, who fell out of the family´s grace years ago for obscure reasons. Or even in a stranger crossing the street.

I remember Sela, always surrounded by colors. Maybe she lives as a hermit somewhere, or became a powerful witch, looking at a new horizon of a sentient and responsive land.