(I am not here)

(I am not here)

Dangling from the onion-shaped handle of a rotting wooden door, a sign reads:

Farewell,

I am not here,

Write me a letter.

Everything suggests abandonment—no shape could be read behind the grime-streaked windowpanes. Nonetheless, a man lives there, in an unusual silence ; unusual, even amongst monks. Since he can only be reached by letter—if he ever bothers to rise—the sign takes on another meaning : Farewell, yes, tht might be the name of the dweller.

Behind his blind, mute windows, the grimacing old man sleeps in his filthy room. A room twisted like an accordion playing the slowest requiem in the world — a song of sighing bricks loosening from the walls, muddy hissing, and the groaning of woody beams. A drunken house, one single room. Four walls, minus one, providing a view—fittingly—of the river that snores into the living room, and a sieve-like roof that stars by day as well as night.

Farewell dreams by doing nothing, like a sleeping beauty who never cared for a prince. Only, he had slumped down by choice, years earlier, resigned to the fact that with the Earth spinning at 40,000 km/h—not to mention the other rotational goings-on in the universe—you don’t travel much farther flailing about than you do rotting at the bottom of your bed.

He would be proven right… had it not been for the mournful transformation of his face, mirroring that of the house. A face that has curled in on itself, crescent-moon shaped—a drift brought on by silence and seclusion: his forehead sagging to the point of curtaining his eyes, and his toothless chin, through long silence, having curled upward. See, that’s how long he’s been away from the world.

So far away from everything that the footsteps barely brushing the silence of the clearing,

Right now,

Outside his door,

Hardly graze his awareness.

So far that the words,

whispered,

by a small stranger

on his doorstep:

“Goodbye, my little dancer”

Barely reshape the fabric of the dream already in motion.

A dream where Farewell molds,

On a potter’s wheel,

A plump little clay lady,

A chubby Venus,

Fist-sized.

Farewell sculpts her dance,

Right there on the wheel.

One step, one arabesque at a time:

a tilt of the wrist, the faintest

pressure from the pulp of his fingers.

Just discreetly enough

and it’s convinced of moving on its own—

And when the potter’s hands finally withdraw,

And the music bursts from the dream,

The chubby Venus escapes the wheel.

The anxiety tears him from sleep. In his filthy room, like a sleepwalker, the witch-like old man throws himself from the bed, collapsing to his knees on the damp, swampy tile floor. Because every movement is agony, he only wakes by degrees, never losing the urgency that bridges dream and waking—the urge to seize his creation.

He flails at the empty air like a cat chasing a fly. He searches under the bed, scrambles clumsily on all fours, scanning the filthy tiles of a house that no longer deserves the name.

After all that time spent gazing only inward, his eyelids have slumped. He can barely see more than he would peering between two rusty shutter blades.

Chasing a familiar blur, he lifts the mattress, startles what must be a toad by knocking over a moldy dresser, shakes and tosses aside one by one the grimoires from his humble library—pages damp and crumbling like soggy wafers. Nothing here, nor in the emptied shelves. Nothing in the kitchen either. In the pantry: rats, disinclined to chat.

Reluctantly, he opens the door to his house, deaf to the stealthy retreat of small footsteps tiptoeing away into the clearing.

Ah—there it is. He picks up from the ground what he believes to be the clay statuette. As his anxiety washes away, Farewell pays no mind to his dancer having grown tenfold in size and weight. She’s swaddled, is warm to the touch, and leaves no clay residue on his hands.

It’s only when the warm little bundle starts wailing, and wets itself in his arms, that real questions begin to arise.

Farewell sits on the bed before the plump little thing which could - through the blur - seem a human child. The crescent-moon man takes stock of all the effects of his awakening piling up at once: aches, rheumatism, throat like sandpaper, tongue sluggish, face petrified, dizzy spells, blood pressure crashing, wet shirt, ringing ears from the crying, a child on the bed… Disoriented, he runs a few wakefulness tests.

With the tip of his tongue, he counts his teeth—Hard to say exactly how many he’d lost in sleep. He studies his reflection: Between memories of his past portrait, what he might’ve become, and a life grown blurry… it’s hard to tell whether he’s still dreaming or awake.

Either someone left a child at his doorstep,

Or somewhere, sometime, his body is still asleep,

And in this dream,

the clay Venus

has become human.

« Dream, reality ? A subtle thread of the two ? Whatever it is, this suddenly looks like it's worth a try. Question, yes, Question ! That would make a cute and fitting name for this child » - he says to himself and the baby. « Baby Question ».

*

Dangling from the onion-shaped handle of a rotting wooden door, a sign, some time ago, read :

Farewell,

I am not here,

Write me a letter.

Having fulfilled its job, that day, the sign would fall off, as would a baby tooth. As for the old man, his name would go from Farewell to Daddy for the coming years of his life, through which he’d let go of the past and all of its crumbling artefacts, gnawed - regardless - by humidity, the voracious river and a touch of indifference.

Forced to build a fourth wall to his and Question’s home, forced to walk along with her first steps, it would even seem that, through years, the house would straighten its back, mirroring Farewell’s transformation into this peaceful wrinkly dad who’d recover his once lost remainder of old leathery beauty.