Self-portrait

This is the second episode in English. My self-portrait, ready to be rolled up in a golden sleeve. I'll ship it off to the hands of everyone daring to love me.

I can visualise you as a matter of fact surprisingly well, – but always as you stood on your door-step that last evening, when the lamps were lit and the trees misty, and I drove away.

Here we go again. I told you this was bound to happen. And it's happening. Right now. I'll stop apologizing - you deserve better than that.

My birthday came and went and left me high as a kite - before you ask, yes, I was completely sober, just overwhelmed with a continuous sense of joy, gratitude, and love. So much love I didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t know where to put it. The math of the heart is a tricky thing, though: how stupid can it be, for a moment of silence to weigh much more than an indefinite amount of love words. Whispered by the voices of the people that love you, the ones that choose you, the ones that stay. And yet zero is much bigger than a hundred, where the heart is concerned.

Birthday celebrations included brunch, a trip to the library, dinner, a play at the theater, then another dinner, followed by cake, two candles, a wish. They lasted three days in total, one before the actual day and one after, and for the first time in forty-one years, the veiled anxiety of having to celebrate another year around the sun was, indeed, veiled. It didn’t scream at me, didn’t make me feel nauseous, didn’t give me a headache or a stomachache - it just lingered a bit in my mind and a bit in my mouth. Everything was yellow. So bright. So big.

4 September 2025. My 41st birthday.

At the library I picked up a book I read once about ten years ago: Mr. Gwyn, by Alessandro Baricco. I sat down and I read it all again in a couple of hours. My book tastes (and not only those) have changed a lot in the last ten years, and I don’t know exactly why I liked this author the way I did when I was younger, but it’s okay, it’s okay that I am not bound to understand some things. It’s okay if I don’t understand it all. If you haven't read the book, it's basically about a writer who goes by the name of Jasper Gwyn, a successful author who, at forty-three, decides he doesn't want to write anymore. He doesn't seem to know how to stop, though, and in the wake of a fun encounter, he decides to pursue an extraordinary vocation: he wants to be a “copyist”. What does he decide to copy? Easy: people. He’ll make their portraits but instead of using colors and a brush and a canvas, he’ll use what he knows how to use best: words. He sits thirty days in a room with the subjects, he observes them - god knows what he is up to, in his head that sees everything and says nothing - and at the end of the thirty days he goes and writes the portrait. We don’t get to know how he does it: it can be a story, a series of stories, adjectives, nouns, places, colors, jobs, names, moments, landscapes, objects - it can be everything and the exact opposite of everything. The only thing we know is that it works. It’s possible. It can be done.

Reading the book made me wonder - perhaps again, I am not entirely sure - whether we can really ever know ourselves, until someone else shows us who we (truly) are.

It also made me wonder if I’d be able to write my own portrait, one I could roll up in a golden sleeve and pass across, shipping it off to the hands of someone interested in getting to know me, in having to decide if I am worthy of their time, their life, their love. I decided if Baricco and Mr. Gwyn did it, so could I.

So here it comes, my self-portrait. The one with words.

A color
A color would be blue, and that doesn’t surprise you.

I fell in love with it when I was still young. Separation and withdrawal when cold. Desire and comfort when warm. Hope, even. Light. I am fixated on it - the water, the sky, the space in between. Violence and self-erasure, waking up from a dream I didn’t want to have. Inevitable, relentless, quiet. The mourning that lacks resolution, the grief that knows no closure. The overwhelming sadness that doesn’t start and doesn’t end, it just continues and continues and continues. Miles of it, till the end of the world. Nostalgia.

Blue is the edge of my language.
Part of what I feel cannot be said; it can only be colored in.

A room
A room in a house would be a living room or a dining room, I am not even sure about the difference to be honest - modern houses can’t afford to have both anyway. I am sitting close to a window, curled up in a spot, it’s an armchair, I think, there’s a book in my hands. I don’t know what I am reading, it might be irrelevant. I feel curiosity and comfort as I move through the pages, my bare feet numb from the cold, my heart open.

I gaze wistfully out the window, maybe I wait for my love to return from the war.
I digress.

A state
I am not sure if this is a state or a mood, I don’t get it. The word I am painting is “alone”. What does it mean, you ask. I can be alone without feeling lonely, and I can feel lonely even when surrounded by people. I am not sure which one it is. I go back to the pictures of my childhood, and there I stand, firm, grounded, a grown up in the body of a kid, and I am, in its glorious evidence and without any shadow of doubt: alone. In a corner, far away, detached.

Separated from the rest.

A geography
I am perhaps not very good at this craft of making portraits with words.

I want to say: an island, and I don’t know where to put it.

It’s so small and so big that nothing can contain it. My roots are there, in a piece of earth surrounded by the sea, the water, the blue, so much blue, everywhere blue. It shapes my wish to belong when I know very well that I can’t. The deep and everlasting longing for a place that maybe, maybe, doesn’t even exist. The volcano so close by, the eruptions, the earthquakes. Knowing that everything is so tremendously fragile and weak and violent and transitory.

Islander.
Separated from the rest.

An adjective
It is “full”. It has to be “full”. It could also be “deep”. I need to choose one but who said I have to. I am making my own rules here. Anyway, “full”.

All my life I have heard:

you are too much, too over the top, too deep, too different

People didn’t always know what to do with me. Neither did I, to be honest.

I felt everything. All the fucking time. And I am not talking about the feelings inside me, always full to the brim, ready to burst, ready to overflow. I talk about the things that other people felt. I felt those, too. All the fucking time.

It’s exhausting, really.

I know if you’re honest, and I know if you’re lying, and I know if you’re sad, and I know if you’re happy. I pick up on your mood. I pick up on the lights, too, and the colors, the shades, the noises, the smells. Sometimes I need to run away from it all.

I spent a lot of time thinking I was broken. I spent a lot of time thinking I was too much, too much and yet never enough.

An adverb
It’s “fiercely”, I am sure. My god I love it. I love “ferociously”, too.

Heartbreak to me feels like dying. Loss feels like dying. I hold tight and never let go. The violence of it all sometimes backfires, slaps me in the face, buries me alive.

I look at my own mess, my drawers, my labels, I want to make sense of the chaos. I numb my senses, at least I try, I tell myself it’ll get better. It never does.

A verb
It has to be “breaking”. Exactly like this, in the present continuous, my perpetual motion of coming undone

a heart that breaks is a heart that opens

like dawn breaks over the sea, violent and necessary, towards the blue, always the blue.

I break bread with people that don’t see me, and yet I search for home in their eyes. Who am I, if I stop apologizing for taking up space?

Breaking and never broken, rough around the edges, maybe there I am easier to swallow.

And you? What about you.

“Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow.
What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not from a moment, an instant, a single second.”¹

I want to know everything.
Tell me everything, so I can love every part of you.

Things I've read, seen, heard

• The new single of Lola Young is driving me absolutely wild. Go have a listen and be ready to fall in love. You’re welcome.

• A wonderful life is officially out <3

• Why do we collect things? A beautiful read.

Be a brat, fate ə monellə <3

1. Virgia Woolf from a letter to Vita Sackville-West.