FREEWINGS

Her blush is like no other. A choral sunset of blues and flesh and vermellion.

She is alone, reminiscing, and she blushes. It's a blush that belongs to her, and to her alone. The blush flows from her previous thoughts, which seem like arrived from a distant past, their presence only denounced by a rumour like a candle flickering.  

On her house, a quiet morning time that looks at her from the breakfast tablecloth. In the air, a strong coffee aroma. The light filtering through the curtain reveals the tiniest particles of dust, floating lazily on the sunbeams. 

I sit there, with her, on one of three free wooden benches. I am not really there. I watch her from beyond time and space. Like a ghost, perhaps. The once harmonious motions of our hearts seem forever lost. What would we do without words?

Yet, I feel her going through a brief lapse of something that could be called joy. There, in her own house, where she usually wears that apron of disbelief, that grey veil of sadness, yet not thick enough to cast a shadow on her beauty. 

But now music pours from the radio and she sings joyfully over the music, following the winding paths of the singer's voice like a second skin. She is loose, she cannot imagine I am there, watching her with a smile. She shines. Her eyes shine, she blushes. 

Yes, she blushes, that little stream of joy runs through the kitchen walls. As she sings, the breakfast dishes vanish like magic.

She switches the music off and sits at the table, by my side. She holds a pencil, her delicate hand chatting with her own mind-eye. She draws something like a circle. The object has some magic to it, and I think it is obviously so much more than a circle. She draws directly from her heart, using definite motions. Everything on the paper starts as a geometric form, and then turns into something else, like alchemy, a  sortilège of sorts.

Yes, she holds the pencil with some reverence, like a a pilgrim would hold a candle. She makes a mental note to buy more paper. This is maybe her hundredth dragonfly. She does not colour her drawings, but inside her blue eyes she can feel the shade of pale yellow on the wings of this one. All the dragonflies are different, all ready to fly, free and easy. 

When the kids come back, after school, they will collect the new dragonflies passionately, colorfully illuminating their mother's drawings with a symphony of crayons. Another ritual. Like her singing, like her sadness. 

But for now everything is still at home. She inhales the coffee smell and keeps on with her reminiscence. A bitter thought crosses her mind: she did not fly when she could.

Freewings, she pronounces loud for herself as I watch, mesmerized, the circles and forms her hand draws on that paper.

I may not see her again, ever.

                                                                                                  Sándalo Naranja