My flight home was delayed by nearly an hour. I sat, exhausted, in the waiting area of Logan airport reliving, re-calculating, re-experiencing the past five days in Boston. The past five days in the company of one of the most astounding women in the world. One of the most human.
How easy it is to get caught between then and now.
Now I am home, if only for a couple of weeks, and I feel distant and melancholy. The concerto of Boston has become an opera--sad and foreign, universal in its melody, cryptic in its language. I began missing two days before I left.
Then, the concerto frenzied and became mute, the melody twisted into a mirror of itself--a carnival glass distorting reality to fit the curve of refracted light.
We found that the vision of two very ordinary women strained under the task of straightening light, and we failed to discern the language of movement.
How could we, after all, when our only interpreter through the years has been italics and underscores instead of sideways glances and quiet pacing?
And somewhere between now and then lies a fairytale that has gone unread, tea-stained brown eyes full of sadness, a new language that may take another lifetime to learn, a poet, a novelist, and two very real dreamers.
--it's the language that matters, isn't it, it's what went on in her mind-- A.S. Byatt from Possession