I travel back to your faces, into their rich pastridden texture.
I hear their opening voices, their gulps and echo-lands.
And I wander across the past and the present, the old songs.
It’s a sensation destabilising itself between nostalgia and shame.
It’s my old vanished faces, former glory and deeply rooted unhappinesses.
I had lost myself in endless pretence and yearning shadows and inadequacy.
These faces block me, shake me, from afar, from deep within and I return
To hollow places that feel too dark to reawaken.
I hear our voices, the fading screams and hopelessness, the nonsensical violence
In our arms, that nobody believed in and everbody listened to.
You look at a photograph and reminisce, but I look at it and see it within a context
And I ache, as I understand myself and look at myself retrospectively.
I detect the silent declarations of my own misery, of my own prisons,
My fears and passivities. I see myself clearly and the words that were never uttered,
The wars that have never been cured by love.
“Morning Toilette” by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853)
