What color are your eyes?
It depends on the weather.
I am fairly certain that on August 27, 2019, as I watched the seagulls cross the roof of the world on that chalk-colored beach in the Gulf of Mexico, they were British racing green. Just as I am certain they were the yellow of citron soda on that 21st of April when, standing by a door blown open by the salt-heavy wind, I said my final goodbye to my greatest love. It depends on the weather, the weather inside, I mean. The kind that turns a day where everything goes wrong into sunshine; the kind that shifts and moves like sand on the seabed, where if you drop something, you struggle to find it even seconds later because the grains have rearranged themselves, or perhaps they’ve simply become something else, a bit like that business of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Perhaps it is because of this shifting weather that even my ID card, despite the close-up photo capturing a very specific shade, no longer dares to state it with absolute certainty. Evidently, even the “masters of identity” have realized that it depends on the weather and we all know the weather is often changeable.
What happens when you lose everything?
I saw a movie at the cinema where a man tapped his head, telling himself he no longer had a choice because he had lost everything. And by “everything,” we mean house, books, car, travels, newspaper clippings (more or less). He is willing to do, in fact, he does the absolute worst, just to reclaim, recover, beg for, or tear back what had been taken from him. He is so clouded, so blinded by his own sightless craving for revenge, that his field of vision gradually narrows until he can no longer see those around him, like his young daughter, who repeats the words of others without creating any of her own, who opens her heart only to a cello made of white spruce. She plays it spasmodically, trying to find a music made of colored dots on a white sheet, placed at the exact distance from one another; a music that seeks an aesthetic perfection so tight it makes you think it cannot find the notes inside itself to lean on. But the man, through the tiny slit of vision remaining, as if he were looking at the sea through the cracks of a distant wooden beach hut, sees only the foam of the wave and mistakes it for a piece of styrofoam. And he is kept alive by a throbbing pain that, like a Swiss watch, ticks out his gradual withdrawal from the last shred of humanity. It worsens to the point where the only choice (he makes) is to rip that pain away, so he can feel nothing at all. And his eyes turn a non-color, and everything goes dark.
I love cinema; it is perhaps my favorite art form. Seeing how creative genius has imagined and visualized an idea before me makes me generate new ones of my own.
The point is: what was that “everything”?
As long as “everything” is reasoned out and solidified through tangible, material, concrete things, as long as the “man with no other choice” recognizes himself only in success, convenience, and power, as long as he remains blind to his own and others’ human reality, the only choice left, once a small piece of the outside world crumbles, will be to pull the aching tooth and lose the color of his eyes. As long as choices veer toward a logic of mere profit, driving people to lock others inside a box with no exit, no safety, no air, and no humanity, I believe the fundamentals are missing, it is pretentious to even speak of “choices.” As long as one tries to cheat another human being, as long as one feels like the master of another, as long as one annihilates another, we cannot speak of being-human.
Then I think of when I choose a long stroke through the blue water instead of struggling to fit in one more job; of giving a bouquet of tulips to the person I love to make them feel safe after one of life’s slaps, instead of not answering the phone because I have “other things to do”; of losing myself in a warm embrace in the dark of night without saying a word, instead of taking shelter behind “I’m fine / I’m enough on my own.” I think of not stopping my thoughts but putting them through the spin cycle and then hanging them out in the sun, instead of drinking the antidote of “well, what can you do, that’s just how we are.”
Perhaps this is part of my “everything.”
Today is a fair day. I looked in the rearview mirror; they are hopeful green.
Susanna Lucatello
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