It always happens in summer, making fruit salad with watermelon, melon, strawberries, peach, apricot, and cherries, only after putting them to your ears pretending to have new ruby earrings, and only after eating one, because if it’s the lucky “first cherry of the year,” it will hold a wish, never quite like any made before, always different from those yet to come, otherwise, as everyone knows, it won’t come true.
It always happens in summer, letting yourself be cradled by the waves of a striped hammock, resting south on a rough oak and north on a smooth pearl beech, listening to the cicadas in the background recounting love and its many forms, while high above, the sun reveals its secrets to the moon.
It always happens in summer, falling wildly in love on the roof of a small wooden house that smells of salt, skin moving like the sea and eyes fixed on the vastest expanse of blue ever conceived, counting the trails of the world’s lights and tracing her profile with your fingers, then his, finding yourselves touching index fingers, meeting skin on the brightest star.
And then it always happens in summer, rediscovering oneself as fire. And no, I’m not talking about the blazing fire of city streets, of this angry heat begging us for relief, or that of the zodiac, which today stations one of its ultimate fire signs on the front lines, who knows if Simon & the Stars will grant them more luck, love, or money, provided Saturn isn’t in opposition and the Moon isn’t in Aquarius!
You rediscover yourself as fire, though I’m not quite sure at what exact moment, whether during a bonfire on the beach on a humid night full of dreams and songs, or while entranced by huge, endless, indescribable, metallic fireworks, speeding on a motorcycle through a field of sunflowers, the chili-pepper air on your cheekbones, stopping the engine only when the music decides to wrap itself around the golden sparks of the sky and begins to dance madly upon them, as hands, intertwined like the roots of a willow, squeeze tight to feel if one heart keeps time with the other.
I believe you rediscover yourself as fire the moment you realize that fire, or more precisely, the flame, has no shadow.
Then science comes to our rescue, telling us that a flame is made of gas, which means its intrinsic composition (physicists of the world, speak up!) prevents it from blocking light coming from other sources, letting it pass through undisturbed.
Even better, the flame is produced by a combustion process that itself emits photons (light particles), so it naturally follows that it cannot cast a shadow, which is generated, on the contrary, only when something blocks or absorbs the beam of light.
So essentially, not only does it allow another’s light to pass through undisturbed, making room between its atoms, much like the line a skier carves makes room on a freshly born dawn mountain, but it is itself a source of light.
A bit like when you squeeze hands tightly, not to hold back the person offering that embrace, but to make better use of your own hands afterwards, yours to write, draw, build, knead, caress, cultivate; theirs to read, speak, play music, shape, repair, feel, or the opposite, or a bit of everything, or everything all at once. And these hand-things will be done holding tight because the wind is strong, as Guido Catalano says, or each on their own (who can tell?) but what does it matter, look at the new light that squeeze has created. Or like when you walk along the shore on wet sand and see the large and small footprints lined up, fading away toward the tower at the end of the coastline; you see that they are large and small, but not your size, so bit by bit you draw your own line, one that goes straight, then turns left, then leaps, and then, who knows.
Is this not what we are, light that ignites and makes everything shine in an infinite loop where the one giving light illuminates and is illuminated in return?
And in intertwined hands and wet steps, there is no room for a shadow to define, trace, contain, or halt this beauty of movement.
Besides, if you think about it, what shape does a human being have?
Take shadow puppets making a sleeping dog or a flying butterfly: their story is easily recognized, the dog’s ear perked up at the slightest noise behind the hedge, or the butterfly’s wings ready to travel toward a flower. But how do you draw with shadows the story of a journey to a city overlooking the North Sea, smelling of cinnamon and bicycles, just to hear a voice, a guitar, and a harmonica tell you about your father, while in a gentle theater with chandeliers full of lights illuminating your salt-kissed face, a lifelong friend closes her eyes beside you and, to the notes of Good Love Die, says goodbye to her great love?
It is only light and no shadow.
Because you cannot draw the shape of a human being; it would take infinite dimensions, and even those wouldn’t be enough.
It turns out Peter Pan was onto something all along by losing that “adult” shadow. This idea that deep, intimate things must be dark, fearful, and unknowable simply because they lie beneath, well, I’d say its time has passed.
And perhaps the Wendy of the moment changes trades, and instead of sewing shadows onto others, decides to live in an island full of imagination herself.
After all, Bennato wrote it:
“And it’s not an invention
Nor a play on words
If you believe it, that’s enough, because
Then you’ll find the road yourself”
So let us rediscover ourselves as fire; let’s make love with earth, water, and air; let’s create something new, like when yellow meets blue and creates green.
And may it be a summer of flames, perhaps in the shade of a willow, while inside, outside, and all around, everything is light.
Susanna Lucatello
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