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I don’t know why, some things I see through your eyes before I see them through mine.
Like now. In a perfect, or perhaps just different world, the clonk of your glass coffee cup against the sandy windowsill brings you back to this present moment, looking out with sandy eyes still from sleep, the same second that I’ve stopped walking. I hold the rim of my wide panama hat down with my hand and look up, as high as possible with my right eye. There you are.
This is what you see. My straw hat waving with the late morning breeze, positioned so that you can trace the halo of hair framing my face, tied in a messy bun that moves over the clasp of a dress that you thought you hated on the hanger. You regret having said a bad word about it as you travel through every ridge and every curve, stalling on the red fabric tugging at my waist, meeting the tip of the neckline. You bring the cup of coffee to your lips and think. There is a sweet spot that you want to taste.
A second is all it takes, you tell yourself. That’s all it took.
I wave wide and long once I leave the basket on the gravel and you giggle like you do, with your eyes before your mouth. I feel theatrical, on solid ground. I remember an image of that Spanish period show that my mother used to watch and bow down to clasp the tip of the dress, knee length (and just how you don’t like it), and swivel around pulling and tugging at the fabric. I laugh before I look up at the noise of you clapping and raising your glass to my daydream silliness.
“OB,” you breath out.
That is what I want you to see.
Now, what really happens is that the door opens. Augie walks out, sleepy lines still imprinted on the side of his face. He empties two buckets of water on the half golden gravel, half dishevelled grass patches growing on the ridges of the house. I wonder why he loves this cottage so much, in the middle of a land that no one really takes care of.
“Hello Kay,” he says like a habit, then stops to eye me up and down with his hands on his hips as if he’d just caught me doing something naughty. You laugh.
“Oh, Matt Kelly my man,” Augie says with his eyebrows raised, turning around and twisting his neck so that he can have a look at you looking at us from the bedroom. “I didn’t realise you were awake.”
I giggle, unsure of whether it is because of Augie’s way of saying everything like he’d just discovered the answer to a riddle, or because I love the effect you two have on each other. Such a pretty love to witness. Before it, bad thoughts stop slipping through to the head.
“What‘ve you got there, kiddo?” Augie says looking at my basket with a devilish grin. I open my mouth, proud of what I’ve managed to bargain and pick out of the vast and luscious landscape that is Cortona’s mercato. It’s made me skip all the way up here with a steady smile on my face. I know you’ll laugh at that.
“Look at you,” you say. “I bet you were skipping about in your summery dress…”
I raise an eyebrow, a second away from telling you that I was about to stay in the village’s centre, to sit down and have a coffee and some fresh tomatoes with bread and let you sort yourselves out.
“Yeah man, fits right in with the landscape. Where’d you get that dress Kay, did like some fairies weave it around you whilst you were rolling down a field of daisies, or?” Augie says laughing.
“… all that fabric,” you too say in heaps of laughter. I frown and open my mouth, happy with the attention.
“Excuse me, yes I did. And also, your bets are on this for breakfast, so.”
Augie and you look at each other and seem to decide it best to hold a truce until you can tease with full bellies.
“Ha!” I clasp a sliver of wrapped cheese and shake it in front of me. “Also, it is cheese that I bring, so.”
“I’m out,” you say, followed by Augie’s agitated: “cheese, man! I would die for cheese!”
Both of you disappear inside at the same time. I can hear your voices, words chasing themselves before I have time to make my own way in, accompanying each other on a slightly hungover morning.
It’s not a fancy home. When you and I came here, I thought it looked like a massive being with a massive mouth had blown a puff of air on a sand dune and created this asymmetric, sandy house. But with time, every ridge and every curve seem to hold a meaning, like the more you spent standing, looking, the more you realised that other stories had flourished on that ground – that different time periods had thought and carved their way through the walls.
Sometimes I just stand there, in front of a curve sliding its way from the tiles to the ceiling, thinking about what someone else might have thought looking at that very shape.
I spend a lot of time looking, so, if you ask me, this is what I would have seen at the sight of me:
A straw hat doesn’t rest leisurely on the head, it pokes through hair, especially those purchased to pretend. I can feel my baby hair in curls curling through my messy bun, and I say messy because after three attempts, my hair was in so many knots this morning that all I could do was stick them through a hairband and try to look dignified about it.
And you hate this dress. The red is too bright, the fabric to frilly, the flowers on it girly and the length unflattering. Like a bad picture that starts at the shoulders and stops just above the knees. I love it though. The whole thing.
This is the same morning in which I slipped my toes through my straw sandals when I woke up, ignoring the sprout of a headache as I walked down the stairs and looked through Augie’s open bedroom door, sprawled on the bed with his head hanging out of it. I resisted the urge of covering his body with a blanket. You know this, he’s had a rough time.
And as I said, I was in the market. The minute its abundance washed over me, I started pointing at things to taste or buy, trying to fit in with the bustle of a sweaty Sunday in this little town. I caught myself imagining how things will look like when we decide to look back again into the future. I thought, “even Augie knows that a house in this sun kissed land won’t fix it.” Does he? It makes for a comforting nook when oblivion is a good thing.
I also smiled thinking of how even you seem different here. You walk differently, almost lighter, as if your worry had lifted. Only your smiles weigh more, your arms wrapped around one of us almost all of the time, in between failed pasta making and increasingly loud chit-chat and red wine.
Just then, just now, you kept shaking your head at my appearance, but your laughter was real, as real as the recovering slump in your best friends’ eyes, his calloused hands and his look, like, “I’ve got nothing to hide and still unspoken worries weigh on my shoulders like an imprint on the skin.” If only it was the sun‘s fault.
I lay the last sliver of cheese on the table and look at you, your eyes growing hungry by the second, your mouth spelling a silent “OB.” Whatever makes you happy, I think.
“Cheese! Cheese, man! I would die for cheese!” Augie says once more.
It is one of those rare moments in which time is polite. We couldn’t find one unpleasant thought even if we searched for it, because between this second and the next, all there is, is exactly what you see. Three friends laughing, open-mouthed and unapologetic as they devour what’s left on the table, and I can’t but think.
I would happily die right here with you both.