Dating : The Sun Wakes You Up and the Moon Puts You to Sleep

Flaminian Way is a street tucked away in a lonely part of the world at the center of the universe from where every other narrow road and wide avenue and sunset boulevard branches off and keeps going to the ends of the earth. It is a street you find by yourself, and it’s not allowed to take anybody with you on the way there. Wise men have labored forever to find a road and map it on a piece of paper and pin it on a wall, but they are no wiser than before, and the walls remain bare. It’s a summer street because in wintertime it disappears completely and comes back as the echoes of the final spring notes fade away and make room for the summer songs dancers dance to. Take a lonely walk around town on a quiet summer night, and maybe you will find it.

They do things differently there because nobody knows any better. Boys build castles in their living rooms behind couches and don’t want to come out of them ever again. Everything they need is heaped on the floor and scattered around them, and they only need to reach for their heart’s desire and in an instant it’s in their hands. Girls write love letters on little pieces of paper, and the boys read them and then throw them away. Heavy rain washes off the earth whenever a lady is sad and laments her fragile heart. Little impromptu boats sail across sun-shaped puddles, and boys relaunch the wayfarers when they reach the shore. The heat then dries the land, and everything is like before and like it has ever been. Dust swirls around behind passing cars and creeps to everybody standing around and sitting under trees and around tables, veiling their eyes and coating their hair. The world becomes a lonely place again. Everybody says so and nobody says otherwise because all you need to do is look at the ocean sky and the tiny boats sailing around the sun.

She wakes up the boy on the bed next to hers, and they go outside together. Their names are never uttered separately. They resemble a song that everybody knows the words of and sings along whenever someone carols it. She summons the girls and gathers them around her, and they go about their business. They write love letters and perfume them and fold them a million times, so that any valentine could fit in your palm and stay hidden away in your pocket. They have pretty summer dresses adorned with every flower in every conceivable pattern and color. Girls’ laughter echoes across the street and then haunts you in your dreams. Their nimble steps are noiseless and ghostly, but their kisses on your neck as they tiptoe behind you are sincere and signify eternal love. The sun follows them around as it moves higher up in the sky, and when they wave at the people on the balconies, it waves back at them, feeling sad to see them go away and not show up again until sunlight dissolves into melancholy night.

The din of gentle voices gradually dies away at midday. The only vestige of the pretty parade is the boy and the girl strolling around the dusty street. She tells him stories about everybody living in the high buildings and strange houses. They climb trees and watch lonely ladies and madmen stare at the walls and rock their heads and sometimes jump in one place and flap their hands. Girls study their faces in narrow mirrors and try out hats and glasses and put little ribbons in their hair and get dressed in white dresses that vary in length from above their knees to down to their ankles. Boys hurry the sun across the sky with their dull eyes and earnest pleas and look to pass the time in memories and hopes they lock away in their rooms. Some people keep their thoughts safe from eyes on trees and mouths on the street, and they sit on their doorsteps and gaze at the empty sky above. Many people sleep, and many don’t do anything at all.

The boy and the girl walk the empty street and listen to the silence everywhere around them. Even the people at the doorsteps are gone, and the sky is perfectly blue and eternally still. Sometimes he gets sleepy, and she finds him a place to rest his weary bones and not worry about anything at all. She hopes to hush his countless thoughts and lull him to sleep, but his soul echoes with every faint note of the universe, and keeps him awake. Days don’t have any names because today is not tomorrow, and that is everything you ever need to know. Her gentle words close his eyes briefly, and momentarily they are open again. She tells him stories about falling in love and about searching for love from ocean to ocean and finding it completely, or not finding it at all. There are places around the world where snow never leaves and summer never arrives, or where princesses live in towers and emperors wear ragged clothes. Sometimes a cloud conceals the sun for a minute, and he watches as darkness veils her face and plucks the flowers from her dress and keeps them for itself. But they bloom again, and she names every flower as her fingers move slowly from the straps on her shoulders down to the fringes at her knees. He braids her hair or ties it in a ponytail and loves to put one side of it behind her ear and leave the other half go down her neck and shoulder. Dust falls from her hair on his fingertips and scatters over her skin like brocade. Sweat covers her body and pierces the scratches covering her arms and legs, and it doesn’t go away even at night. He wraps his arms around her and conceals her from the last harsh remnants of the setting sun as the moon shrouds everything in darkness, and summons everyone to her.

The ladies are the first to go outside in the night. They leave their houses for an amble beneath the streetlamps, and their dresses glide along the ground about their bare feet and leave a trace behind them. The yellow light muddles up the colors of their harlequin clothes and confuses the people watching from their balconies under the stars. Cherry lips whisper kind words as moonlight snares the sweet melody and chants it to the flowers, which suffuse the air with its aroma, and empty the world of any unlovely sights. The ladies’ names are decorated with maquillage that arranges the letters like the notes of summer songs that sneak out through open windows and waft through the air inviting everyone out on the streets like the tolling of bells across the sea points wanderers the way to shore. Men sit on the benches in front of their homes or on the pavement and the ground around bonfires and imagine distant lands bordered by endless oceans they need to sail through to reach the coast. Girls pirouette and whirl around boys who do the dance of death on a path of fiery embers extending beyond the horizon. Some sing, and others whisper the words under their breaths. There are those who play the tambourine or the piano, and those who mimic the movement of hands with their fingers. Sometimes, a weary traveler hears the music and nears the girls in their whirling dresses who look like dancing ghosts, and who send him on his way again.

Fatigue hushes the performers and breaks off the dancing well after midnight, and the wanderers become deaf to the whispers of the wraiths. Then somebody carols a song, and the girls gather around their morning summoner under a lonely tree at the end of the street. The scarlet moon veils their white dresses in crimson and smears blood on their skin, where it mixes with the taste of strawberry dust stuck on some girls’ lips forever. They write love letters to the messengers who carry the perfumed envelopes away and who never open them on the way to the receiver. Valentines all the way down to their thighs keep the girls’ hearts from breaking. Candid words are sewed on pieces of paper like the flowers on their day dresses, and the envelopes are as white as their gowns and as clean as their faces. Think about me when the warm touch of the sun caresses your body, and when the moon cools it down again. When you mend other people’s hearts, don’t forget to fix your own. Or when the wind hurries you along the street towards a stranger’s house, remember to walk under my window and whisper my name. Don’t be mad at me for keeping you awake at night, but sneak into my room to wake me up and sing me back to sleep again. Ruffle my hair resting on your chest and bite my lips. Forget your eyes, and let me guide you with my voice.

Siren songs start to pierce the night air slowly. Mothers call their daughters from the balconies and tell them to find a boy to accompany them home. One by one the boys come, and little by little the girls begin to disappear from your eyes below the lit windows with shadows passing behind the curtains, and beside the empty running cars on the pavement along the black cats purring under the windowpanes. Soft steps split the dust in the direction of the moon and vanish at the doorsteps scattered around the street. Specters in nightgowns put out the candles burning on the tables, and the Devil blows the streetlamps out and dooms the world to eternal darkness. The only people left on the street are the boy and the girl, who sit under the tree and listen to the solitary sound of unloved songs meandering around them. There is a little shop just around the corner where chandeliers hang from the ceiling like the stars in the sky, and there is a small café next door where painted faces on the wall watch over the street like the night birds on the roofs. The crumbling building where they sell lottery tickets borders windows plastered with pale posters and infinite numbers. The pair passes the sleeping postmen on one side of the road and the marauding fiends on the other. The boy keeps close to her as the singing tomcats and howling hounds wind around them and accompany them to their door. The moon peeks through the open window and illuminates only half of the little room, which walls are stained with unwashed hands and dirty clothes heaped in the corner, and where the boy and girl talk until she falls asleep.

Sometimes the whistling of the wind wakes her up in the middle of the night. She whispers his name, and together they run outside in the rain. They don’t see the raindrops falling from the sky, but they smell them in the air and feel them on their skin. Clouds conceal the moon above them, and the rain dampens the earth beneath their bare feet. They dance in the mud under the sound of wails wafting around them and sing every song they know by heart. The wind carries away the dust from their eyes, and she washes off his hair and every little wound covering his arms and legs. They undress on the way back to their beds and throw their clothes in the corner of the room. Tiny drops of dirt fall on the floor and stay there eternally as she wriggles her feet sticking out of bed. The clouds in the sky clear away, and she falls asleep forever.