Dear Wigleaf,

I'm home after a long time. After a long time I have a bathroom to myself. I make coffee, watch shows, look out the window at sparrows that remind me of fluffed up cats. Here, in New England, the leaves have not turned red yet—the forecast suggests that they will go directly from green to brown this year. This evasion of orange and yellow has me depressed, they are my favorite colors. I have a yellow backpack, yellow flowerpots, yellow highlights in replicas of paintings I've bought from a small shop I frequent. These pleasures fill me with such a sensation of calmness that as I leave home to walk to the bus stop, usually in a slow drizzle, I feel the utter stillness of everything around me.

As if the world has stopped while I walk through it. As if some poetry is at work, as if I know this tranquility is temporary, that the life I have now will be lost. But in this retroactive feeling is a deep pleasure too. It reminds me of the fragility of our lives, why it feels so important to write at all, to write to you, today.

"I don't care about the flowers, which I merely invented to give myself another reason to address you."
—Aleksandar Ristović

Yours,
Rabia