Page 85 - NOMADS_NO4_2015

I feel new freedom and security to have found a place to live so quickly and leave the apartment with a bounce in my step. I am closing the door behind me when my drive to hit the streets takes a backseat. I hear someone singing a song in Italian with such deep feelings that I freeze in my tracks. Only an arm’s length away is the opened window to the kitchen of the next apartment.
Black iron bars cover that window and an elderly, short and plump woman sits at the table peeling an apple. The song drifts from her lips like a breeze from heaven itself and I am mesmerized by this angel wearing a wrinkled robe, a button missing halfway down. She catches me staring and I become a bit embarrassed. She, however, doesn’t seem bothered, as if I am a welcomed audience.
I want to know everything about her, because I just might learn to better sing my own innermost song. Here’s hoping and praying, my precious beauties, that the scorpions you eat do not sting, that when you are kicked out from one home you quickly find another, that you encounter a singing bird that gives wings to your heart, and that the bars before you are not a cage but a door to new and intriguing horizons. Ciao from Roma!
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in the center of her upper mouth, and she comes from her chair, the peeled apple in her hand. Reaching the barred window, she has no reservation in searching my eyes. Then she says in barely above a whisper: “I am a bird of sorts.” She grips the prison-thick bars. “Are you in the cage or am I?” Then she laughs the laugh of a child and I join her in that world of delicate wonder, where on the rarest of occasions two strangers spontaneously skip stones
over the pond of new possibilities.
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