Trafika Europe 2 - Polish Nocturne

I’d been afraid of seeing the town without him. But I don’t see it, because it’s not the same place: Someone has transformed it into a stage set. As a result, I’m scared: I find it deceptive, and therefore hostile. It deceives me in the worse possible way: disguising itself as the town it was. There are, therefore, no painful memories, but nor are there memories that I can associate with him. And this lack of familiarity is so strong that it sometimes provokes an unbearable physical malaise, especially when I leave the inside of a building and find myself on the street again. At times I have to go back inside until I can regain my vital signs, my breathing. Then I head home with the intention of not going out again. Home, home, to our haven, to the house, fast. Fast! To home. I suppose it’s the indifference that makes the town so inhospitable, meaning precisely that nothing has changed: No river of tears has flooded it, no black sky has collapsed onto the streets. People stroll nonchalantly. Everything flows with the indifference that characterizes towns and cities, whose movements are never contingent on death, that is, not when the person dies an individual death. At home, however, everything is different. His presence is powerful; it accompanies you. You can touch his clothes, his annotated books, his ideas spread about the table in many little slips of paper. At home, the objects are not indifferent. They speak. The oversized envelope left on the bed—on top of the duvet cover with the large yellow

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