melancholy

An inspiring story that makes you write your first poem after reading it twice

I woke up with this mood today. It’s cold and raining, just like in late November, although it’s still August. It’s almost a year now since I came back home and I don’t know anything about the future. I am still sensitive to rain, the years I spent in the Netherlands left a mark on my heart. But now, as time passes, it seems to me as if I dreamt about it. The only true rain is the one I feel today on my skin.

I remembered all the times I walked empty streets, in foreign or familiar  places with something trembling inside my chest. I walked around the city trying to catch the mood, to put it into words, as if trying to catch a rare bird and express the tenderness it lights inside your heart. It is a tender feeling the one I have today.

I am human, I have feelings therefore a rare bird exists. And it trembles inside my chest as I go on walking, as the wind goes on blowing, the rain goes pouring and I go out seeking company.

There is a dim light inside the café,  I look outside the window, the wind blows the curtains. It’s one of those days when I just feel like looking outside the window. I must have done it many times in a dream. It was a window facing a forever grey sky with seagulls flying in circle all the time. The window was close to sea, but it was so thick I couldn’t hear anything.

That bird is still inside my chest, but I make it quiet for a while, I start drinking wine and we play monopoly.  So serious as only the people that have birds in their chest that need to be quiet for a while could play. We laugh. And the memory of rain vanishes like one of those dream that one forgets.

There are novels in which it rains for half of the book. I know one written by Jose Saramago. There are novels in which the main characters spend their loneliness in an almost voluptuous way, they go to work, they come back home, they cook dinner, eat alone and maybe look outside the window. I know some written by Haruki Murakami.  But good novels tell a true story. I am a poet and I believe poetry is a way a being. I am specialized in moving something inside people’s heart.

I don’t want to be alone any more. That is all my trembling heart was trying to tell me. And now that the bird has a name, I can open the window and let it fly away.

If I were to write a poem now, I would write only this: Be gentle to the birds of tenderness.

Laura Livia Grigore is a poet, painter and psychology enthusiast, with a background in space engineering. She likes to experiment with various mediums and types of writing. Her artwork is orientated on emotions, reflecting her opinion that most of the answers we need can be found inside ourselves, although the hardest thing to do is to be sincere with oneself.

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