One day you will do everything for the last time: breathe, make love, drink, sleep and wake up. Maybe even think. One day you will visit Paris for the last time. If you knew when, you’d go somewhere you felt suited you. No, not to the Louvre, not to the Pantheon, not to a street café, not to a library, but to the botanical gardens, to the Jardin des Plantes where you have a chance to encounter the dandelion, wood sorrel and mallow who will acknowledge you. As you will be acknowledged by the silence that took you by the hand, helping you to overcome fear in your home on University Street in Tartu late one afternoon when everyone else was away. You were sitting on the sofa with a book in your hand. Darkness was falling. Distant voices changed their tone and the shadows crept out from under the wardrobes and beds. It’s the same silence that was waiting for you in an old outhouse full of old wooden vessels and dust that nobody had cleaned up for years. The silence that took hold of you like a voiceless dark vortex dragging you into depths whose bottom you haven’t yet reached. If there is any bottom at all: maybe there is only the echo, a rumble that has come nearer with every year, the deafening, dizzying TE DEUM or OM MANI PADME HUM of free fall, of freedom.
*