- The Empty Room -

Flatiron Building - New York January 2011

My Dear,

It is a Monday.

The past is an empty room now.

No one is here in my room. No one has been for a very long time. At least I think so.

I have covered my ears so as not to hear the sounds from the street. They distract me. They invade to my thoughts and to a specific moment which I want to live again and again.

All I hear is a whisper that says I Love You..I remember looking at you as a different kind of species once you said those words to me. I wasn’t expecting to hear them ever by such an innocent and honest voice. And I cried that night on your bed but those were tears of happiness for what you had said.

Often, I feel the need to bring you in my present. To talk to you, share with you my news, my new sounds, my new fears.

Fears, fears, fears..yes once my moto was “No Fear”.

These days though, I confess that I do have fear. I fear of changing. And the older I get, the more this fear arouses. I can see the change in me and yet I am scared to allow myself to become that change. I believe that many people must suffer from the same disease I have. The disease of being “Afraid of changing”.

It can be as simple as a wallpaper change to a house change, to a career change, to a life change, to a CHANGE of LOVE chain. A good friend told me to write lists of the changes I would like to do.

Today I made my first list. On the top I wrote:

i would like

to be in the empty room again ...

I must have written that because it is easier to return to the old than to be the change and embrace the new.

Together with this letter, I am sending you a photo I took last week. Its the Flatiron building but it looks as if it is a building with an empty room from the PAST.

You see, I cant change easily.

I remain in the past. But at least I am aware of it.

With Differente love,

- Garia August

- Astor Place in Slow Snow Motion

Photos: Maria Garozi

- THE HIGHLANDERS // 2011

WOODSTOCK JAN 2011

photos: Maria Garozi

- The Most Living is the Present

Woodstock 12498, NY

My Dear,

We came here together for the weekend with some friends. How nice this feels right now.I wasn’t sure if I wanted to leave New York for a mini escape. But waking up yesterday, I had the desire to jump through the window of my east village apartment and hover for the rest of my life. So, it seemed right to get in the car and follow the wind's cry.

The house is on the top of a hill in Woodstock. Its surrounded by ice, snow and trees. There are no other houses or any construction close by.We are covered by a silence that transcends through nature, through the waterfall, through the mountain reaching my soul in a space where I feel myself again after a long time.

Although there is such a silence everywhere out there, in this house the noise is never ceasing. So many people; who indeed make me happy knowing that they are around but still I long for some moments on my own to read,to write, to take a peak through the window of the mountain's solitude. I want to think of the present as the lady at the Tibetan Temple we visited earlier said. In Buddhism there is no past or future but only the present. That all there is and all we have.

I am now in a wonderful present alone and with E.M who just came upstairs to check on me. But for some reason this isn't enough. I keep going back to the past of the night I met again with the Silent Man.

I am in. now.

The door closed behind me smoothly. It is not even closed firmly but it keeps us safe. Nothing else exists now but us. There is no universe out there anymore in these hours. The universe is here within these walls. He is arriving from the bedroom. He is wearing a white comfortable outfit and a brown cardigan. Soft garments. Soft garments. The dog is looking at me in the eyes. He wants something from me and his look pre-announces that what he wants has not ending.

The man is finally here. In front of me. He glances at me roughly and innocently at the same time. I reach towards him and we hug. He moves on towards the kitchen. And then I lose him from the image.

I will run faster

faster than your shadow

Tears of solitude wet my agony

for where we shall meet again

It is here in this silent

hideaway full of others

that I dreamt for a moment of us again

- Garia August

- Impressions and Landscapes

When people disappear from my life, the books arrive. So was the case this Monday

first came Resistance, Rebellion and Death by Albert Camus

then Poet in New York by F.G.L

then The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca

then The Myth of Sisyphus by A.C again

then Gypsy Ballads by F.G.L

and finally the book where I hope to find all the answers arrived at the office wrapped up well:

Impressions and Landscapes which was the first book of Federico Garcia Lorca published in 1918. I dont know what is hidden between Albert Camus and Federico Garcia Lorca but the latter writes in his first book;

Dear reader: If you read this entire book, you will note in it a certain vagueness and a certain melancholy. You will see how things upon things pass by, always portrayed bitterly, interpreted sadly. All the scenes parading through these pages are an interpretation of memories, landscapes, figures. Reality may not show its hoary head perhaps, but fantasy for inner passionate moods spreads its its spiritual glow over exterior nature magnifying small things, dignifying ugliness as the full moon does upon invading the fields.

There is in our soul something surpassing everything that exists.

F.G.L