dressing up

In the warmth of daylight,

in the silence of an empty home at midday,

have you ever seen?

A girl going up the stairs.

Her quiet excitement is tangible.

The world around her is enriched with joy; with the joy of being filled with treasure,

of brimming over with hidden goods and secret wonders.

To her right, at the top of the stairs, there is the bedroom.

She is coming from the kitchen that opens out into the yard, so the bedroom with its closed shutters looks dark, and feels cold on her skin.

She opens the top shutters to let in light, but so that she still cannot be seen from the road. The sound of wood and metals colliding, and of occasional male voices - the sound of builders building on a warm spring day – travels into the room.

She knows she is uninvited. She knows she is not wanted to be going in; and looking through; and touching the things. But that only means that she has to do it now that she is alone, and it means that she has to leave everything like she found it, as if untouched. She cannot leave behind any trace of these blissful moments;

of these secret discoveries; of these happy encounters with the wealth of life. 


She is comfortable in the day's heat, she is excited about the particular little things about her. She has only to reach out, when no one is looking, and touch them.

Have you ever seen a young girl trying on her mother’s clothes and jewelry, looking through her drawers? The clothes hanging gracelessly from her unshaped body, the shoulders of the clothes unsupported by her own. The shoes too big for her feet. 


She assesses herself in the mirror. Not yet. These adult clothes don’t look quit right on her just yet. She must still be too young. But she leans into the mirror, she looks at her face, and she does not see it. She does not see the youth. She sees in her eyes one hundred years of solitude; she sees her cheekbones set – like boulders at the sea are set: permanently so that they can withstand all the waves of the ocean. She sees an old woman looking back at her. Through the mirror, from her face, coming through. She sees also her dark honey brown skin, her sun-burnt hair.  

She takes off the round gold-colored clip-on earrings and lays them back. She takes off everything and lays it back, as if untouched by herself, like she found it. With just her t-shirt, her shorts, and that old face that others don’t see, she leaves leaving everything as she had found it.