shading

1. She doesn't impress you much at first glance, but actually, she has a very pleasant face. Her smile is soft, and kind, and happy. Her voice that sounds over-sweet at first, is actually gentle. You could quickly overlook her. Literally, you can disregard her when you first meet her and pay no more notice to her from then on. And she would let you if you did so. She would watch you, and learn about you, from the shadows, but you wouldn't look or learn about her. But you would be better off for it if you did. Acknowledge her and she will speak to you. You'll see that she is not in fact shy at all. Rather, she is content, and patient. She is not greedy for attention.

When you look at her you will see how her face shines, how glad her eyes are, how confident her soft, gentle demeanor. She has a pair of twins, she is pregnant now with another two. Her husband loves her and is fortunate to have her in his life.

She sits in the shade of the kitchen. She doesn't drink coffee.

2. She has good-looking characteristics on her face, you notice that right away, but there is something wrong with her posture - it is not exactly right. It feels perhaps as if her muscles are too tense for her body to be strait.

Her black hair is cut bellow her earlobes, but again, not exactly strait. It leans forward like her body. Her daughter is slightly oler than the twins and well behaved, calm.

Her Cypriot is good, she barely has an accent. One feels that she has tried to fit in. She moves in the same spaces, the same people speak to her, but you can feel that there is some destain regarding her. My first thought is that it is racism. I hear there is racism amongst the islanders. 

She knows it. She expects you it. She notices your discomfort with her before you feel it yourself. Then you notice it: in her eyes, that she knows you like her less, and that your gestures showed it. And then you notice that perhaps you like her less. Her eyes tell you that you don't like her, and you are convinced by them.

I ask who the woman was. She is the wife of that man. She is his second wife. He has a son with the first wife, adult children - his son is of age to be in the military. She was taking care of the grandfather. That is how he met her, and fell in love with her, and left his wife for her.

I think about him. There was something not nice about his manner also, something unjoyous. But people ignore these things, and they talk to eachother as if everything is fine. They will listen to you, have coffee with you, and smoke with you. People might talk about these things when you are not there, but in practice they are forgiving. They overlook, and they help you behave as if you are ok. They treat you as if you were respectable anyway. That is the skill of good men - they can do that for you.

3. She always wanted a man she could depend on, a man who will save her from the tower and be her loving partner through the years - doing things together and for eachother. She never found that. On the contrary: she found a man who couldn't even save himself.

But she never got over it. She never stood up and said "okie-dokie. This is it, this is reality, let me get on with it." She never became independent. She just lets herself become more, and more trivially dependent, even though there s no one to depend on. As if we owe her that. As if we need to deal with her that way, because her mother never nurtured her when she was small and she was that way, and that disagreement is not over. Mind, we do owe her that.

Now her mother is becoming senile, she is rather old. "Don't think you can jst get away with it", she thinks, "you still owe me. I need too. I can be dependent too."

I came into the bedroom and found the duvet without a cover. A single sheet and a double duvet. She did not cover it because it is too heavy and she cannot do it alone. "You do not acknowledge my needs", she thinks, "but I will show you! I will have more."

"I cannot do it because no one helps me", she says.

4. I want to write and say everything. I want to speak the details of the lives I see around me. But I don't. I feel it is unkind to speak too clearly about people as they try to live their lives. I feel that if I write too coherently about peoples issues they will cease to be the problems they are dealing with and will become people's character traits and their faults. I don't want to pin burdensome characters to people who are just trying to live their lives. I feel bad. I am ashamed to describe the vices.

Do you that is how abstract are came about? I do think so. You can say it, but no one has to understand you if they don't want to.

Look at people, and you will see. There is light shining upon some amongst us, and there are shades. Some people live blessed, and others are burdened, and captivated in some sort of foul spiritual prison. And we all live side by side, sholder to sholder. We have the same brand of fridge. We share a coffee, talk, smoke.