…There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle…. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers. …Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures, our of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman’s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep. —Baudelaire, “Windows”

What are the mathematical chances of that precise angle a woman turned, away from our gaze, forever towards a lion, a cub presenting himself over the armrest of a Deco seat?

Her face illuminated by the light coming through the window hitting the ornamental tassel that barely brushes the faded geometric patterns of the drapes. Behind her, on the wall, in the distant dark, the corner of massive frame of a lost landscape, an enormous oil painting hanging in a Belgian room.  A room where life lived. We know not what the painting portrayed. It was the backdrop to wilderness domesticated, in her tenderness.

She wears a  delicate white crochet top. Feminine. Her hair thick waves, like her son’s. The line of her thighs leading to the knees forever pressing a mark on the mental canvas.

The excruciating sensuality of the slightly open mouth.

The cub, only head and paws. Her left hand caressing the back of his neck and the right one pressing his throat.  He wants to die at her knees, worshipping her, the goddess. To belong to her. At the threshold in the timeless forever.

But he has one arm dangling out. Brought in and kept out. In-between worlds.

Who told her to sit thus?

Finding her story, looking for her, I miss the invisible frames and those hidden pillars I used to step upon when it seemed I am floating on air.

London, May-June 2015