Still Life

by Sarah Winman

It’s what’s in here that counts, and she’d pointed to his stomach. Guts is where we love from,

the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.

the responsibility of privilege must always be to raise others up.

We’re embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we’ll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn’t let our inability to know what’s what diminish us. Because it’ll try. We have to remain curious and open.

facts were stone. Poetry, though, was sand. Ever compared to stars in its granular infinity. Ever shifting.

The olfactory bulb passes scent close to the amygdala and hippocampus, both areas in the brain that deal with emotion and memory.

Stay put, my sweet, and thrive.

in the space between artist and sitter could be found understanding and forgiveness and maybe love.

out of the window, watching time in the shift of light and shadow. Daylight beautifies and moonlight mystifies;

one doesn’t come to Italy for niceness, one comes for life. For passion!

The Church doesn’t have a language for the variations of our humanness.

Faith is rather a numbers game, isn’t it?

So, time heals. Mostly. Sometimes carelessly. And in unsuspecting moments, the pain catches and reminds one of all that’s been missing. The fulcrum of what might have been. But then it passes. Winter moves into spring and swallows return. The proximity of new skin returns to the sheets. Beauty does what is required. Jobs fulfil and conversations inspire. Loneliness becomes a mere Sunday. Scattered clothes. Empty bowls. Rotting fruit. Passing time. But still life in all its beauty and complexity.