I remember the revelation of how the morning changed your voice like it does mine. I remember your face different in the bitter chill of the courtyards and marveled at a Vilnius that could show you to me in so many hues. Even though I think you had to try, that day, to present an impossible scholarly calm as the snow in Ponary forest forced your hearty gait into small cautious steps. Maybe you had to put a wall up so nothing could muddy the usual cheer, which was almost as eerie as the natural beauty which we all remarked there, and I remember thinking that itās not about the trees that grow irreverently splitting the sky along arbitrary fault lines like shattered mirror fragments; itās about the way we look next to them, humiliated, slouched and frost-eyed ā even you, who three days before so dwarfed the gods in that narrow lecture hall as polished stone tossed your crisp abundant words about the room like coins from an ancient hoard. Consonants that clipped the oxygen and vowels that filled hungry lungs and pauses in between within which I could not stand to be so far away from you.
I wanted to go around letting all the curtains down in all the hotels. Throw open every window in every palace. Expose the furniture to the elements. After all the revelations lets drink coffee, talk about the weather and joke and swear and be humans, plain and contingent ā together.
