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Winter had laid its cover over the land. I longed for a morning walk along the shore. Not a single human soul had trodden here yet. The fjord steamed with fog and earth powder, endorsing birdsongs through the cold. The air was so full of wooden tempers that I could only breathe deeper. It felt as if I might swallow the birds themselves—as if they could land in my mouth, the way they settle holes in the ice to fish. I watched them drop and splash—an avian urge to break the earth’s surface. They left behind sparse bouquets of feathers, as tough meant to be taken in. I thought “these birds bore through skies and waters alike; they are so strong they might swallow me instead.”. The sky above had taken shape of the steady kestrel.

During wintertime, I walked far out on the thick ice. I wobbled along until I would feel that it might crack and carry me away. There was no real purpose— only a thirst for the unreachable landscape. I wanted to hold it—make it mine and call it my landscape. Its features had become familiar, like a face known by heart. I had met laughter on its wooden lips, blood on its stony cheeks, tears in its lacustrine eyes. I had felt its trembling hand part my clothes, lifting my chest upon my heart. I had felt its thumb turning pink search underneath—there, where words elude themselves: the sanctuary of our reasons. I wanted to hold it—my landscape. My soul leaned over the ice, searching the water for a anchor: an orange round, or a round orange. A buoy or a fruit? I no longer remember clearly. Both ideas had turned brownish with the frost, berries and bath toys got confounded. When I found one, I would sit beside it and observe. With thought alone, I turned the floating sphere into a gorgeous fruit, as if a citrus had bent toward me from bare branches, for me to bit a little pulp. I could taste it so flavorful, against my lips filled with desire for the landscape. A round epidermis, dyed from pleasure, bloomed from a spirit. I saw a happy profusion, softening as the days had gone by. I saw the floating fruits fresh robes thickening and arching, pearling onto the ice, a little juice seep. They laid bare in my imagination, free for birds to gather—or simply behold.

However, fruits falling from imaginary trees have a way of shutting down living thoughts. It is a taste that lingers, drowsy as a crazing lake. Buoys, jewels or candied fruits—all for the sea to preserve in the saltiness of eternal fantasy. Their juice turns sour against reality. This dream upon the fjord conceals me in silence.

Reality. Eventually, we all come to see the fruits of our own deeds: our branches leaning toward the shore grow heavy with flavor. If at first they fainted pleasant perfumes, they leave a flickering trail behind us—of satisfaction, of guilt, of hope, of love. Then they begin to sag. Some fruits grow greedy and sensual, pulpy in their bodies. It is a vast expanse in which over time, collapses just as skin dries and detaches. The landscape we once longed for gets peeled away. And of the very feeling of these bare oranges reflected in the fjord’s buoys, there remains in me now the memory of lonesomeness. In the first clearings of the following day, I started to feel a presence. I distinctly remembered her body. The one I had once wished to hug, as morning’s vague enclosure dissolved. My heart beat and hers, our arms entangled, and a look of lust. Her fruits had glided all the way to me. The caring green eyelet, dozing in her lap, examined me through all its colors. Back then, none of us could mask our skin’s coming rapture, trembling with heat, from the moment we dwelled in our charms, until we pierced a crack in the day. Her lips, moreover less distinct from their own folds than the undulant foam is from its lacework, marked out a plumpness in her face. As a flower reveals itself only at dawn, for it keeps living on the threshold of its own garden. From this woman’s song, from her orchard and her waters one cannot imagine, a whiff of soaked earth—there came a smile. The gentle smile of a being whose gown had taken on the reliefs of blue ice.

I cried. On this long walk along the shore, I let the tears run as they came, washing off my oranges icy foliage. Long heavy tears, flowing as wax drops along the cheeks of a burning candle. Candles always cry in the church.