Luljeta Lleshanaku [Lleshanaku - Negative Space

Their large window opens to the east. A lazy boy in sandals drags a bucket of water half his size. Sedative. The world holds its breath for one moment. The page turns. Trucks loaded with cement leave the symbol for infinity in the dirt.

Along the wall, a plumb line measures the height like a medallion hanging into space or from someones neck whose face nobody bothers to look at. They started with the barn. This is how a new life begins with an axiom. I remember my father returning sweaty from the fields at lunch break; he and mother coming out of the barn tidying their tangled hair in a hurry, both flushed, looking around in fear like two thieves. Their bedroom was cool and clean on the first floor of the house. I still ask myself: Why in the barn? But I also remember that the harvest was short that year, the livestock hungry; we were on a budget and switched the lights off early.

I was twelve. My sleep deep, my curiosity numbed, tossed carelessly to the side like mounds of snow along the road. But I remember the barn clearly, as if it were yesterday, almost yesterday. You cannot easily forget what you watch with one eye closed, the death of the hero in the film, or your first eclipse of the sun.

A ticket booth. The slow clock hanging from a nail. Some of the passengers have been sitting in the same chairs for a while now. They know that you must wait for the moment and that the moment will not wait for you. Only a few get on; fewer get off. The man sitting on a bench kills time reading a local newspaper.

Train platforms are all the same, except for the boy hiding behind the pole, the collar of his school uniform askew. He is not the firstborn, but the prodigal son, the chosen one for adventure and the parable of return. Fried dough, candy, mint sodas! Its the wandering vendor who stirs the thick air with his clumsy voice. His pockets are empty but deep. Dust clings freely on his sticky fingers, along with a strand of hair, and in the evening, sometimes, an entire city. You dont forget small-town stations easily, the short stops with ordinary charm.

If you pay attention to every detail, they will become our alibi for not arriving on time or for never arriving at all wherever we had set out to go.

And we call destiny our common unknown, a genderless, unconjugated, unspecified name. Its authority hangs on one shoulder like the tunic of a Roman senator leaving only one arm bare and free.

And in the last row, young boys craning their heads towards the beauty marks on the blonde girls necks. I dont remember the teachers name, the room, or the names of the portraits on the wall, except the irony clinging to the stump of his arm like foam around the Cape of Good Hope. When his healthy arm pointed out Bismarck, his hollow sleeve gestured in an unknown direction. We couldnt tell which one of us was the target, making us question the tiniest bit of who we thought we were. Out of his insatiable mouth flew battle dates, names, causes. Never resolutions or winners.

We could hardly wait for the bell to write our own history, as we already knew everything in those days. But sometimes his hollow sleeve felt warm and human, like a cricket-filled summer night. It hovered, waiting to land somewhere. On a valley or roof. It searched for a hero among us not among the athletic or sparkly-eyed ones, but among those stamped with innocence. One day, each one of us will be that teacher standing before a seventeen-year-old boy or a girl with a beauty mark on her neck.