Balcony Magic

~Another one of her birthdays without her~

“Just a minute,” she says and disappears into the depths of the apartment, the light-fabric, semi-transparent peach-colour curtain swaying back and forth in her slipstream. My father and I remain waiting on the balcony. It’s late summer, the heat has lost some of its edge, it’s pleasant and cool to stand on the third floor and cast a glance at the neighbourhood. My elementary school is below, a few playgrounds and a big meadow between the surrounding apartment buildings, somewhere to the right the river is flowing fast and green at the foot of the hills. I’m 18, my hair is long and I still haven’t decided what to do with it, and I have an analog camera which I’m learning how to use. This is my last summer “at home” before I’m off to university in another city. I’m bent on taking photos of what has been my entire world up to now but I do it coolly, as if from a distance of curiosity, not with a mournful eye. I’m too young for that.

My mother, however, has sensed the defining potential of this moment, and has decided to make herself more photogenic. A few minutes later she comes back with a touch of lipstick, a trace of eyeliner, and a white diaphanous hair ribbon (made from an old curtain). I herd my parents together, with the newly painted orange balcony doorframe behind them (my father’s doing), they hold still for a few seconds, and I snap the photo. I don’t know that I will never live in that apartment again, that the balcony where my father in his pajamas once stared down a crowd that had assembled outside after an earthquake, where I used to stand and observe the boys from the hood playing soccer, and where the pigeons often came announcing summer, is about to become a memory, a symbol, a thing of the past, framed and remembered only through photos like this one.

And there they are, underexposed but present, he with an easy cross-armed and wide-collared confidence of a content man in his prime, and she with her long neck, slightly parted lips and a look of vulnerability… Vulnerability in the face of time, which she must have felt starting to slip away from her and take, irrevocably, one by one those things that are precious. I am about to leave and her world will change drastically. This is her missive, her letter for the future me, which she is sending via my photo, and in her small, fragile way she keeps time still whenever I look at her, decades down the line. She doesn’t have much with which to fight the inevitable separation and diminishment brought by time, but she does have that little bit of magic at her disposal, and she improvises with it, magician-like.

She was, is here. She was, is beautiful.