After I had put up Zakaria’s newly sent paintings of the Afghan, crimson-red poppy fields beside my sunflowers, I slipped Barzin’s Notes to an Absent Lover into the CD player and lay down on my new single bed. The setting sun cast a calm, amber light through the old window glass from the early part of the last century. The window’s uneven, wavy surface broke the light into small shifts that moved across the room. Barzin’s melancholy voice.

Desperate in my sleep
Like I’d lost something.

As if I had lost something and tried to replace it with my old paintings, shelves of books, and many unimportant, important things. Like my father’s old Seagull camera from 1967, which I had lugged with me across all of Europe when I fled war-torn Bosnia in 1992. It still looked new in its brown, glossy case. It hung surrounded by countless sunflower paintings from my latest symbol session. Whatever I tried to render of myself there, it became yet another sunflower.

A warm light from the lotus-shaped candlestick on the nearby shelf softened the sunflowers. I had taken it as a keepsake from the funeral of a friend who had passed far too early, ten years earlier. Beside it, sunk into the wax, stood a little pair of mice holding a heart that said “Love.” It was the closest to a declaration of love I had received in recent years.

The rest of the room was books. Stacked along the walls and in rows behind the bed. Lispector, Auster, Knausgård, Plath. A pile beside the bed, where there were always at least ten books that I somehow managed to read at the same time. Some lay open in the middle, some dog-eared, all underlined and scrawled with little notes in the margins.

The room had become my own little Babel where words and sentences would one day write me out of loneliness.

Recently I had bought Diamond Prose by Arthur Rimbaud. A 1950s edition that smelled of damp. When I opened the book in The bookshop and read the poem “Departure,” I didn’t have to think much.

Seen enough. Vision has met me in every quarter.
Had enough. The cities’ murmur, in the evening, in the sun, and always.
Gone enough. The halts of life. — O Murmur and Visions!
Departure in rapture and noise anew!

The sun went down. All that remained was the last faint shimmer in the glass. Barzin’s record had ended, and silence took over the room.