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He tried to put phrases, words together in an alchemy of signs, colors and smells.  He, the last depository of knowledge, who had served for years at many courts, in innumerable past lives, was now losing face when confronted with his personal quest.  He wasn’t close to creating the original potion, the filter long sought for in centuries of dreams and unformulated hopes.

      All he ever obtained was a paraphrase, a redundancy of three simple words, “I love you,” or “I love myself,” the difference being so tiny, the formulas so identical that all it took was one double binding broken loose, a rise in temperature, an imbalance of catalytic elements, and either the reflexive was obtained, or the displacement between wording and initial meaning was lost in the process.

       The proper mixture seemed unstable, unattainable, unfathomable and unpredictable the way a delicate perfume decomposes over certain skins, when mixed with pore secretions, adulterating the initial scent.  The original formula, he decided, had been lost since time immemorial, leading to confusing myths such as people drowning into their own reflection, making love to their own creation, or confronted with arrows becoming boomerangs with a mind of their own, defying all laws of gravity.

       Perplexed, he caressed his long, well groomed beard, indulging in long pensive strokes.  He spent most of his time in a high ceilinged room amidst crystal phials, long necked flasks, and multi-shaped copper alembics.  In the largest alembic, facing his voluminous desk, water constantly traveled through darkness as inside a whale’s stomach, distilled over rose petals or orange blossoms, rising with heat faster than over magic carpets.        

       He concentrated on the wingless molecules, imagining they’d give him a clue as to his constant concern, replacing them with words and letters.  He visualized the vapor’s voyage through the alembic’s cold bent neck, as if through translucent glass, imagining the broken processions of letters, the various modalities of their regrouping.   He saw them swell, expand in the limited space, then condense into streaming ribbons pouring steadily out of the funnel.

       But unlike words, molecules, in their sacrificial flight, decomposed and reorganized themselves, obeying rigid laws, in unity and always in the same order.  He kept on trying his mental distillation, writing and rewriting, confident he’d find the right solution.  Something was defying his observation, an imperceptible detail he knew he was close to discovering.  All he required was time and patience; the former, never denied to him, the latter, fading away, failing him day after day.

       Discouraged, he then decided to improvise.  He dreamt of fluid words reducing the whole perception into an eternal instant.  He invented with great eagerness and a sense of premeditated success an invisible ink responding to rigid codes, indecipherable except to readers possessing intuitively similar decoding systems.  In other words, a language for minorities, almost a wordless message as those from the heart, only to be read by someone experiencing the exact same feeling, or perhaps by owners of special magnifying iridium glasses.

        He gradually came to the conclusion that his attempts would remain fruitless.  Words, phrases, spoiled by memory which added different layers of meanings, of conditioned reflexes intensifying or diminishing the initial message, altering the fleeting content, unable to be harnessed, refusing in its fragility the carcanet of labels.  It was as if he tried to possess beauty or life in its extemporaneity–the way some stuff exotic bluebirds–, or pretend to preserve the transitory purity of lines of the shadow of reeds above a river or stream.  The feel of petals over skin, he thought, told more than elaborate cogitation and displays of eloquence.

        He finally accepted his faith.  Living in a world of mutability, of free emotions, harnessed only for a brief instant more lasting than eternity, he realized time elapsed destroyed the immediacy of experience.  Erasing layers of memory allowed an impression of novelty, a wonderment, the forever possible amazement facing the unknown.  And what were the conditions for newness of experience, he reflected, genuine ignorance, or partial forgetfulness?

        Hum… He smoothed his silky beard… yet another elixir to search for, in addition to the others.  Feeling always one step behind, no matter what he experienced or discovered, words seemed to resist the ferrets of specificity, escaping the initial thought, emotion or perception, like oversized gloves or useless ones over swelled fingers.  Words no longer fit the meaning and the most difficult to harness, love, could never coexist harmoniously in combination with others.  Its vivid and elusive nature reminded him of mercury.  He closed his eyes and recalled his experiments with the gliding silvery substance, breaking lose at the least touch into infinitely small particles, bubbles of scintillating water, schools of shimmering silver fish. 

First published by Linden Lane Magazine
From Flying Carpets (Interlink 2013)

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She has authored three poetry collections, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019), Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and Finalist for the Best Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the Best Book Award and the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism, Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa, examines the visual aspects of the Peruvian Nobel Prize Winner narrative. A twenty-two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, and recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/