The Almagest by Adriana Kortlandt

There is a woman next to me, blowing stories in my ears, breathing them from my childhood; she is made of wind.

Sometimes, when they refused to open its doors - my hands, two guards - she just kept pounding, almost puncturing my eardrums. Whether she was asleep or awake, alone or accompanied, she visited me and no one noticed. Whether she made up stories similar to lies, it was her air coming out of my mouth.

As a little girl, I was afraid of being alone, because she would hit and her drive haunted me. Cotton in my ears, tape over them and yet the intruder still penetrated. Inspired by the vision of Apollo XI on the small black and white television, I used the latest technology at the time - in my imagination of a child of the sixties, everything that was modern was silver in color - and I pasted aluminum foil, or rather gum wrapper to seal my ears. The result was a night in the emergency room, and the unknown entered anyway.

I was ashamed of my first kiss, first sex; I felt her around, I lived under her shadow.  Only later, when I was much older, I understood the will, I mean, the need of the wind woman: she wanted to ask for asylum.

I must have been her promised land, and the bodiless space where she lived, a desert. To me, a greater adventure than sheltering the refugee was giving a soul to my body, because until her arrival, my life was an open faucet through which flowed only a trickle without warmth.

I let her in. Since then, this intrepid foreigner inhabits my bowels.

Do you know the howl of the wind whooshing through the wastelands? That was her voice inside me. After the scare, I began understanding the stories behind the howling. They are wild. She is something of a cannibal. Like a good treat, I let myself be eaten and it sounds mystical to me. Paradoxically, she filled in all and the most bizarre dimensions, as nobody could ever have done.

We married and feasted.

I am her home, temple, tavern and alcove, caravel, port or caravan. Why not believe that she is the volatile pulp, the steamy flesh of the fruit, whose seed am I? Or maybe, everything is backwards. She and I, dancing without beginning or end, like the Uroboros snake biting its own tail.

From time to time, we live moments of sublime calmness, when we lay in the open, gazing at the sky. At these times, she tells me this or that tale, when she was wandering: A long time ago, in the 2^nd Century of our era, an astronomer called Ptolemy of Alexandria published a treatise on astronomy that later became known as the Almagest - "The Greatest" in Arabic, a title conferred in honor of the great knowledge of the cosmos. In it, the planets and stars rotating around the Earth were described in sophisticated detail. I do not remember the rest of the tale, but now that I have lost count of my age, what pleases me most is its geocentric view, because it makes me think of another center with unknown but essential diameter movement. The Earth can even be round - Ptolemy was wrong - but ... what about the universe? It is an ineffable plan, with the human being in the middle, creating meaning for everything, even his own feelings, even to the need for making sense, or else he cannot even exist. This is the true genesis! I will tell you some stories of wandering pilgrims, as I once was. They are expressions of what the soul kept in hiding, trying to generate sense in that sheer retort. They are memories of death, birth, love ... Finally, changing skin.

She began to tell, and I became her scribe. I listen and write.

by Adriana Kortlandt

The blog for 'Brit Writers and Writers Everywhere' blog.