At this particular moment, how she wished to become a speck of dust in the light, without weight to carry or to burden.
Her thoughts wandered. Her eyes wandered, too.
Two or three armchairs bought as a set with the sofa surrounded a coff ee table in an oval. They were disconnected from each other and partly in the shade. They displayed their silence, their emptiness, their loneliness, their monotony. They longed to be taken, to be obsessed with physical company. They seemed like the trials of aging. Mei’s eyes followed a ray of light, which shone above a large wooden closet attached to a wall, partially stopped by a round massive pole in the middle, and had tediously moved from her toes to her knees. Deepening into such a ray of light, Mei saw silver smoothness, milky mildness, hazy paleness and purple elegy, as the inestimable value of an ancient photograph of a noble queen’s profi le in the moonlight. She gave up the door, lost her balance, staggered forward a little and knelt down with the steps of a slow dance. Her hips were resting on her heels, her arms rose slowly, then opened wide to embrace. Her head leaned back, the sunshine spotlighted the fragility of her truly frail mask. Her broken tears were fleeing from home like refugees. Her eyes were shut in the act of readiness to die. At last, with the tremble of her lips, she opened her mouth to perform the fi nal act, to absorb the heat, to give her best part away as a gift. She was sending a message to the God of Mercy and asking for redemption; only in this way could the light wash the dirt off her. She felt nothing but nothingness. Her being there was the depth of being naked. She yearned for salvation.