Isis Agonist 2013

Sometimes coming home hurts.
A little bit, at least.
Especially when the place you are returning from was flooded with laughter, light, and zest for life, with sun, sparkling turquoise, and salt on my skin.
With white sails and foaming spray, friendly faces and laughing eyes, rugged islands and endless blue.
Time was a side issue, stress a foreign word, the soul free as it was last at eight, nine, ten.
For two weeks, fourteen wonderful days.
And then back over endlessly long roads, for hours, for days, metal against metal - sky blue mutates to rain gray.
Gray are also the people at the borders, who weren’t there when we headed south - gray the clothes, gray the faces, smiles seem to have been forgotten somehow.
How long was I gone - just two weeks?
How different the world seems since then, how cold - and it’s not just the thermometer that makes me shiver.

When my feet are cold, warm socks help, when my beloved is chattering his teeth, a broad chest, alternatively the bathtub.
But what to do when it’s not the body that is freezing?
When the warm golden sun of autumn may still reach the skin, but no longer the eyes, not the blood, not that strange something called the soul?

Someone listened to my thoughts, directed my gaze and my hand.
"Isis".
The goddess of the Nile.
It’s warm there, very warm - even I know that, having never been there.
I don’t know more, neither about divinity nor scent.
I spray...

...and stand for a moment in the center of bright golden rays, gently surrounded by green, soft and cool and friendly like a dawn deep in the south.
The sun is still half-hanging on the horizon, the air is still as smooth and weightless as silk, dew pearls on the grass and fruits shimmer cool-matt moist in the leaves.
But shortly thereafter, they become lemon tarts, so creamy and fluffy-light like biscuit.
A hint of powdered sugar and finest porcelain, the table set in the garden under the old tree.
It’s warm there and peaceful, a little out of time.
It gets warmer by the hour and softer, sensually sweet and mysteriously familiar - I have to ponder for a long time until "Tempore Donna" comes to mind and with it the penny drops.
So naturally feminine, unpretentious and approachable, like that Italian woman, the goddess Isis also shows me her supple-soft side, wrapping me in a butter-soft cashmere plaid and turning gray once again into amber-terra cotta, aquamarine, and matte white and dull green.
And here and there, a smile begins to bloom.

PS: Franfan - thank you!