A NECKLACE OF WHISTLES, A HORIZON OF SALT

 

    ©tedorè

17 August 2025, coast

Afternoons on the coast have a way of undoing me. 

The whistle, small, delicate, absurd, slips between my lips, releasing the cry of a gull. 

And then, as if summoned, a bird carves across the sky, its wings cutting the fragile blue that is already bruising into rose. 

I do not know if it was answering me, or something I had not yet dared to name. 

The sea leaned closer, heavy with a pink shimmer, a tide rehearsing eternity, always returning, never the same. 

And I thought of you. 

ECHOES ON THE SECOND FLOOR

 

2 July 2025, Paris 

Lately, my dates always begin or end with rain. This one arrived dressed in overcast light, the kind that brushes everything with a hush. It was the second of July in Paris, and the sky had just finished raining in the early hours, leaving behind a softness that clung to windows, steps, and thoughts. I wandered into the Centre Pompidou just as the wind lifted slightly, as if something unseen had stirred. 

The old BPI library, once dense with books and whispers, now stood emptied, not abandoned, but expectant. I hadn't planned to feel sentimental about industrial carpet, but there it was: faded marks where shelves once stood, an unintentional grid of ghosts. It suited the occasion. 

Wolfgang Tillmans had taken over the entire second level for his retrospective, "Nothing Could Have Prepared Us, Everything Could Have Prepared Us". It didn’t feel like an exhibition. It felt like someone had broken open their own archive and invited me to walk barefoot through the aftershock. 

There were no clear paths, no forced chronology. Photographs were taped to walls, laid flat on tables, and paused mid-thought on giant prints. Some shimmered with a club's pulse, others with domestic quiet. One moment, I was looking at skin, impossibly close, damp with motion. Next, I was face to face with a storm cloud that looked like it might swallow the entire city of Lagos. These images didn’t explain themselves. They simply were, like light or hunger. 

HOW THE DREAMS COME TO US, SUNDAY NOTES

    ©tedoré
 

They arrive like guests who know the way without ever having walked it. We never see the hour of their departure, yet each night they find us, fumbling, unguarded, stretching their quiet fingers through the slit of sleep. 

Not a knock. Not a name. Just the soft trespass of their presence, as if our souls had always kept a backdoor open for them. Some come draped in familiar faces, carrying the weight of old promises.

Others arrive faceless, faceless yet radiant, speaking in the dialect of winds over black water. There are dreams that feel like rain falling from beneath the earth, and others that feel like smoke climbing into our lungs, velvet, invisible, devastating. 

We think we dream, but it is not we who call them. They find us because we are made porous for them. They find us because the day is too heavy to hold everything we are. At night, the skin grows thin as parchment and the ink seeps through. 

SERENISSIMA, SUNDAY NOTES

 

Letter left inside a jacket pocket, never mailed

Venice, early days of June 

There are places you visit, and others you haunt. Venice, I fear, has reversed the roles. 

I wandered in wearing silence, left with something less intact. The city is a costume no one dares remove. Even the sky feels baroque, draped in pearl-grey thoughts, every hour a different shade of rehearsal. Theatrical. 

Yes, she is beautiful. But not kindly. She keeps too many mirrors. 

I thought of Marchesa Casati often, how she once walked these stones in peacocks and sleep-laced jewels, shoulders draped in dusk and leopards, gliding through shadows like myth turned flesh, determined to make her life a work of art. She wanted her life to outlive her. Perhaps it has. Now the pigeons circle where her gaze once landed. The ghosts applaud her, still. They remember. 

IN THE THROAT OF LIGHT, SUNDAY NOTES

 

There are nights when the body remembers what the mind forgets, how the voice is not just sound, but a soft-burnished vessel, a way to carry tenderness. I’ve had this recurring dream. It always returns when my voice disappears, as if silence were a signal for something sacred to arrive. In the dream, I swallow lights. Small, glowing things, baked for me by hands I love, by hands that know me. They appear with quiet certainty, as if they’ve always existed in the folds of night. They bake these lights, warm and golden like citrus in honey. I never see the oven.

I just know it’s been lit. They walk a thin line, a trapeze in the dark. Not quite flying, not quite falling. Suspended. Above me. As I sleep, they pour something into me, glowing oil, slow and rich. It enters not just the mouth, but the space behind the sternum, the hollow where grief sometimes pools. It coats the wound where the voice had once lived. And when I wake, I don’t speak. I don’t need to. There’s a resonance inside, not a song, but a readiness. Like a note waiting for its pitch. A breath about to form. 

THE SPACE BETWEEN NARRATIVES, SUNDAY NOTES

 

25 May 2025

A Sunday between the sheets. Coffee cooling beside me, and a few madeleines gone soft from steam, a stack of notes I probably won’t finish reading. I’d stayed up the night before watching Europa, von Trier’s metallic, trance-like fever dream, narration like a spell, trains cutting through post-war fog, and that strange, weightless tension of sleeping through history’s aftermath. I finished it with the faint feeling I’d been hypnotised and then sent back into my reality, disoriented and suddenly aware of the hum of some birds. 

This morning, I opened Écrit dans un jardin, and there was Yourcenar, steady and lucid, walking through her garden and into my head like she’d always had a key. Like a balm, her garden meditations, not quite prose, not quite poetry, just her mind walking slowly, picking things up. No drama. Just air and leaves and a kind of careful noticing that felt like an antidote to all the cold narrative control of the film.