Thánatos Song

Just after the sunset, at the time everything goes quiet - as if the great clockwork of the city would have been turned off - I was walking with a friend along one of Amsterdam's streets. It was one of the many streets that runs along a channel, paved with small bricks and covered by slender maple trees. It was late enough for the light not to be the dark orange hue of the yawning sun anymore but too early for it to be the warm golden one that, pouring down from the street lamps, turns the city into a stained collection of aged sepia daguerreotypes. There was just that undistinguished pale gray radiance that always precedes the night.

A small boat approached from our back, gliding slowly over the silver waters of the channel. There was no sound coming from the boat, not from its motor nor from the passengers standing on its board. The only sound that could be heard was the faint flapping of the waves rippling against the brick sides of the channel. It seemed as if the boat would not be passing by at all. Or perhaps not at that moment in time. It seemed more as if I would be recalling the memory of a boat I once might have seen passing by.

The boat disappeared under a low bridge at the end of the street and only then the voices of the passengers could be heard, turned into unintelligible echoes of liquid chanting by the acoustics of the water and the passage's moist walls. After that the boat could not be seen anymore, as if it would have crossed that thin fabric backdrop that we call reality.

We kept walking until we reached the bridge. I stopped over the passage and looked at the channel along which the boat had just sailed. There were no more traces of the ripples the boat had left behind.

It seemed as if I could have stood very inert, so quiet, so silent that time would not notice my presence and, forgetful, just pass me by leaving me behind, extending that moment forever and forever being calm.

My friend asked me why I looked so sad. It is strange how calmness and sadness sometimes wear the same mask.

I could hear Thánatos humming one of his wordless songs.