and then, as we left behind the spot with the poplars and the dried up river?, he said that talking about the transformation of an object could resemble a permanently dried-up waterfall, an eternal absence, and that if I still needed another version of his thought, he would tell me that every object, whatever form it takes, will always resemble a lethargy of rocks, and when I asked him to explain this rigidity, he told me to close my eyes for a moment, to cross a gate in my mind, any gate, he whispered, and then to briefly consider any version of any characteristic of ours that I think could be fluid and unstable, like, for example, he continued, our provincial alcoholism, the kind that feeds off a tendency towards excess, when the alcohol seeps inside us and the surface of logic ceases to be impermeable, and I might have obeyed for a moment, and yes, I closed my eyes, even though I wanted to ask if logic could truly have a surface, or, if he couldn’t answer that, how he could define the lethargy of rocks, and those thoughts were suddenly interrupted because he kept asking me: hey, don!t you get it, even if a system suffers from chronic dysfunction, it never stops being what it was originally called: a system, and food, by the way, he added, what else could it be but an undefined exchange, a melodic line between need and gratitude, a great balancer, and now I opened my eyes and walked faster, because all that he was telling me might have come from a kind of childishness, some nonsense, because, I was about to say, even when a worm chews a bit of a beech tree, you can clearly see it, the tree is now scratched, and certainly, I wouldn’t stretch it as far as to say that with the worm’s intervention, what remains before us isn’t a beech but a half-form, but hey, I!d say, even the cloudy remnants of oil can sometimes become sawdust, and, yes, I!d continue, maybe to truly live, we need to keep engraved in our memory the harshness of the care we gave to something or someone, along with the sense of surrendering all we have without second thought, as if nothing else exists but this mutual rattling, but in the end, we both agreed that all of this is nothing but transformations and distorted images of the world, which had long begun to fade, often completely, like glaucoma gradually dulls vision, and this realization, which struck us as we were walking along the path, together with gusts of wind, reminded us that, yes, let!s admit it— even sheet metal can sigh

Text by Sofronis Sofroniou