When longing anchors you inside the pouring outpour of its own cloudburst, your heart whimpers itself out through your eyes. Then memories take you far, very far back, to happy times of being together, to what might have been, to who you were and to how it was.

Like a closed book, your heart begins to turn back the pages of your life one by one. Sometimes your heart opens the book in the middle. Sometimes it leafs forwards, sometimes backwards. Then you weep over both the good times and the bad. And the bad times do not feel nearly as wearing as you had thought they were. You look at everything with new eyes and the same eyes. Your father and mother become new people. Different people. Because suddenly you yourself are where they were for so long — where they once stood still. You walk back, above all, along the tracks of your firsts, as memory lets them parade past your mind's eye. Who ever forgets their first kiss? Or the first time you cut your hair (unless it has been short for as long as you can remember), or the first time you learned to dance? Or your first baby — a stranger-you bound to a stranger-creature. The first person you began, involuntarily, to miss very deeply. Little realising that the umbilical cord to life is replaced by an umbilical cord to the heart — later, to many hearts.

As we learn to be sophisticated, we unlearn how to be naïve. And any indulgence in a moment out of our past brings us again into contact with simplicity and innocence, which, in a sympathetic way, folds everything of the past up in sentiment before stowing it away. Secretly, we long back to the time when our deepest self contemplated and judged the world uncomplicated. When our heart lay unprotected and without pretence, childlike, open and receptive to impressions and to substance. Before time became the plane that gives scars and wounds their smooth emotional finish.

But before the present, with its sharp sense of reality, slowly and softly draws the curtain of remembering closed again, it is this short respite and this intimate contact with naïvety that refreshes our souls and softens the mass of our hearts — tenderly marinated, for a moment, in the melancholy of memories and of innocence, which makes us love everyone and everything again.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer