Love has taken away my eyes

Love has taken away my eyes. Now all I’ve got is ears.

It all feels familiar and strange: the centre of this small city that I know so well. Each cobbled street, each walkway, each bridge. I know the way that the light falls on different spots of the Grasslei cafés at different times of the day – and where you can sit to enjoy the last full sunshine in Ghent. By now, even the voices of the boat tour guides are familiar to me. Their white pleasure craft slip through Prinsenhof diurnally for matins and vesper services. I feel that I live in a city that has become pure metaphor ; a rich landscape of abstract qualities: textures, sounds, interplays of light. It reminds me of how Freud used the city as a metaphor for the mind. Its intricacies are neural, its landmarks are mental signposts – areas of accumulated power and resistance. I see space here now, more abstractly. Familiarity has given way to understanding, understanding to imagination.

It changes every time I do. The whole city is a mood ring: I feel, it sighs; I love, it loves. Now everything is bright and recrudescent. Spring has come. The light is mellow and muffled. The glassy Leie rustles her silvered skirts, ever-winking, ever-moving. The white-beaked moorhen rocks back and forth and bustles about in the water searching for fragments of food. The walkers strolling across St Michael’s bridge appear and disappear behind the wood-timbered meat market.

Love can change everything. Who said it was like walking on air? I know what they mean. There is a lightness. Your whole body is affected; your understanding of weight and time is affected.  Your awareness of place is affected. Even the bricks and cobblestones feels saturated with him. I feel like I’ve jumped in a rocket and got off in a strange and unknown planet where things are pale and soft. It’s like those sketches that Botticelli made of Paradise. Zero-gravity. Fleecy and soft as cotton buds. A kind of harmony and restfulness pervades everything. A transformation has taken place. The world feels different. A concertina lines every footstep, and a kiss is the natural point of contact: a mooring.