The Sandcastle in the Sky

In love with an artist that may be Prince Charming

I’m Rach. Probably you have met me here, so maybe you know by now that when I smile it feels as if spring has finally landed on your street! Besides that, I also have pink hair and I’m in love with an artist that daydreams. Before all that, I was nothing but the mistress of a far-away castle.

Back then:

I can’t imagine a morning that doesn’t smell of freshly baked cake. For me, the light entering through the yellow curtains, the nanny telling me “good morning” in a tough German, the smell of breakfast and the sudden, annoyed gesture I would do to hide my feet under the fluffy mattress…. well, they all go in the same sentence: it’s time to wake up. It was only years later when I watched “The devil wears Prada” and I think I began to understand why they used to call me “the devil”.

My duties as a child were clear, so I knew how to avoid every single one of them. I was to present myself as a little polite, poetry-passioned, mathematics-guru, multilingual, blonde, blue-eyed, touched to tears by every flower of a blooming spring-ish tree.

However, after the breakfast smell and the nanny disrupted my sleep, I would cry to faint because I wanted one sock to be blue and the other one to be purple. I dreamt of marrying or at least being Madonna and I believed there is no better food than green, unripe, stolen apples. Thank God for the so-many moments when my friends wanted me to go out and play: those were precisely the moments when I truly wanted to stay in and read a book.

I had a way of being upside down.

Belgrade:

The friendliest streets in Europe. One would instantly fall in love with the mix between back then and extremely-today, the sort of baroque, but somehow modern design of all the places you’d visit, the gorgeously spiced pleskavitza, the vibrant nights on the river shore where beautiful dancers were transforming the clubs into an aliens world, which you just couldn’t stay away from.

I remember that Belgrade was keeping me on the edge, jumping from extreme happiness to cautiously remembering the “basis” I had managed to learn from my nanny’s shouted coaching: be kind and do no harm. One night, sharing a tequila bottle with 10 friends while attending one of the usual summer raves and watching dancers jumping from the previously-hot sand to the really-deep lake, I thought of Belgrade as a devil — a really good-looking devil — but one I needed to run away from.

I believe it took me around 4 years of exhausting jobs, new acquaintances, lots of traveling, and plenty of music to get back to the nights so long and so nights-nights that in the morning I would get to hide my feet under the fluffy mattress, as I was really and again sleeping when morning kicked in.

Ibiza:

I’d say you can’t understand the sun until you have sunbathed in it. Those years were as if cuddling and repeat cuddling, in the warm sand. Well… we were growing pomegranates and fig trees in our back yard and indeed, I wiped a little every year, to celebrate their blooming.

Instead of long walks, each morning we would take drumming lessons with a former Dj that knew how to tribal tap the rhythm of anything. Later in the afternoon, I would have students coming in for algebra lessons; I had already gotten used to waiting for them with freshly baked muffins and the cute white dog in my lap.

I was thinking I would stay there for the rest of my life, but I wasn’t aware that my upside-down character was slowly pushing him away. He was beginning to get exhausted by the energy that was driving me to work, laugh, chat, and dance from dawn to the next dawn. He was finding it confusing how I almost never slept. Later on, he also started to notice that my mind was also getting confused from time to time. However: Ibiza my love and Ibiza the isle were about simple things and small joys coming in waves; when things started to feel complicated and the river got polluted with unfinished sentences, Ibiza my love disappeared.

The castle:

After my grandmother died, I went back home to put things in order and I decided to spend some months there. The nanny had never left the castle, as she didn’t have any relatives alive, so she was a constant presence in my life, abrupt and military as always.

She used to say that the years I had spent away from home had broken me, as the world couldn’t understand how my upside-down character needed to be leashed, so nature had followed its course. She saw me as a joyful and fizzy personality, smart as it gets, kinder than my fellow species, but unruled, undisciplined, and un-present.

She started what she believed was re-educating me...and here I was, having terrible deja vu’s whenever she was repeating all that childhood German-style routine.

Eventually, to get rid of her big old mouth, I accepted I needed to get married. A proper husband would enforce discipline on my woman-too-playful nature, mostly because women couldn’t live a good life outside a traditional family and the obligations that come with it, she said.

We started to prepare the castle to welcome the high-life events we intended to have, all with the purpose of identifying a suitable husband. I let the nanny deal with those preparations entirely, while I‘d just spent my time signing cheques for furniture restorers, the best gardeners the village could provide, a modern approach to the central path, and other stuff like that. I felt I didn’t have a soul, so no part of me was really interested. Probably for the first time in my life, I was just following instructions.

Him:

It was an awfully annoying cold morning when Nanny entered my room and, somehow even more abrupt than ever, she draw the curtains apart and barked in German that I was late! I did sense the smell of fresh muffins, so I tried to find some familiar comfort in it while trying to get out of bed and understand the nanny’s terrible, untypical rush.

Ahh… The painter was coming for the re-design of the dining room and he had requested my presence; he must meet the lady of the house herself, to feel her vibe and to understand her personality, cause that room must reflect her entirely in order to properly welcome guests…. Nanny explained it all in one single breath, so I figured it was somehow important… I was wondering what the hell my empty being might tell him and I was inside smiling imagining how he would paint the living room in nothing — well that’s a bold color, I thought.

I chose a minty-blue dress, assuming I could give the guy at least the option of a deep ocean instead of a deep nothing. Of course, without realizing that in combination with my pink hair — the nanny hadn’t managed to discipline that too ;) — and my sarcastic, but funny mood, I would actually seem to him the warmest person he had met on the way to this remote village, remote castle, in a remote winter. When I entered the breakfast room, I got a glimpse of a tiny creature sitting still; so still that it crossed my mind that the nanny might have already scared him. So I just made the stupidest joke in the world:

You take your coffee very seriously, sir, wouldn’t you want to take it sweeter? From his stillness, he looked a bit blankly at me but uttered: I don’t sense you as sweet but as a unicorn.

Berlin:

His eyes are kind and smiling; his hands are soft and firm at the same time; he smells of paint and cigarettes. He usually paints portraits of young women that he meets on the streets or he sees in a movie or on a cover of an old vinyl or he just imagines. He only-only paints from his imagination: from how he remembers the girl could or might have been when he caught sight of her.

The struggle of imagining her builds a fantasy relationship in his mind. He talks to her, asks me to buy clothes for his imaginary muse, sometimes looks at me with sad eyes and says: Rach, can’t we have pizza today please, you know how strict Diana is with her carbs? For her sake please, could we try to go vegetarian for a while?

I don’t mind. Actually, I believe I’m lucky: these fantasy women have a whole diversity of tastes, personalities, and abilities according to how he imagines them. At the end of the day, I get dressed in their princess dresses or maybe linen pajamas, ’cause this Diana, for example, was really nature-oriented. I have to scream at him if he pictured Monica as a wild bitch, but I also need to dive into biology lessons to match wonderful Anna’s deep interest in cell multiplication. I felt it as being difficult probably only when Zhana had to put on her white kimono and to show him how she got her black belt, as I’m really not good at fighting.

Today:

I think I found some kind of far-fetched discipline in the struggle of being no one. Does it fit me? Yepp, kind of… I don’t think I know what fitting actually means, but I know how I feel right now: I’m happy.