James Baldwin — Munich Winter 1973 For Y.S

In a strange house, a strange bed in a strange town, a very strange me is waiting for you. Now it is very early in the morning. The silence is loud. The baby is walking about with his foaming bottle, making strange sounds and deciding, after all, to be my friend. You arrive tonight. How dull time is! How empty—and yet, since I am sitting here, lying here, walking up and down here, waiting, I see that time's cruel ability to make one wait is time’s reality. I see your hair which I call red. I lie here in this bed. Someone teased me once, a friend of ours— saying that I saw your hair red because I was not thinking of the hair on your head. Someone also told me, a long time ago: my father said to me, It is a terrible thing, son, to fall into the hands of the living God. Now, I know what he was saying. I could not have seen red before finding myself in this strange, this waiting bed. Nor had my naked eye suggested that colour was created by the light falling, now, on me, in this strange bed, waiting where no one has ever rested! The streets, I observe, are wintry. It feels like snow. Starlings circle in the sky, conspiring, together, and alone, unspeakable journeys into and out of the light. I know I will see you tonight. And snow may fall enough to freeze our tongues and scald our eyes. We may never be found again! Just as the birds above our heads circling are singing, knowing that, in what lies before them, the always unknown passage, wind, water, air, the failing light the failing night the blinding sun they must get the journey done. Listen. They have wings and voices are making choices are using what they have. They are aware that, on long journeys, each bears the other, whirring, stirring love occuring in the middle of the terrifying air.