I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from outside. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. From an indefinite distance I am looking at that picture, which includes me.

It is a prophetic moment it is our entire existence, all we have lived and have yet to live, all times in one time, without beginning or end. Not an image on a plate, but one traced by a fine pen, a small and perfect memory with the soft volumes and warm colors of a Renaissance painting, like an intention captured on grainy paper or cloth. I think in the frozen images of a photograph.

You think in words for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it. That is how I remember you, in stillness. Sometimes you sat beside me, your legs pulled up to your chin and your silk shawl over one shoulder in the silence of the night that had barely begun. I brushed your hair back to look into your eyes. In the final instant we glimpsed absolute solitude, each lost in a blazing chasm, but soon we returned from the far side of that fire to find ourselves embraced amid a riot of pillows beneath white mosquito netting. You pressed against me, you explored me, you scaled me, you fastened me with your invincible legs, you said a thousand times, come, your lips on mine. You opened to me, my hands on your twisting waist, your hands impatient. We were too close to see one another, each absorbed in our urgent rite, enveloped in our shared warmth and scent. You untied your sash, kicked off your sandals, tossed your full skirt into the corner-it was cotton, if I remember-and loosened the clasp that held your hair in a ponytail.

Int'l Women's Conference - México, 2013.

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Ceremony, 2017.

Isabel allende the stories of eva luna