You have been told more than once not to take everything so much to heart. The advice sounded sensible and was therefore entirely useless. You never asked exactly how far life ought to be pushed away before it stopped touching a nerve.
You know how to keep silent. Sometimes out of good manners, sometimes out of pity for the conversation. Indifference, however, has never been your accomplishment. Far too pale a colour.
A cool summer evening suits you. The heat of the day has already gone, the wind has grown more insistent, and yet it is still too early to go home. You are wearing a sweater that makes itself felt without weighing you down. The open sections of the knit let air through, the denser ones keep the warmth — exactly enough for an evening that has not earned a coat.
All the colours are matte. At dusk the burgundy turns wine-dark, the plum almost black, the grey recalls smoke, and the milky shade holds the last of the light. Lilac appears between them unexpectedly, like a good thought in a conversation that had already been considered lost.
The ruffle lies diagonally — calm, almost motionless. And yet all the unrest begins precisely there.
One sleeve opens from the elbow into a wide asymmetric wave, like a tango skirt in the sharp turn for which the music was invented in the first place. The burgundy curve gives way to soft pale folds; as you move, they unfold and gather again, never quite the same twice.
The other sleeve is lighter and shorter. Grey, milky, plum, and lilac meet in its openwork like guests at a late supper: at first they keep apart, then they mingle, and at the wrist the whole conversation ends in a small cheerful reception.
The sweater can be worn back to front. The neckline, the ruffle, and the coloured fragments shift, and the whole composition becomes something else. Tonight you wanted it this way. You trust your own decisions more than advice — advice usually arrives later and begins with the words “I told you so.”
By night the air grows colder. You have time to grow angry, to laugh, and to say what you had meant to keep to yourself. You return home late and do not regret it in the least.