Roland Schimmelpfennig

Suddently, everything is very different from last winter; no one appears abruptly under the window and starts whistling in Central European Time. Nobody comes inside anymore, as they always did, in big shoes and with secret kisses in the early evening when the light is slowly turning blue.
What remains from this winter is the smell of coffee. And the memories of stories about foreign words, about beacons and colours, about international flag signals, about water resources and lengths of measure from distant lands. What remains is the yardstick, and measuring things in centimetres: the distance between your shoes when you’ve taken them off; the length of a winter coat’s arms; the distance of the kettle from the hob. What remains is the view out the window, even if no one is looking up, MEZ, an electric wire over the street, a lamp above the median strip, little balconies across the way, curtains. And a little metal pipe in your pocket when you rummage around for it.
An implied story, an aborted story. The memory releases the breath that puts the words of this “monologue for a woman” into circulation this final winter. The language distils snapshots of a shared past, reduced, enlarged, the picture that she wanted to preserve in her memory keeps moving further away into new experimental arrangements.