Petit Bocal

The mist

Come closer.

Look: someone lives in there.

Scroll. I’ll tell you where they come from.

The sand

Before them, there was an empty jar. And sand.

As a child, I poured coloured sand into glasses and bottles.

One colour. Then another.

Layer after layer, very gently, so that nothing would mix.

It was for Mother’s Day.

And I, nose against the glass, imagined tiny worlds inside.

The aquarium

I also had an aquarium.

I could stay there for a long time. Behind the glass, life went on without minding me.

The lizards

And lizards, in vivariums.

A lizard does not move. Then, suddenly, it is somewhere else.

All of it fascinated me. Whole worlds, held behind a pane of glass.

The wish

For years, I wanted to make my own.

I tried things, with cubes.

Then I mixed it all: the sand, the glass, the water, the cubes.

All that was missing was someone.

Someone

So they came.

Lumi fells the trees. All the village’s wood will pass through those hands.

Okko builds the houses. Never two alike.

Brin cuts the stone, unhurried.

So does Pip. But Pip often stops to watch the water.

Nobody tells them what to do. They know.

A day

And the days went by. Here, a day lasts six minutes.

In the morning, everyone sets off to work.

At noon, they eat together.

In the evening, the light turns to honey.

They light the fire. They tell each other about the day.

Then everyone goes home to sleep. The windows go dark, one by one.

Here, nobody fights. They build, they share, they sleep.

The rain

When it rains, the glass mists over.

See? You are already taking care of them.

Inside their heads

You can even step inside their heads.

From here, the world is immense.

And the glass, you end up forgetting it.

And us?

Sometimes I feel watched, too.

As if I were in a jar. Sometimes, shut in.

Glass protects as much as it encloses.

What if someone were watching us like this? Patiently. Tenderly.

To watch without breaking anything may already be a way of caring.

Yours

There. This is my little jar.

Now it is yours too.