Yesterday I found a key. Small, wrought iron, with a blue thread. I recognized it at once. The strange thing was that I couldn’t remember what it opened.
I held it in my hand for a while.
A house.
A closet.
A mailbox.
Nothing?
I thought about throwing it away, but I couldn’t. When night came, I left it on the table… This morning it was still there.
Do you think time changes us? Or is it space? What do we find when we look within ourselves again?
Today we are the same, and yet we are already different. What has become of you?
I have kept writing, singing, performing, traveling, searching within… and not long ago I reopened two books you may remember, books that had been important to me: Ritmo de lucha and Compás de espera.
Two books that held who I was, what I felt, something of that Eva somewhere in Italy, in Spain… I returned to them with affection and a certain fear of the unknown in that Eva past.
With time and care, I opened them, hated them, loved them, cleaned them up, illustrated them…
and this month they have gone back out into the world, revised and reissued with longer, perhaps more accurate titles: Ritmo de lucha · Ostinato and Compás de espera · Variaciones de una fuga.
There is something magical about returning to certain books years later and discovering new emotions. Who has changed: the books or us?
Sometimes an emotion finally finds the words it had long been searching for; at other times, rereading something we felt years ago returns us to a part of ourselves we thought we had forgotten. And sometimes the book seems different simply because the person reading it is no longer the same, or discovers meanings that had remained hidden until then…
While I was revising them, something unexpected happened. My poems began to rebel. They wanted to leave the page and, suddenly, they began to sing.
Now they are trying on music, and other questions have appeared: What changes when something you had read silently, in private, begins to sound outside you? Which version stays with you and becomes part of you?
I have opened a small private listening room so we can discover it together. It is part of my creative space, AnyWayEva.com and I have called it Listening Room. There I am sharing versions, experiments and transformations while they can still change, so you can listen to them, be moved by them, love them, hate them… and tell me honestly what you want to hear again, what you would keep, what happens when they reach the other side… Your side.
This is the doorway:
The key is your email address.
With it, you can enter the Listening Room and the next Letters from the Future will reach you: poems that change shape, songs still in progress, images, questions, humor, things that may help you remember, feel or see something differently.
Both poetry collections have returned to print in renewed editions and, as of today, are also available as ebooks from Innersea Poetry · Contemporary Spanish Poetry series. Meanwhile, some of those poems are still trying on music…
The key is still on the table. What will it open?
Eva
AnyWayEva · Words · Music · Stage · anywayeva.com · @anywayeva
P.S. To receive Letters from the Future in your inbox and gain access to Listening Room, enter your key here: → ENTER ACCESS · ANYWAYEVA