Maybe This Time Read Online Free PDF

liberated. The woman looked into my eyes and didn’t move. Eventually she raised her finger to her lips and signalled that I should remain silent. Then she got up and left the room and was gone for the rest of my visit.
    I didn’t know what I should do and had no explanation for what had just happened, but that it had something to do with me was clear, and that both repelled and intrigued me. I wanted to know more and so, from that time on, visited the woman frequently. Her house became our place. We sat there across from each other, and it always happened the same way. She sat across from me and I walked behind myself. The sensation was not completely new. Even as a child I had often had the feeling of following myself, of not letting this other self out of my sight. And this is what it was like now. I stood behind or followed myself, distant, impartial, devoid of emotion, and what I saw was both familiar, but then again not. I recognized it and knew that I had experienced it, but when the scene stopped, I couldn’t understand what had occurred.
    I saw this woman and the doll on her lap and I looked at the child I once was. I follow him. We’re in a garden with a house and a path leading up to it. It’s always the same. A door opens and swings shut. A hallway, a staircase, a room. Another place, there are many of them, a meadow by a forest, a clearing. A woman is standing in front of me, she takes a step towards me. I want to leave this place, but cannot stay away. As strange as these encounters were, I kept wanting to experience them, to relive them. I could hardly wait for the woman to disappear into one of the rooms and return some time later to show me what had been. Karl sat opposite me, in her lap, sometimes younger, sometimes older. It varied. His age was as unpredictable as the story she revealed to me.
    I knew I wouldn’t get any explanations, so I didn’t ask, afraid she might stop the game. I accepted that she would only sit there in silence and show me myself. Everything I witnessed I relived once more, only this time I was safe, but not entirely. And however much I saw, I knew I could not interfere. The road, the house with the garden, the hallway and staircase, the room and the wall I always ended up facing. Repeating what was, to see it once again, again and always anew.
    I knocked and she welcomed me. In time she opened the door before I’d even had a chance to knock, or simply left the door ajar. I entered and sat on my chair, and got ready. I sat alone for a long time, as if she were waiting until I had made myself at home. Then she came out of one of the rooms, greeted me and sat on the sofa, without a word, always the same. When it happened, when she showed me myself in the guise of the doll as I had been, it was I who was sitting on her lap, and she was the witness of what happened to me. She stroked my hair as I dived into the images, merged with them and disappeared. She never stopped looking at me, and it was into her gaze that I fell and in her eyes that I awoke hours later, hours that I could not account for.
    Karl was always there with us, watching me while I remembered particular moments from my past, places and situations into which I was about to plunge, where all traces of my history had been erased. It was there that I encountered myself, as the child I once was, and I would see myself run, or sit, or walk through the trees. The same images , always in the same sequence. This house with its front garden, the room, the wall, always the same, and always someone would be picking me up, lifting me and lowering me again, lifting and lowering me, weightless. There the memory ended each time and I landed back in the present, looking into the eyes of the woman who welcomed me with a smile.
    We sat across from each other, looking at each other in silence, and I remembered, though afterwards I could no longer say what it was I had recalled.
    I knew very well what kept drawing me back to this