Desiderii Marginis
Seven Sorrows

It was a day like any other, empty, dull, scarred by habit and worldly tedium, one of those that come and go without leaving anything but an exhausting fatigue. Silence devoured the cold house while the old clock harvested every single moment with its dull and hypnotic ticks, but Dario didn't listen: he was seated at his small desk, bent over books, and was distractedly reading the lines of some school text, like every day. In reality, his thoughts were elsewhere. He was counting the months, days, hours, and seconds, waiting to be freed, even if only for a little while, from the prison of those pale days, but in vain. Something, however, suddenly distracted him: was it a whisper? No, it was just beginning to rain. He looked out the window. He had never admired the rain, nor had he ever listened to its subdued call. A leaden sky spread transparent and crystalline veils over the deserted street, exhaling a faint rustling that resembled a whisper, a voice? That was calling him.

Everything was impulsive and unexpected: he jumped up, grabbed his mp3, put on his shoes, and went out without even taking an umbrella. Cold tears flooded his face, and a cold, biting wind scratched his skin. He chose from the trusty mp3 the first name that came to hand: Desiderii Marginis, "Seven Sorrows". A dense cloud of celestial electronics and the humid bitterness of a guitar ("Constant Like the Northern Star") became the fragile soundtrack of that moment. Meanwhile, Dario ran, ran through puddles shaken by the ever thicker rain, oblivious to the fact that his long hair was now soaked and that heavy drops hammered his body and clothes. Cold and chills made him feel alive, despite the pulsating sky of thunders that loomed over him menacingly in its dark grayness. The epic "Why Are You Fearful?", in all its sooty drama and thunderous stasis, seemed like the gaze of lightning bolts splintering the horizon, the deafening roar of the most destructive thunder.

It was a scenario as fascinating as it was desolate, and Dario lived it with detached wonder. The polyphony of nature, branches and bushes quivering, quivering droplets, veins of lightning, fields of grain lashed and nearly uprooted by cascades of cold crystals; the world writhed, vibrated around him while clear notes stained with ether ("My Diamond in the Rough") chimed with every tear of the sky that fell on the tired and withered earth. The sweet melancholy of those timeless moments dissolved with the arrival of "Silence Will Stop Our Hearts": a hazy and suffocating storm of confused, folded, and distorted sounds, weighed down the landscape with brief but penetrating pangs of anguish, and the immense expanse of clouds seemed to Dario darker than ever. But it was precisely thanks to that fear that he felt an enlightening thrill, the awareness of being, for better or worse, an insignificant spectator of nature in its deepest, sometimes even violent and disturbing manifestations.

The paradisiacal melancholy that shone among the broken echoes of a piano in "Lifeline" and in "Untitled" slowed down time and the intense sublimity of the scene, and from the ample arpeggios of "I Tell the Ancient Tale" flowed the chilling sigh of the storm. And Dario was no longer a mere spectator; by now he had become part of nature itself. He was the tree, he was the water and the thunder, while "Seven Sorrows" was the heart of that semi-divine monologue, the poetry of every frame, now a memory of broken astonishment. And even now the house is empty and cold, even now the pendulum speckles the weight of silence, but Dario no longer counts the seconds and hours nor pretends to read: he is just waiting for another rainy day to run in solitude, without a destination, under the shadow of a sick sky, soaked with tears, notes, and autumnal languor.

"Be silent in that solitude, which is not loneliness..."