And we pretend to understand

On the faded backdrop of what looks like an old letter, a boy in short 1960s trousers juggles colored dots — almost like symptoms, almost like signs, almost like meanings that never truly existed.

His face is calm, but within that calmness there is a quiet tension — like the young man in Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols, trapped in his own universe where every wrinkle, every shadow, every mark on the wall is a whisper, a warning, a cipher of cosmic intent.

And here he is — not in a ward, but in some imagined hallway of memory — weighing his private worlds, assigning gravity to emptiness, tossing not balls, but ideas: green for dread, blue for solitude, ochre for what never happened.

The boy, caught between a book’s page and a dusty photograph, between tenderness and madness, pretends to play.

And we pretend to understand.