My love for words began with a peculiar journey one late evening when I didn’t want to let myself go into the arms of Morpheus. I was five or six years old and reluctant to fall asleep. Perhaps I was afraid that all the things in the room—the picture books piled on the windowsill, my calico dress hanging on the back of a chair, the clock on the wall, even the house itself—would disappear if I took my eyes off them. But nothing escaped. What did happen was my own running away, the here in body and somewhere in mind, an amphibian life between two worlds which would shape and define my life trajectory.

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        Hugging a pillow and singing a lullaby to myself, I played one word out loud or to myself I could not recall which one, but I do recall the words: apple tree. The moment I said them I realized that there were two apple trees: one in my mind and another one, the real one, outside in the garden. With the same words I could call to mind the image of another apple tree, the crab apple tree, or the Jonathan one and, if I added other words to go along with the initial one, such as “in bloom” or “full of green leaves”, the image in my mind changed as a response to the words I used.