There's a kind of elongated violet indigo clouds that is typical of the sky at dawn in the half-beautiful days, at least here over the roofs of Milan. I must have looked at them dozens of times, isolated as they are against the fading-to-yellow blu sky. They all look alike, from day to day and season to season, strechted and small, pointed at the ends and frayed and very very distant but low in the sky. And I am pretty sure they announce bigger clouds to come.
How long they last? They last from the moment you notice them, in the quiet house where everything still has to happen, and your thoughts don't fight with sensations but just toy with them, to the moment you have forgotten everything about them, in the house where the world pushes in, and your idea of the sky is just the repository of everything that heats, burns, turns into ashes and smoke. Suddendly, the strongest wind rattles the window panes and announces rain. The clouds are gigantic already.