Tonight we wondered about that possibility:
You, here, only in October.
Which left me with many thoughts: some gray, as sad as those that cloud our vision on a quiet winter morning, others as reddish as that moon you always show me. Today, I got angry.
And I can reaffirm that tonight I was angry, so angry that with just my mood, I could have paved the main road of this city with the boiling tar of my fury.
I can’t conceive the idea of mistreatment.
I don’t usually get angry like that, but today while I was driving my heart, was crossing all the avenues, bridges, and roads. I almost got hit by a tourist van and on top of that, they charged me a toll to travel on a road full of potholes.
With this heart, I can’t get anywhere, I said.
Well, returning to the possibilities…
Possibility 1 (out of thousands)
Monday 11.11.2024
Universe
For a couple of days, I haven’t moved, I remain in the same place, without gesture or spoken word.
I wonder what it’s like to be dead.
I guess it’s like my two dead days: you don’t move but things move and pass before your open eyes, they reflect there, something moves in front of your eyes, you too, but you don’t move, you’re just rotting away, your heart opens up and cries a blue liquid, your guts twist, your bones wear out without you moving, everything moves until you turn to dust.
Dust that will later move in the wind.
(everything is moving)
This morning, I watched through a piece of window how the new day presented itself to me: an open, damp mouth, a dark mouth breathing from the depths of its belly of piled clouds, colors tangled in the light that dripped wet among things, the day breathed with difficulty, slowly drowning in a storm, exhaling gusts of air, vomiting dry leaves.
It drizzled.
The day’s drool slid down the window, accumulated in the corners of my things, in my stillness, spread out on the bed.
The day that was dying opened its mouth to swallow me in a desperate bite before nightfall, like a mouthful of dark stillness, thoughts covered to the eyes with a heavy blanket.
Tears drawing lines on the skin, and I continued not moving, but moving.
Numb.
The universe continues expanding, says the podcast I listen to every Thursday.
Today I listened to episode 434, I hit play, and the universe continued expanding. I left my room with dry lips, a lost gaze, hunger as an excuse to get to the kitchen, stretching out and touching the back of the anger that appeared today and I keep (without anyone seeing) in my pocket, because it no longer fits in the closet.
The anger of a dead person.
The sun had set so low that it lay on my table, next to the clutter of my cutlery, glasses, it lay orange next to my dream and as the hours passed, it died among the hairs of my left arm.
I served myself coffee, two eggs, a toast, and I cut a peach of the season: furry, orange, fleshy, inside a wrinkled seed and inside the seed, an almond and inside the almond, a tree that hasn’t grown.
And as night arrived, I had breakfast with that coffee, those two eggs, that toast, and peach at 2 in the morning. The anger fell out of my pocket, and the universe continued expanding.
Maybe that’s why sometimes it’s so hard for me to get out of bed and throw myself out there, because the universe expands and I with it, everything stretches and the distance grows.
It hurts.
The universe, according to what I heard, is in adolescence.
A difficult age, you and I know it, adolescence and on top of that, expanding, while I ate the remnants of the yolks from my plate with my fingers.
The universe is growing legs, suffering growing pains, its voice is changing in some vocal cord that vibrates in a quasar, it’s growing a beard somewhere in a galaxy, the universe is falling in love, with all its planets in tow, its hormones explode and flutter like migrating monarch butterflies and its effects and destruction.
And the bulk of the population doesn’t know that right now the universe is still expanding.
The universe is to blame for my lack of movement, I don’t go with its adolescent rhythm, which expands and flutters, which rains and breathes. I curl up and sometimes age before the already so worn sky, before the so handled drizzle, before the daily grind, mouths that open and close, night falls in a throat, and so day after day, I age little by little.
The universe that was mine began expanding two weeks ago.
And still, the universe continues expanding and distancing us.
(it hurts)
Everything keeps moving.
Possibility 2 (out of countless others)
Monday 11.11.2024
Pacient
I spent two weeks in bed, suffering from a memory attack with convulsions and vomiting of forgetfulness, because you can get sick from those things too.
From what little I remember, it went like this: I was in the middle of a room full of people repeating things I keep repeating—repeating and repeating, redundancy intended—every repeated year.
Suddenly, it happened that the words came out of my mouth, repeated, and I kept forgetting them one after another. I said “sky” so many times and so worn out and looked up and there were no clouds or stars, just emptiness; I said “heart” and something withered inside me and my blood silently, without a gallop, stopped holding me up, I was suffocating, I said “sea” and we were left only with dead fish, dark foam, and a lot of mud, I was left with repeated bottomless coffees and the sound of waves that also disappeared, I said “Lima” and the city collapsed in a huge explosion, and everything kept disappearing in my speech, I kept forgetting everything I had lived up to that day, each word devoured my space, each past memory devoured my present until it left me without footing, and then, in front of those people, I collapsed.
I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine, with a view of a new sky that looked freshly painted because I had already forgotten the previous ones, the lost skies, the page skies, the worn-out skies, and the colors of other cities that I no longer remember either. I felt the touch of the sky-blue sheets like the sky, and I learned to relate words to things, new sensations were reconstructing my memory, the sky-blue with the sky, with the bed, with the sheets, with my newly painted world with a few things in a white and empty room, all new.
A nurse took my pulse and temperature, injected me with memory serum, and told me, “Your heart is fine”, and something beat inside very slowly, faintly, like the sigh of a train floating away from a city that lost hope.
She left me alone in the room, and the memory of so many tears I had was just a blur. It started to drizzle outside, and I dozed off.
They would wake me up periodically to inject me with that memory serum: large needles and colored tubes entered my veins and inside, my blood was refilled with cleaner ink-like liquid, floating over my new and blank insides.
Little by little, I began to recover my memory in that bed, under professional supervision, the memory no longer overwhelmed, tore apart, or swallowed me; it was simply a past movie projected on a television where each patient recovering from memory attacks watched their own movie without feeling like the protagonist anymore but someone else, venom therapy as an antidote, for the intoxication to generate antibodies.
And if I changed the channel, the memory always remained, and I always with everything repeated, like advertisements, cable movies, all repeated, and myself and the usual, my action, drama, comedy, and horror movies fixed on schedules, and if I wanted, I turned them off and I did.
A few days later, I was discharged, the test results said that from so much memory intoxication, I think I can now get over your gaze. I had generated the necessary antibodies to avoid dying from melancholy or nostalgia.
Or anything.
Part of the therapy was silence and confinement. I look at my veins and only have blood, my heart intact, and I am looking at my window, writing new words that are the same but no longer mean the same: now “word of honor” is a suit that will fit me well the day I remember everything again and now words like “memory” will be a part of my computer (of ideas) and “you” the second singular pronoun, alone and without a name, of my repeated and necessary grammar book to teach a foreign language that only tells the truth.
Possibility 3 (and I won’t bother you anymore)
Monday 11.11.2024
Silence
These days, I have no idea what I should do (or not do). I’ve looked at my life and the pages lived two weeks ago are blank, folded into a triangle like the mark of a before and after. There is a past we wanted to write, probably because I knew that two weeks later I would remember everything very clearly. I knew then that the blank pages would not mean forgetting, but rather a mark, spaces to be filled with memory because I also knew that in any subsequent November, any morning, I would wake up to see those blank pages as a sign of something real (though past) that will not happen again, not even in words.
So.
These days I’ve opted for silence.
One might think that silence happens when we have nothing to say or when there is nothing, but my silence is full of many real things that bubble and move somewhere inside me and of which I cannot speak due to a lack of references or beginnings.
The violence of things leaves me in silence, without time (or space) to search for or find in these same things (present or past) the images or words to bring them to the outside and stop being silent, to define them. Everything overwhelms and overflows me, nothing matches my rhythms.
Your last gaze left me in silence. I saw you walk away towards that plane, there was no hug or farewell, perhaps because we didn’t want to exchange our silences.
And now attempting to talk/write about these things that overwhelm me and bubble while I go through this period of silence would be just an attempt to draw them using examples from when you were here, turning them into something else. Thus, trying to express my silence would be an attempt to construct an image that resembles it, but not the same silence or what I live that bubbles inside, it would be something invented or fictitious, but not real.
Something like pain.
I know I’ve been living with a pain for some time. I don’t know where it comes from, what exactly causes it, or at what point it appears. I don’t even know if it’s a pain, but that’s what I call it—”pain”—because it’s similar to the sensation of a knife opening the skin, a violent punch crashing onto my nerve cells, the fall of a body onto a floor of glass. It resembles that a lot, so I call it “pain” because it’s the only word I’ve found among my lived experiences. Perhaps it isn’t.
The knife, the punch, and the broken glass are just fiction, the real thing is always inside, locked away somewhere.
If I remain silent, it’s not an attempt to flee from the real, nor isolation, but rather an attempt to get closer to it, to the real and the only thing I have. Like a silent journey into my marrow to see with my own eyes how the pain happens (while outside, a knife cuts my skin), silence to see the pain and not have to define it.
I wonder—nothing more—where all this begins. If I could find a starting point, it would then be easier to start a path, an initiation, and then move from one side to the other, defining lines and limits, and as a result of this journey, I would have an object before me, an object that I would recognize and keep somewhere as a useful reference for the unknown that will come.
Until recently, I thought that inside me lay the escape waiting to wake up and start a race from door slam to door slam and after all the inexplicable and the silence.
Now I realize that what I thought was an escape has been nothing but an encounter.
Knowing well what is left after the door slam and knowing what awaits you in destiny is not an escape.
Fleeing, I believe, is running away without knowing where from or anything towards a place of which you know neither its location nor anything about it.
(I have fled a few times then)
Being silent allows me to absorb—perhaps in an attempt to capture references to break the silence—all that moves around my senses.
Words arrive in chaos and pile up in front of me in dark heaps. How to take them to place them inside me, to meet that real silent thing and let them embrace in a reunion and align so I can express all that I carry within?
Words that could define something: the harsh expression of my gaze, my clenched fists, my lack of sleep, and even my silence.
Colors that drip from things, flowing like rivers seeking the ocean. How to take them—I wonder—without them mixing into a stain or getting lost in other colors?
I could drink them in small glasses or inject them into different veins, thus filling those empty-sounding words, filling all those empty spaces I’ve been defining with words, lines, and even gestures.
I spend my days alone with myself, listening to things like this, watching how spring moves in colors and there, the words, always the words piling up like my dirty laundry, words that always wait for me (and I for them),
In silence.