Today on the kitchen table there was a new potato masher, shiny and full of sharp little holes. It looked like a torture instrument…

If I put my brain in the potato masher, my thoughts would come out in strips, steaming, wrapped in the humidity of Lima.

Those thoughts are my daily mash. It’s what everyone calls: eating your brain. But I eat mine as mash.

Today I woke up with that feeling of happiness (I can tell you that I know what it is, or at least I know now) that pleasant dreams leave, where the skin feels like you’ve fulfilled the dream, but the head knows it’s over, that the dream ended and you’re awake, that you have one less dream and it probably won’t happen again…

Let me tell you,

That sometimes, when I’m walking through the streets, missing my cat has made me look for my cat in other cats. I found two black cats. One in a park yesterday that looked at me with the deepest, most impossible street cat love and never approached, even though I kept calling it. Today I met my neighbor’s cat, who is blind in one eye and disarms me, he came to me as soon as I called him and tangled himself around my legs, I gave him some ham I had bought, and then he bit me when I petted him on the side of his blind eye.

(My mother says I should get vaccinated for the cat bite, and I think what’s the point since I’ve been wandering around rooftops for a while, and you have to die of something, if not of love then of rabies, forgive my unhappy phrases, but today I’m under a gray sky that gets darker and darker, but I’m happy, yet gray phrases still sprout from me, heh!)

Today I realized that the absence that hurts is not really absence, but a constant and eternal presence of what we miss, in the form of ghosts so dense they can be touched in everything and that touch us, leaving the living traces of death on our skin, the memory of ice, the forgetfulness that doesn’t exist and is a rock, the pain of emptiness that isn’t empty as we believe but is full of the absence that is not absence but presence, and that’s why it always bleeds.

It’s not forgetfulness that hurts, but memory.

It’s not absence that hurts, but the presence of that anguish.

It’s not death that hurts, but being alive.

That’s what I realized today when I stepped out of the shower, a little while ago when I stood naked looking at the empty mirror.

And speaking of that presence, I can talk about losses:

Since I’ve known you

I have lost many things

this has been

love

under embargo

because I have lost

my clothes

(they still haven’t arrived)

my head and my hat

the heart you took

my nights without startles

and my hurtful truths

I have lost my “never again”

and I have lost my name

because my name in your mouth

I know it sounds different

as if it were a story

I have lost

my eyes in yours

my eyes that see what you see

my words that don’t speak

my lines that draw your name

I have even lost my body

and left it in the closet

waiting for you to arrive

to pat it on the shoulder

and revive it

and I have also lost my fear

I already said it

because fear disappears

when I think about you all day.