Shades of perfection

A: This strange habit of yours of idealizing people as they go on performing the most mundane activities.

B: Choosing a book is not necessarily mundane.

A: I know, but you have just said that she looks so perfect as she goes through the isles.  I mean, you don't even know her!

B: I agree with that.  But, look at her!  She does look perfect.  The light coming through the windows makes a perfect match with the shadows and specks of dust around her.  The way her hair hangs from her scalp, half curly, half straight, as she tilts her head to see the books on the lower shelves.  The natural, calm stare in her eyes as she reads through the titles.

A: Ok!  I'll give you that we are at an angle from where everything combines in order to create an almost mystical ambience to her surroundings.  But then...  Why even look?

B: What's wrong with looking?

A: I don't know!  It seems like you have almost envisioned a whole life with her.  Like you could practically aim to start a relationship based on the perfection you, and only you, have seen from a particular place you happened to be drinking coffee at a library!

B: Woow! I never said that! I just said she looked perfect!

A: My point precisely!  Perfect for what?  For you?

B: Well..

A: So, what you are saying is that just because she looks just the way she is supposed to look, out of mere library design, you can practically predict what your life with her would be like?

B: I wouldn't dare predict anything.  I just stated what she looked like to me.  It has been you who dared see beyond what I said.  How deeply do you think you know me?

A: Well, you now seem guilty about it all...

B: I'm not feeling guilty.  I just regret having shared anything at all.

A:  Why is that?

B: You seem quite upset about it.

A: Well.  That's your reading through me as well.  How well do you think you know me?

B: You're right.  Is this then the way you usually make conversation?

A: No.  I have to confess I was upset.

B: You're not anymore?

A: Not after I heard how you regretted sharing anything with me.  I'm sorry.  I just saw your gaze drifting away from me, and reacted like that.  Couldn't handle myself.



Spanish version here

Dear sadness

Be welcome again.  I know you had been waiting for your chance.  And now at last you have settled in after lost calls that were found after the earthquake and among hurricane clouds.

Truth is I missed you.  Not like when one yearns for the lover that is gone, but like the memory of that which I become when you are here.  Powerful senseless habit.  Dear sadness, however, I would rather that you not be, that you not show the confidence that you show.  I would opt for you to listen to my guts as they rustle, and to how your presence detriments me.  Maybe then you could start collecting some taste of compassion.  

Image:  Aldo Monges

I would love to be able to have you mixed up with fury, anger without a reason and without mercy.   But reality is that we needed to finally get together, it was now time that you invaded me with your anxiety attacks after one or two hours of poor sleep.  It was now time that you became this nuisance, with your bland necessity that ages and then is reborn lush every time I open my eyes in panic, realizing that I have forgotten to breathe.  My heart is closer to its last beat thanks to you, so powerful and, at the same time, so wilted. 

Dear sadness, I shall be at your mercy for a time now.  A glorious time of obscurity within failure.  Infamous lapse without foundation during which I shall try to give an explanation to my falls and to the shattering of the world I used to live in.  Interval at which I shall outline a glimpse of understanding toward the very life that is escaping me.  Thanks to you I know I am human, I understand that I am alive, right here and now, without need of further evidence other than my words, my silence, and the torrent of my blood that gets slumped each time you accumulate until you become anxiety.  

Dear sadness, my old friend, be welcome.  Understand that I am accepting you because you are beautiful in essence.  You remind me that losses are such because once there were dreams.  Stubborn, you invoke in my mind moments of emotional wreck because, at some time in the past, my heart and somebody else's had conjugated rhythms to form harmonies as beautiful and spontaneous as whole universes.  You let me comprehend that you are temporary and situational.  Circumstantial.  And, in your visit, as long and uncomfortable as it may be, I'll allow myself to bless you, since I know that, when I finally shake you off from my now broken and muted unfolding, at last, peace will come. 

Spanish version here

Lost souls

My brother is a wise man.  Many times I find him odious, but truth be told he has got my admiration as far as life situations and experiences, mostly in all this wisdom he carries around, but that generally never uses.  Hence his barren, lonely existence.

Yesterday he was telling me how the Greeks had actually written everything there was to write.  Since the Greeks, there has been nothing new.  Everything that has been written, everything that has been said can be identified without problem as a byproduct of Greek thought.  Except for love.  Greeks never philosophized about love.  But for that, humanity required situational attributes that only the experience of centuries could provide, since everything we experience, in many ways, passes on in memories throughout the generations.  The pains of the heart, the passionate love, the warmth in one's muscles as one becomes a participant of a full surrender to the other.  The envy and jealousy made to come, in many a chance thoughtlessly, by the one we love.  The very same obsession and even the very feeling of being possessed by feelings that are impossible to get a hold of.  Centuries had to go by for someone to be able to write the only thing that still needed to be written.  Finally, William Shakespeare gave it to us.  He granted our kind with a brutal understanding of incomprehension itself.  He gave us all the right to set out on restrictionless loving, with outbursts and ravings, with the desperate and euphoric surrender that only can be supplied by those who suffer from spasms and panic attacks in lieu of the momentary loss of that only person that sets them on fire like dragon flares.

It is so easy -says my brother as he lights his cigarette- for two souls that have found each other to give themselves away in the deepest of ways.  All that is required is both wills.  That is all.  And there will not be a force in the universe that prevents them both from finding, loving and interweaving each other's fates together.  Montagues, Capulets, whomever there may be, and as widely they may be distributed within the universe shell.  If the wills of both are there, distance in all of its shades will matter nought, and absolute hatred will not transcend above them.  Nothing will stop them both from loving, given that is their wish.  If that is what they truly want.  Two souls will overcome all obstacles in order to get to the experience of being, in unison.

Sadly, it is easier for the most intrinsic bonds to fade, get destroyed, and eventually turn into nausea and dark, painful oblivion.  Because, for that to occur, all is needed is that, from both, only one becomes undecided.  For two hearts to wind out dead to each other, all is needed is one of them bringing up excuses.  Only one to stop committing.  Or that only one starts giving conditions to love, or decides ceasing their loving.

My brother is wise, and he tells me all of this with gleeful loud voices, since that is the way he makes actual conversation.  Little does he know that this thing he is sharing with the joy of recent discovery is too painful to be heard.  I look into my watch, and make up that I have to go now.  We say goodbye, and I walk crying to the nearest subway station.

Spanish version here

To change is to disappear

I am change.  I am the spinal cord of what you so vividly yearn for, and at the same time of that which you are so afraid of.  I am all of your opportunities soon to come, and I am all of your losses.  You look at my face, but you are never able to predict me.  I am unbearable and endless fire.  I am your soul that suffers because of your heart that can never seem to finally comprehend.  I am your burning eyes.  I am your body that yells, and that winds out accepting that, without me, you just cannot keep being.  Because, as I am construction, I am also erosion, I am pedantic intransigence overflown by the passing of time.

I am change, and it is because of me that you disappear by the little.  I am dethroning you, without you being aware of it, and from whatever joy in your soul there will be nothing but remains, feeble memories without connection.  I am the contrast between what you think happened and what actually occurred.  I am an infinite bunch of interpretations and perspectives.  I give you moments of enlightenment, so that I can then disrupt your conclusions.  And in lieu of this I, in my pure capriciousness, am forcing you to vanish.  So that you stop being you, so that you stop thinking so much about yourself.  For you to try at least at moments to put me in your agenda, so we could happen to meet, talk, understand each other, and die together with no trouble amongst us.

I am your cowardice.  I am your teachings.  I am your fascination.  I am each time that you tried to help someone understand, each moment that you achieved conquering love, each feeling that turned you into an unscrupulous, shameless creature.  I am that piercing moment that made you a hero to the eyes of that who most mattered.  I am you, but tomorrow.  I am you, two seconds after your heart has been ripped apart.  I am you, without the pieces of your soul that have been killed.

I am change, and thanks to me, you disappear all the time.  You cease being.  You cease understanding. You behave as if you had just been born, and as if you already knew how life is supposed to work.  I am your wasteful spendings, and your encounters.  I am your contexts and epiphanies.  I am your undermined life turned into and infinite void.  Unbearable solitude.

But I am also that who gives you freedom.  I am that who inspires and provokes your most gorgeous thoughts, your most extravagant ideas.  Your kindest behaviors and your most considerate compromises.  I am your bravest attitudes, and your best moments of care and loyalty.  Your love conversations until the whole world just seems to not be there anymore, and your eyes finally close.  I am your most tenacious attempts at learning.  I am your body which, amidst intangible processes, never ceases to be born.  So you are right to always be feeling like this.  I am your healing heart, I am your ever emanating beauty, I am your soul as it shines the most.  I am the moment of that first kiss, I am that infinite instant of unconnected nervous ends at last feeling together.  I am your life.  I am your desire.  I am you...

Original Spanish version here

The last animal of fire

The last animal of fire, in his lonely, dark cave, slept dreaming without thinking since, in his animal quality, his cerebral traits were somewhat limited.  He was dreaming with the last time he made love, and the last time he saw a female still alive.  In his dream the world was a monumental embrace of fire and coal, and his dwelling was tainted with a redness that did more than live, it bubbled with a gleefulness that dyed the air with enormous sparks.  He had already convinced the female that this was a nest worthy of their progeny.  He let her get installed at the warmest site of the crater that he had suffered so much to conquer.  He had expelled and rejected dragons with so many beautiful shades in their scales that he could not remember them anymore.  She, his partner, seemed to be at peace in the spot he had chosen; however, he knew that soon she would start to get violent to the extent of releasing flame gusts through each one of her pores.  It was the natural process.  But he would wait and keep her right.  He would withstand the physical touch of her skin turned into embers, and would keep her in her place with cuddles and subtle hugs wrapped with his wings.  He would bear all of this for love.  Her horns penetrating his neck, and the last flare from her mouth coming into his the way explosions do.  And only then, with her being exhausted and frankly soothed, he could, with the little strength he would have left, end the act of love.  Then, for an instant, for a magic moment of ecstasy that would not last more than a second and that would not be repeated for years, they would both at the same time become beings with blood cold and barren.  Lonely beings keeping company to each other at the moment of that which for dragons is an actual explosion.  To be together and be one with each other for an eternal instant at which the future would be perpetuated with their seeds.

All of this was still imagination within the dream of the last animal of fire.  He came back from his daydream within his oneiric unreality and contemplated once more how his partner was getting comfortable, knowing that this was the peace before the storm of the courtship soon to be consummated.  He looked at his dragoness and found her beautiful, just at the time that a flock of men, behind her back, came out of the back part of the crater under the mountain with their evil yearning for extermination.  The animal of fire, scared as he was before the view of what was approaching, started flying immediately towards his loved one to protect her now that she was defenseless within the aim of the human spears, but he never reached his destination...  

He woke up in the cold darkness of his cave with his wings extended towards an embrace that just wrapped on thin air.  Anguished and upset, he did not try to explain what had just happened, but he continued searching for his dragoness with his eyes, knowing that he would not find her, since in this wretched shelter no female would ever lay their gaze.  He then kept quietly monitoring in search of threatening men, but he did not find them either.  Soon after, he quit, and stabbed the wet, earthy ground with his chin, and -even when in his animal quality he had no awareness of his having dreamt and remembered- without knowing what that stabbing pain was that ripped from his heart, he became sadness invaded, and two confused tears added moisture to his eyes to vaporize at the touch of his scaled skin, love forgotten...

Circle draw

To dwell in one's mind, to live in its unlimited silence. Swinging with the winding meadows of one's very own soul, worn weary, worn out. To not be able to turn around, or to come out. To find fault with everything within, and not be able to mend any of it.

To change perspective. To bring different visions about. To fiercely hurt that which can not be undone, but that can be traced, hunted, and, finally, wounded. Never killed.

To kindly remind ourselves that it is not changing that we need: It is profound awareness of what we actually are, so we can shine. So we can at least help darkness into clarity, into misted garments of pale, dim light.

To roar. To cry. To bear and tear. To heal. To become healed. To appease.

To let others lean. To let others sing. Sing out. To let them do. To let them, for a time, dwell in their minds as well. And find their hearts within.

Sometimes

Sometimes I wonder why the urge to write is more strident when my heart is torn.
At times I turn back and feel that there's nothing to write related to what I was before.
I'm dead since I let go of the things that I once shared, the feelings that blew up within the paragraphs that I here I used to baste.
I chose to kill myself and be happy, live and transcend on other plains, on other lives.
I regret not.
I accept it in the most humane manner, I live it in the most mundane way.
Caressing moments and late nights.
Intesifying the lines of indelible roads.
I contemplate myself and I know I'm everyday older, stronger and less prone.
My nose is a hook.
My eyes glittered, but now they're sombre.
I'm falling from a cliff manufactured with a permanent levity.
I have ceased growing.
I hide my introspections from the people I love, so as not to hurt them.
I'm water.
I rain and then steam away.
I sometimes run without aim because I'm pouring everywhere...

Sometimes I wonder why the urge to write is more stident when my heart is torn.

______________________________

Click here for original Spanish version.