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

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.

A and B

Hermano B (alegre): Caminé diez kilómetros desde mi casa hasta aquí. Me siento muy bien.

Hermano A (gritando y esquivando el abrazo): Ya lo sé, maldito inconciente. La única razón por la que dios te ubicó en esta familia fue para que te pusiéramos una correa como a los perros. Ven y abrázame donde no te pegue el sol.

Hermano B (con el corazón roto): Está bien.

Hermano A (visiblemente enfadado): ¿Por qué te viniste caminando?

Hermano B (con plena conciencia de su simple verdad): ¡Porque quise!

(continuará...)

___________________________________________________

Brother B (joyful): I walked ten kilometers from home to get here. I feel pretty good.

Brother A (yelling and walking away from the hug): I know, you freakin' irresponsible bastard. The only reason why god brought you to this family was so that we could put a leash on you like a dog. Come and hug me where the sun won't hit you.

Brother B (with his heart broken): Alright.

Brother A (obviously pissed): Why did you walk all the way here?

Brother B (with a full awareness of his simple truth): Because I felt like it!

(to be continued...)

All is so easy

Sometimes I get so desperate from being so busy. Physically, mentally and emotionally. My job, my fianceé, my no-moneyness, facebook, my classes, the material, the powerpoint slide shows, the final exams, the students, the principals, my bosses, the commitments, my debts, the grades, the extraordinary exams, the championship that's coming, my car, her dog, my mum, my siblings, my friends, Santos, the amount of minutes in my mobile, my clothes, my room, the not-working washing-machine, the people around us, our wedding, the photo shoot, the reception, the feast, the money, the guests, the godfathers, the ring, the proposing evening, the bridal shower and the bachelor party, the presents, my neglected live spaces, my equally neglected blogspot sites, my net friends, los tres coyotes, the freaking suicidal stupid man, the waiting, the nerve, my always showing a good face, the uninvited suddenly appeared, the invitations, the flower arrangements, the video shoot, the Summer vacations that come without a single dime, my eternal search, my pawned bass guitar, the cousins, the uncles, the aunts, the family, my unableness to ask for things -whatever to whomever-, my constant need to always eat in solitude, the concerts I'm not going to, my college buddies, the trips, students who love me, students who hate me, my Michigan diploma with honors, my recognition as the best teacher in front of the dean and all, the wine, the canapé servings, the waiters, the bar-tender, the TV, the fridge, the air conditioning system, the biweekly coffee that turns out to be into dinner for five at applebee's, our munchies, my empty wallet, the sacrificed music with a goosebumpy smirk, the loss that it involves, the death rasping breathing that it promotes, my stress-caused belly growth, my smile, the writing, the reports, the parents of my students that come to visit just to get to meet the teacher of their creatures, the monthly parties made to celebrate all the birtday people, my bad thoughts, my good thoughts, my intransigence of heart that keeps on not listening to my good sense which takes millenia to be aware of my emotinal state, the politics, the flattering, my car wrapped with the local team's flags, my library fines, the books, my computer, the quaranteened applications, the Trojan horses, my nephews, Nicholas, the repairs on our new house, the real estate agents that won't stop getting me through hell just to sell, the payroll receipts, my original birth certificate which says I'm a woman due to a typing mystake, the fucking heat that whips my city, the fence that shall be erected, the window protections, the house widening, the date in which it'll be given to us, the paper signing, the delays, the down payments, the honeymoon, the vacations, the days that we won't we working, the thoughts that just won't stop bothering, her depilation, the make up, my hair that just won't allow any control, the motor oil leak, the translations, the invitations I get to play with other bands, the curtains, the furniture, the trousseau, the dinner, the packages, the bride-shows, the prices, the discounts, my dirty little mind corners, my paranoia, my expectations, my eagerness, my need to get rid of everything and just go on with chaos, my urgency to have order, my family, the balance, the computer payments, internet, the events, the lawn, the lizards, the bridges being built throughout the city which take five minutes each from each of my commutes, her hands, her eyes, the feeling of drunkedness that they cause on me, the lack of concentration, the bouquet, the wedding band, the church, the garter, the lab tests, the civil wedding, the bride magazines, the time that's left and barely lets us make it, her PMSings, our Tuesday's movies, the endless leaflets, tryptichs and bulletins that are now like my car's inside tapestry, the disorganization, her waist, the countless assholes that keep hitting on her knowingly of the fact that she's soon getting married, those mother-fuckers, my laughter, mi vice, her posture, the salads we both make, our ignoring the past, the vampires, my castle on knighthood, my vasals, my songs, my need to sing and yell, the talks, the judgements and prejudices, the emotional charge, the music-knowledge tests, the fact that I winded out being Han Solo on my Star Wars personality test, the value of being, her lips, my restlessness, her father who won't even talk to me, my father whom I won't even turn to look at, our powerless mothers, my unquenchedness, my lack of inspiration, my ego, my libido that demands, my extremities that search and only in her they find my truth, my fate, my punishment, my struggle, my heaven, my grace and my peace...

Spanish version

Regarding how Ariadna finally accepted that witches do exist

Which freaking witches? She thought as she saw Daniela's sent mail's subject. You're the witch, she told Daniela from here in Mexico all the way to the west boundaries of downtown New Zealand's capital. She, being here, with all the sense of decency that only solitude without her best friend's vacation brought up, and Daniela being there in paradise showing off her being able to send stupid mails.

There was a boy that had been looking at her since a while ago, sitting two tables away from her. The guy chit-chatted, smiled and laughed with a friend of his whose face she couldn't see. The crossing of a glimpse of hers with his definite beholding baffled her at first, but then it came strangely over her just like the fixed gaze of a lover in obviously contained insanity, in such a way that, a little while afterwards, she knew that she herself was feasting her eyes with waves of glimpses over the screen of her laptop.

Daniela's mail was one of those chained things. Poorly written and so commomplace now that internet was so concurred. Everything seemed too annoying and lacking coherence for the friendship level that she and Daniela had managed to grow. In fact, it was thinking in their friendship that she decided to read it all.

She read a little bit here and then she looked up. He wasn't looking anymore, but his body language was too obvious. He had opened his legs so that she could see deep into his Jamaican bermuda. Blond. Impressive aqua green eyes. His hair seemed to keep a perfect balance with tidiness even though they looked as if they hadn't even been a bit watered for a couple of days. He was shaved, though.

Suddenly, he looked back at her now hiding less and she, stupidly, went back to reading her witchcraft mail. Make a wish, she could read while she scrolled the text. You've got 10 seconds. The stupidest thing was that most of those silly chained mails even had a countdown from 10 to 1 so that the readers would concentrate in whatever they wished for.


Do you want to know what Ariadna wished for? Click here!

REVENGE

Revenge does not grant relief in itself.
It is mostly the fact of our now being aware of our being able to act in a more despicable way than that who has damaged us.
It is the fact of knowing ourselves as being worse human beings than those who trespass against us.
It is believing ourselves as justified to do wrong.
It is having ceased being afraid because we know ourselves to be superior to the hurt that may be inflicted on us.
It is to wield a banner that gloriously, overwhelmingly and proudly leads a retinue that now has taken a strong hold of life and comes back home...
To hell...

His tears were made of stone

During that masterly dream, Manuel glimpsed until the death of his epiphany that the only transcendental thing he could possibly scribble in his eternal and boring autobiography would be having conceived children.
After so many studies, provings, tries and errors, ambiguous and secular experiences.
Several, none, all and the only one.
Decisions, some erudite and other ones anger-sheltering.
Reactions, contempts, absolute or pleading intentions to hurt and even to kill.
Or to love.
How different could they ever be?
The most sincere of his words told him that depressed was barely a nickname, a sentence to define, a blurry state that just wouldn't end up his poisoning.
He wasn't twenty-five yet and he already felt as having reached the top of his capabilities.
He was aware of his being common, austere, plausible and definitely one-handed.
Just a man.
Mr father.
One more.
He felt like crying.
His eyes wouldn't respond, though.
Nothing did, since his soul dryness was turning him into a statue.
He hungered for being released from the chains that now skewered him away from life.
But at trembling, he proclaimed that nothing was now under his control, if it ever happened that anything was.
So drifting.
No pride.
Lacking of a peaceful backwater.
So much love, so much work.
So lusty.
So fun within the sin that in its moment was almost barbaric and arrogant but that by today was left worse than degraded.
Merely common-placed.
Less than that.
Just another series of stupidities.
A totalitarian stain.
That turned him almost into an animal.
Nothing now.
Only boredom.
And no tear whatsoever.

Imbecil...

Why?

That who eternally seeks, by universality devotes his life to seeking. He rarely finds.
Who has found never lost what he's encountered. He's always known where it was.
Who has arrived just as he promised didn't get lost on the way. His essence is spotless.
Who has been found was waiting for his being looked for. His need has defined him.

That who always knew himself has always been what he is.
He exists.
He guides.
He chooses.
He does not touch: He feels.
Lives.
His value goes further away from what simple mortality represents.
His joy resides in everything that there is, everything that is surrounded by his presence.
The truth is that his happiness does not matter, though.
He does not search it, he does not claim for it, does neither frivolize nor idealize it, doesn't yearn for it.
Why?

Espacios

Jonás was his name and, like everyone or like no one, the whole of him was an enormous cetacean due to all he carried within. Pondering were all of the meaningful figures that wandered inside his stomach. Memories, wounds, recalls, beautiful moments. We can't go on being stuck in here, said all to each other. All of them agreed on this, however none could simply go away. There was a memory of her lost mother that kept clinging there trying to heal his stress-related heartburn. The images of his wedding and his first happy days with his wife smoothed the pain caused by his stomach ulcer. And so on. Jonás himself sometimes talked with his organs and apologized for the work overload or thanked them for their always punctual and efficient duties. His heart seemed particularly praiseworthy to him. Always in a constant struggle with the nervous system. Blood flowing and electricity thundering here and there.

Sometimes, Jonás realized that he -meaning his essence- was not in any of his organs. It was in those moments, as he floated in air without looking back or without allowing any physical sentiment, that he felt truly Jonás. He flew then. Suddenly a whole new series of ethereal appendixes like enormous rows sprouted from within his whale fins and everything turned into simply pure. He forgot nothing, but nor did he remember. His body was at peace: the ulcer, the small clots in his veins, the hereditary inkling from arthritis that would never develop fully just because he was a man, the callus that was turning into stone underneath his left food, the recurrent pain in his ears. The whole of him was a weightless little paper in the shape of a sperm whale.

When Jonás was at one, some of his memories managed to get one-way tickets to oblivion. They raised their tiny little thousand-shaped and varied-smoothed hands as if they were old-fashioned single virgins hopping and jumping to reach for the just-thrown-to-the-air bride's bouquet. They said "me! me!" And in the end some of them went away, leaving empty spaces for the others to fill at will, and others remained there sunk in envies and unevenness. They sent then messages to the brain that said "we're still here!" And the pain started once again. Jonás then went back to his litany of ailments and unprescribed medicine, and peace was then missed, longed for as beauty is needed when it's not there.

Then some day, cancer arrived and all, all of the organs without exception, started to fear a coming invasion. The stomach died and along died the rest of the organs and it was like so that Jonás died. With nothing else to say. Like everyone or like no one. His last thought was in fact a feeling. A moment of communion of his body in which all of the moments, memories, experiences, schemes, feeling and images of his life gathered together just to say " "

Spanish version

A fable

Once, there was a simple ant that had desperately fallen lost into love limbo for a beautiful light moth. It came to happen that this ant's almost nightly work schedule allowed it to contemplate dawn while heading towards the huge hole that all of the ants had invented themselves, to the point that one day she saw the small light moth emerging as if bulleted in direction to the sky. What a sublime creature, said the ant. Marry me, it said. But the moth was too focused in her task of reaching the light, all the time insisting and trying to figure out some strategy to reach it.

This story has no end. It's always the same, and it's made as if a mockery of any lost cause. Because the ant may as well invent herself some wings to fly, but it will surely not fly towards the light anyway. Because, even though in a moment of distraction the moth might turn her gaze to where the ant stares at her with awe, she will never see in its tender love-filled little eyes any other thing than a light even more radiant than any light bulb's, to which she's compeled to go. She'll try to understand it, grab it and almost swallow it, without realizing that what causes that light isn't but a reflection of herself through a stranger's eyes.


click here for the original Spanish version.

Nothing and everything to write about

Busy.
Loooots of work.
Lots of stress.
Projects.
Headaches.
Porcelain has been broken at last.
But there're always more gods.
Impossible to concentrate when you're not working.
You ran over a donkey the other day just because of your being unfocused.
The following week your car almost rolls over with everything inside, including your friend.
You're still amazed to have come out of it alive.
Your actions do have true consenquences.
However, everything seems so surreal.
Another friend, almost lost.
The future settles itself and there's no other choice above holding it by where it lets itself be grabbed.
And now it seems you don't even know what to do with so much money you're earning.
But, it isn't that much anyway.
You just had gotten used to lacking it.
There are cycles to be closed.
Or you can just keep on rolling over.
September was truly an avalanache of more than memorable proportions.
Fortune's coming.
But the scale always keeps moving.
Always...



click here for original spanish version

Still life

"I don't understand why in this house that pineapple is always on top of all, darned conceited fool. She's always there, showing her malformed crest and boasting about her abdominal squares crowned with their little forelocks, more shriveled than myself." That who was talking under the concealment caused by the other fruits was the pear, forgotten at the bottom of the prodigious fruit bowl that the painter used for his still-life paintings.

The other fruits, the pouched mango, the sugar cane, the Chinese cantaloupe, the smelly guava, the exposed peaches with tiny nectar drops, the bananas and the purple grapes, kept silent since the weight that the vain pineapple exerted upon them was too much. Besides, the touch of its shell produced some stinging due to its so many protuberances and dry roots. It seemed better that it remain on top, thought all, because if it were underneath, we'd surely be stung by her hard green gray and marred pompon.

"I love the smell that always comes out of this room" a voice was heard. It was the beautiful woman that in ocassions was with the artist. She was crossing the lintel of the door and she looked ecstatic, as if finding out something that now made her understand. She was light-dressed, with a long white gown in almost transparent layers that seemed to reveal but didn't but for the opening that it had below the crutch. "You hadn't shown me this place" said she without turning back but obviously aware that the painter was listening to her at her back with both his hands strongly fit grasping the upper part of the door frame. It was noticeable that the painter held the aluminum tightly so as to restrain his anxious steps towards the woman and get to her in a violent plead for a lust outburst. To him, in this moment, this room was the least voluptuous place in the universe, simply because it was taking time away from her afternoon and night with her.

"You'll have to explain to me how it is that you get inspired to paint", said she, with her soft hands sliding over the empty canvass of days and days without being able to give expression to what any ideas soever. He kept ironically silent, rocking underneath the horseshoe that was nailed below the irregular wooden ceiling. She, nevertheless and despite the expansion she created in his anxiety, did not await an answer and kept on walking graciously till reaching the thick cedar table in which lay the candles and the fruits cloistered within the measureless glassy-coloured bowl. She lay her hand underneath her chin in a thoughtful attitude with a murmuring moan at the time she observed the whole composition. "This pineapple doesn't seem right in here" said she. "It looks like it's crushing everything else". And, right before the painter's eyes that opened wide like broken piggy banks and before his muscles that tightened as hanging bridge's wires, without anymore talk, she grabbed the huge fruit by its hardened hair with both her hands and dropped it off the table like someone who tosses a ball for it to reach the kitchen bouncing and hopping.

As she did so, an even more intense scent than the whole room's came out from the bottom of the bowl. It was a pear that had been buried under red apples even with its very smell inside its grave. And the smell had been concentrating down till creating this aphrodisiac compound of taste-without-inspiration days. So, still ever flabbergasted as moments passed by, the painter watched how the beautiful woman dismounted the heap of fruits that still didn't seem to satisfy him in order for him to start painting, until she could reach where the pear was free at last and exposed to the light that showed its reality: it was stale.

"You'll have to use fresh fruits for your paintings, beauty", said she gesturing some graceful sarcasm with the spoiled fruit's stem between her fingers. She kept on walking now more slender in her posture up to reaching the corner where the waste basket was. She threw the pear with an accurate basketball-player pass and went on towards the kitchen making her way under his right armpit and arm. "I'm hungry", she said. "Have you got anything to eat?"


Original Spanish version here