Ghost

You open the newspaper of March 2, 2012, you think it is absurd to read the notices of occasion, you know that you like obituaries better, but who cares, you have to entertain yourself with something. You look carefully, it seems as if someone had put it there for you, and you read:

Lonely ghost seeks friend, companion in the world of the dead, who is able to hold conversations with strangers. She will be provided with parties and situations never experienced before. Requirements: no pulse and complete solitude, refrain from calling if you have a beating heart. Contact at 32682762.

And you lack one of the requirements, but how many times have you not thought about getting rid of your existence. If you die, you will stop visiting the museums, the streets of Centro Historico, Parque Mexico, really? If I die I will have time to do everything I could not imagine I would do.

Danger. Danger. Danger.

It would be so much easier to be dead, brains spilling out onto the pavement. The truth is that I have never been a person of many friends, in fact I have none. All my life I have wandered through parks, squares, bookstores and movie theaters with the simple company of my shadow. I would like to be dead, because it would be more comfortable to be alone without corporeal form. If I were not alive, if I were a ghost, I could enjoy myself fully, sit among the trees, pluck the grass, play with the squirrels. I would not have to ask anyone's permission, nor would I create lies or explanations, I would simply be me, for me.

If I stay alive any longer, I will lose any chance of living. As a ghost I could walk the streets of Coyoacán, during the night I would not be afraid; I would hang from the street lamps, the roofs, the branches. In my volatile and transparent body I would find the way to converse with the fireflies; silence would no longer be one of my problems, there are days when I prefer not to hear anything, not to hear from anyone. I am afraid to remain me.

How to get rid of this useless body? Nothing can save me. I fast to disappear, but then hunger and, sometimes more than hunger, responsibility force me to break my goal. In any case it would not be so ingenious to die of anorexia, I will have time later to enjoy my lack of weight. If I open the windows I don't feel like jumping into the void. Slashing my wrists? I've already been there, holding back the pain, the trickle of blood. No, I must find an aesthetic death.

I have a decomposed body, I owe it all to the constant vomiting, to reality; but I cannot wait for everything to crumble inside my body, that would take years, I want to die NOW!

There are days when I slowly cross the street, as if waiting for the miracle worker. No one comes. One cyanide capsule and it's all over. There would be no nostalgia for the past, nostalgia for what never was and never will be. I never had better times, I have always been unbalanced. I'm getting dizzy, I feel out of control in my body, a kind of electricity that cramps my stomach; I want to vomit. I am subordinated to the enumerations of my suicides; the other is a pretext to corroborate my own existence.

Photography by Isa Gelb