I…
I always wondered what grammatical truth consisted of—that infallible formula everyone talks about, or at least the great writers do; that cardiac state in which reason and a love for words merge into a good discourse, into a radiant text, into a cluster of letters that erode the conscience.
What am I supposed to do to have impeccable, almost pure texts?
It was a constant question within me. I even preferred to read those immense texts rather than do my math assignments. I preferred reading Tolstoy, with his warlike and devout commandments, over turning in a form as a means of salvation; the truth is, it was impossible for me to abandon a fragmented narrative just to attend to matters that only provoke idleness, mental heaviness, or the endless resolutions of a formula. Let the intelligent ones take care of that. I—a female dissolved in the strident riffs of electric guitars, with a “ridiculous” hairstyle and a plausible urge to poeticize the world—was not going to waste time on trivialities.
I wrote about almost anything, even the simplest, the most visceral things. I felt like a scribe just by pausing to narrate whatever it might be. Verbs, accents, here, there, nouns, subjects, of me, of others, conjunctions between links.
Now, I recall Professor Remedios from calculus telling me: “They’re just letters—just assign them a value.” There lies the answer to all my reasonable doubts.
I found a certain pleasure in immersing myself in the stories I read, and then, in an innocent way, “imitating” that precision in my writing—the romanticism of punctuation marks and their most exact conjugations constantly seduced me.
II….
Besides, who would have thought that that remark—uttered with a hint of arrogance about my lack of understanding, attentive skill, or exemption—would become the little push I needed to begin narrating, to play with words, to respect them, and to grow fond of the conjunctions that form when one gives them a bit of care. But no, don’t think this comes from a place of overcoming some academic trauma. Rather, I had to make this little announcement to tell you that something happened today, right when I had my head against your chest and your arms were holding me from behind, while I turned my face to look back and then found yours.
I realized that I have written you some words—words that say nothing more than what you make me feel. Each one weaves together the nervousness I feel when I see you from afar, across that corridor; I see you approaching and my heart races too fast, as if it could beat louder, even outside of me. But I can’t be watching for the exact moment you arrive—I’m not “the fox from The Little Prince”—that’s why I invent these texts. How silly, right?
I’ve written you many others with touches of madness, mixed with sweetness—born from my fascination with Benedetti—paradoxes because of Borges, or pieces that lack a bit of sense in the spirit of Sabines. Others recount the kind of dogma your presence creates in me, the way you appeared, almost like the perpetual cycle of atoms—tiny stories that, unmoving, I sit down to write to you so that in a free moment you might read them and then realize that things can also be discovered through little letters, and that, just as your science says, your atoms and mine traveled through interstellar space until they gathered to form these letters to which “we must assign value”…
Photography by Regina Arellano Muñoz
