Narrative
“We look for the sermon in suicide, the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, we select the most viable option among the multiple options. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the changing phantasmagoria that constitutes our real experience.”
–Joan Didion
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Certificate of presence
My mother inside a frame. How many photographs do I have of her, of my father, of my brother, of my sister? I think the sound of the shutter delivers a sentence. Every photograph kills twice.
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Black
I thought that by closing my eyes it would go away. The result was far worse than the initial problem: now it was inside my mind, wandering through my thoughts, invading my dreams and memories. In each of them it had already been there, and I had never noticed its presence.
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Existenz
Because I am not my body. I am not this decay nor this fly-specked flesh. Or at least, I refuse to be. And yet I am, and with enormous pathos I try to adorn it, because it is the only thing I can offer you. The only thing I can receive from you.
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Own pace
Suddenly, every person walking beside me becomes the author of something important. I don’t know exactly what, and I’m not concerned with finding out. Some knowledge is spoiled the moment it is named.
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Squat
A huge unhappiness has settled in my heart for the past month at night. I had seen it wandering through the bar I frequent, lingering among the people there, asking insistently if anyone had a spare room that another feeling wasn’t already occupying. No one answered, and that made me feel so bad that I approached it.
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In living flesh
A year from now, its shadow will still accompany you, decorating the permanent stain of a makeshift patch, an addition of topography on the map of your skin. Evidence that, at that moment, you felt everything in living flesh, and now its mark has become part of you.
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Death according to the father
You were struggling in vain, incredulous being; you were crying like an infant. Father, your irony! I was questioning your philosophical failings, your temperamental deformities. I rose from the mat where I had been lying, remembering the times you had admitted wanting to be dead. You imagined funeral services: the delight of your passing, the collective martyrdom of your nonexistence.
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The women of the water
We are the river. The mother of all. Those of us who do not sleep. We flow through all mouths and all bodies. From within, we make the earth live. We make it green, abundant, we make it grow. To the earth and to the body. To the heart and the livers.
