The traffic code of the streets, a date of birth, my years of schooling, the career they say I chose, the periodic table and its elements.

It was no longer enough to step on the ground and drag the day along, to hang it at the end of a street fading into dusk in the middle of a city where nothing ever seemed to happen, because so little ever came back.

They can’t find their voice and cry softly, while I scream for those who do not scream. I cry for those who cry.

I keep thinking: maybe I’m addicted  to the raw version  the way people are addicted  to behind-the-scenes footage,  the way a timeline loves a disaster  as long as it’s formatted. 

Sometimes I feel I must express myself and then whatever needs to be expressed falls from my mouth like ash or like scales and when those scales harden everything seems made of green light; I suppose color can erase uncertainty, anyway now everything is made of green light.

How heavy the body becomes when it moves without meaning. My soul slips away in little fragments and my chest no longer hurts when I cry. I rest my bones in bed for endless hours every day until my flowers wither or the coffee pot is finally empty.

In the ebb and flow of time, I choose to be, I choose to exist without looking back. What lies beyond?

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.

I believe in the fertilized seed that is both origin and destiny. In the announced agony that has a name and that has an end.

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.

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.

We live as if there were a rehearsal before real life begins; always waiting for when we’ll have more time, when we get older, when we find a partner, when everything finally falls into place. But nothing ever truly falls into place.