Now I realize: I feel alone. I get overwhelmed. I listen. Outside, chaos. Inside, you.

Because without your name I am incomplete, because your name hides my memory: there will always be a trace of one in the other.

In the middle of the avenue, a woman from the street is walking, clearly under the influence of some drug. Her hair is messy, her clothes dirty, her gaze lost. Her features are harsh, she looks angry, walking as if daring life itself: she’s moving against the flow of traffic, and for a moment, it feels like she’s coming straight at me.

I know I should love others as Jesus loves me, but with you, it becomes a bit difficult. Still, I hope you open your eyes soon and return to your humanity, and not your ambitions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I close my eyes, I always think about fantasies. I could move houses once a month. My mom calls me cold, but I would say reversible.

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.

Suddenly, the air turned crisp, and the memories grew cold. I know it’s time, but no one taught me how to honor my own death.

It was easy to be a passing cloud, giving you shade, taking it away, offering you its outline.

Bite me slowly, hold me tight. Caress me, write on my skin. What is it? What is it that you want?

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.

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.

The sea, the one that made me cry on winter nights, now mirrored the erotic movement of your hands.

Coincidences exist, and this text is one of them. A few weeks ago, I went to the place I always go to buy CDs, and by a twist of fate, I found Album, the first record by the now-defunct band Girls.

I try to imagine what it must be like. Entering death. What it felt like to loosen oneself from life. I always think from the place of feeling. For a moment I feel humbled by that absence, and suddenly it seems to me that going on would be nothing more than an unending entering into death. Something like dying a hundred times before really dying.

We buy substitutes for encounters, lands without maps, nomadic, possible. Accustomed to instability, and I always linger on your freckles.

When I get home, I think about the object I chose for my enjoyment, even though the battery has been dead for a while; I haven't even used it for three days since I bought it. Sexuality and self-exploration are rituals I don't want to let fall into decline.