Lean on me, stranger.
What are we?
Trying to be islands, scattered across a much too interconnected world.
no (wo)man is an island.
entire of itself.
How to be anything, anyone when everyone is already taken?
So I fight my instincts,
re-interpret the signs whose meaning I never learnt,
recall moves from movies I've seen and ridiculed.
People say fake it til you make it.
Make what, exactly?
You are leaning on my shoulder,
Weaving me a story to snare me.
You're the victim, you're the hero, you're the intricate mystery.
For a layman, your improv-writing is very convincing.
So real, I think to myself, forgetting I'm all about the fiction.
When it's all over we pretend we did not fake it.
We were both there, we could call each others' bluff.
But we won't.
Respiratory ailment
Holding your breath does something to your inner monologue.
The story you tell yourself moves forward even when you stop breathing.
The story you tell yourself doesn't follow the rules of narratology.
It contains no hero, no villain, maybe not even a princess and endings are never ever after.
It's just you and the universe trying to figure each other out.
Cutting off the oxygen rarely improves the story.
The plot goes insane, the protagonist struggles for air.
Returning characters forget to leave, effectively preventing their return.
And there you are, a narrator without a plan or a way of finishing the story.
You could always choose to inhale..
Photographing something is a way to drive it out of our mind.
Writing a story was Kafka's way of shutting his eyes.
Pamuk asks if framing a picture of a moment means immortilization or succumbing to decay.
We invent all those things just so that we can live with these truths unknown,
certainties unconfirmed, myths believed or fabricated and acceptable lies.
Are they the danger or what saves us from danger?
Who knows? Shut your mind, close your brain, open your mouth.
- Breathe.
emotionally irresponsible
se trata de la certeza que tu amplitud es mi horizonte
Just a few words strung together.
They must have really meant something to somebody,
but I don't mind creatively remixing (hopefully, neither does Andrés Neuman)
It seems silly, I know.
Carrying this phrase around in my imaginary pocket, hoping I'll mean it.
Like the invisible words in the tiny book I wear around my neck.
Sometimes I wonder if life is all preparation and implementation.
And if those fleeting moments that we are all hunting for,
- Camouflage, rifle and an open heart?
if we'll even know it when we find them.
And here I am, hardly remembering what it feels to mean it.
Mumbling imperatives like "use me up!"
Only to see what it would be like.
Just to be true to the search.
And if ever I should forget.
That your borders are the boundaries of my world.
I've got it in writing.
The chicken and the egg, the writer and the word
Language speaks us, wrote Saussure and Foucault agreed.
We do the talking, but it's the boundaries of our narratives that create us.
"There is no outside the text", offered Derrida, failing to distinguish himself from the early (de-) constructionists.
Storytellers are created as their stories unravel.
I specialize in romantic dramas.
Never a conscious decision, I simply ended up discovering the world like this.
Although there was always an emphasis on drama, as romance was always in short supply.
A love story is the work of alchemist magic.
Not the pink, fluffy hollywood kind.
The heavy, moist, yet fleetingly light stories tinged with passion and elusive depth.
Taking mundane moments and turning them into sinister omens.
A brief glance between strangers become a divine intervention or the fulfillment of ones destiny.
I write the word S E R E N D I P I T Y and there it is, insisting on its own being.
I erase and write W E L T S C H M E R Z and I feel it in the pit of my stomach.
This pressing burden of irrevocable sadness for all that will never be.
I think I am writing the world, yet Foucault reminds me that the world is writing me.
A good story takes you by the hand and nudges you along before you second guess your choice.
Choice? No such thing.
You are the story now.
throw me living off the deep end.
We are the most advantageous generation hitherto.
Is this a bedtime story we've told each other long enough to start believing it?
Options are endless. Our lifes are not.
Our choices are violently infinite against the very finitude of time.
How free does that really make us?
We tell ourselves all kinds of things to cope
I am independent. I do not care.
I will not give up. You cannot hurt me.
We are like teflon; nothing sticks.
Our generation's greatest achievement is our ability to carry on.
We constantly compliment each others' mastery of this treacherous art.
Have we become too good at it?
At the end of time we'll look back on our perfectly flat-lined lifespan and every tombstone will read:
'she kept calm and carried on'
And we'll realize that life is not about keeping calm.
And carrying on is not a noble end.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
You may have noticed..
I tend to favour fiction over facts,
literature over life,
tales over truth, because what else is there?
Is language more real than reality?
We tend to casually assume that words are just predetermined sounds,
perfectly corresponding to the things we want to refer to.
But, just like Magritte's trecherous images pointed out,
a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
The word P-I-P-E is certainly not a pipe, nor do the letters in any way resemble one.
So, when we say reality; to which one are we referring?
Isn't our constructed concept of grass more meaningful than the green, moisty mass on the ground?
There is no meaning.
We produce meaning, all the time, because otherwise our world contains nothing.
The trees in the park, the café on the corner, the cobbled street..
They'd all be part of a backdrop of unidentifiable color.
So, if Luis Borges hadn't written about paradise as a kind of library,
Would we have been able to think of one just like it?
He said himself that realidad no es siempre probable ni plausible.
But this is more than written words on a page.
We're all in the meaning-making business.
The world is what we've made so far.
And- fortunately- in this place
No matter how much we print, it never causes inflation.
Awaiting permission
It is the elephant in the room of any single.
Single what, you ask.
Single me, I say.
Perhaps the greatest irrationality of our time,
that this word- this concept which we have invented-
should have ended up casting its spell on all of us.
Even in the face of melting ices, military interventions and multiple sclerosis
we are helplessly succumbing to the cult of love.
(Am I confusing despite with because?)
We stay up late telling each other stories of happiness, tragedy, desire and infidelity,
We call them love stories, but they are stories of life, of humanity.
Stories of the universe as we know it.
Love is an intervention that we choose without asking the permission of the UN Security Council.
We believe in it, we resent it, we argue about it.
We rip it open, looking for clues.
Is it true (love)?
I don't want to know.
Everybody loves a good story.
perfectly polished praline
I am a skyscraper, I am an acacia
a camouflaged feline about to land on my feet.
I am a perfectly polished praline on display,
a blessing for dieting window shoppers.
In this place where the waiters never wonder
if you want a table for one,
but just blunty look right through you
and ask if you are toute seule.
"Completely alone"?
Like an activist without a cause
Between the most iconoclastic explanations and the least naïve excuses,
beyond cynicism and bitterness,
lies The Question.
It hangs in the air,
so I dress the walls in paintings, postcards, magazine clippings,
until there is no longer any space for it to hang.
Suspended in mid-room, like an activist without a cause,
I put it in a glass jar to keep my dreams safe from wondering.
The question mark is familiar; it's challenged me before.
I am not grounded,
Free-floating like the red hair of a Botticelli Venus.
capricious like a Klimt water-snake.
I am only coming through in waves.
But the question is prying its way past the snakes and the hair.
- How come nobody gets through?
And nothing else matters, the world stops instantly.
Everything I love, the things I've achieved, the dreams I keep chasing- disappear.
As we stare each other down.
And then I reach out and grab his tail, put him back into the jar, closing the lid.
Wondering if I've won the battle but am losing the war.
Unintended Multiverse
Expat life is an exponential tabula rasa
everyone is nobody to you- you are nobody to everyone.
Freedom for a night?
Freedom for a life?
We come from nowhere, and in the blink of an eye,
-in the signing of a contract- we are here.
Baggage safely tucked away behind the doors of our sometimes pre-paid apartments.
Our lives compartmentalized, uncluttered and hyper-efficient.
Re-inventing yourself is a healthy process, when it includes examining your preconceptions,
When you look yourself in the eye and deicide to approve or to work harder.
Making sense of the world in a new environment can make you humble.
The sheer magnitude of diversity, all those disparate destinies mashing- meeting- melting, on the street.
Making sense of the world in this place can make you jaded.
On the surface, the multiverse sparkling with promising intensity.
(- you can be anyone! you can do anything!)
Below, the nagging doubt that the essence of things,
the plain truths about yourself,
may never cut through this elastic fog of dreams, hopes and accomplishments.
That you will remain a parenthesis in the bigger scheme of things.
What do you want?
You can change it.
You are the story.
Lo and be told
We glorify the beginning of things. We mourn the ending.
The piece in between- Life- is but an unidentifiable chunk of space and time.
How do we ever know where this ends and that begins, anyway?
What distinguishes a friend from a lover?
"Through what is laughable say what is somber", Nietzsche offered.
How do you tell a joke from seriousness? A lie from the truth?
Truth as the lie of the beholder?
It is not the actions, but the essence.
Not the means, but the meaning.
- C'est les gestes, pas les mots.
It is a false frontier, that which separates the realms of love and friendship.
One we can never see or feel until we have already crashed into it,
broken the wall, head over heals, and stumbled through onto the other side.
Uncertain if life as we know it will still be there when we turn around.
Not knowing if we knew life at all.
What you risk reveals what you value, they say.
But where does that leave us?
Is it an excuse? an incentive? a Rothschild test?
I am becoming what I am writing.
Or writing what I am becoming.
I want to write my own story and live it too.
I want to say what is somber while laughing.
prendre ta douleur
don't ask me,
it takes me just about a second to absorbe it
it runs familiarly in my bloodstream, just an element like any other
Your pain? Nono, it is mine now, don't worry.
I do other things as well.
Pride, ego, recognition and sense of self.
Some are a bit more expensive, but my experience is equally extensive.
100% customer satisfaction guaranteed.
I should probably warn you about the side effects.
Jealousy, bitterness, cynicism and betrayal
Not necessarily in that order and maybe you won't be affected at all.
(If you are one of those silver lining types.)
It seems easy at first.
Letting someone else feel your feelings,
avoiding difficulty, skipping the guilt,
only adding without taking anything away
but pretty soon you'll be leaving and eventually you realize you don't know how to feel at all.
Without me.
Lève toi c'est décidé,
laisse moi te remplacer
je vais prendre ta douleur
je vais prendre ta douleur
you are not the poem or the punchline or the ridde or the joke
Is it all in the words unspoken?
I think it's simple, maybe I am being naïve.
Some lessons needs constant reiteration.
Il faut exiger de chacun ce que chacun peut donner.
We must ask of others only that which they can give us.
But desire blurs the contours of decency and common sense.
We demand too much and take without asking at all.
Our disappointment comes down on others like a guillotine,
without mercy or any other way of finishing the story.
Guilty of not living up to my expectations?
- Don't expect a fair trial
Perhaps I am starting from the wrong end.
Asking for something and waiting for something is not the same thing.
If we do not ask, do we really have the right to expect anything?
And if we do, how is that right granted?
Maybe what separates the two is the silence not yet broken.
Attraversiamo?
Scattered diatribes of Philo
They say we use aproximately six metaphors per minute,
unintentionally, because we can barely think of anything without seeing a picture of something else.
Shakespeare is partly to blame for this, as with so many other marvelous things.
I use them intentionally,
Because I don't know how to say out loud the things I am feeling.
Can we communicate forever like this, thinking we know exactly what we mean,
but living in constant suspense, in the (un)likely event of being mistaken?
In the hope that we are not?
Andrés Neuman has compared the grammar of love to that of translation,
because we must continously translate the language of those we love.
It is even in the word itself- tongue.
What better metaphor for love, anyway?
We speak in tongues. We dance around our shadows. We misunderstand.
We meet in the middle, we coincide, we translate each other.
But are we metaphorical?
tu vis quelque part entre douleur et douceur
mais je te suis quand même
But sometimes I simply throw words at you, without looking back to see if they stick,
if they even fit you, if you want them, if you'll take them.
And of course I am not really talking about words.
Folding stories ( Are We There Yet?)
I dream and I think it is life.
You were there, I was there; there is nothing unreal about it.
I felt it, so why do I need to end my sentences with a rethoric question mark.
It is my story, I can leave it out if I choose to.
I wrote it when I first stumbled upon him.
A protagonist with the power to rip the reader from somewhere else,
and glue her to the pages of his adventures.
The story evolved behind my eyelids, it grew at the back of my head,
and though I mused, and though I enjoyed indulging in the plot,
I never thought that one day it might be indulging me.
Imagination is funny that way.
It seems real in the way that only the surreal can.
It fills your mind and leaves no space for the mundane.
Hijacking even the most banal details, inflating them to the point of absurdity.
You were breathing, you were smiling, you were there.
It seemed like a miracle.
And all I could think was are we there yet?
So that I could kiss you.
To finish the story.
sketches and gravity
Why is emotional gravity more attractive than emotional persistance?
We are constantly aiming for the top, working hard; striving to be ambitious and self-made.
But we still believe that the only way to really get love is to stumble on it.
It lies in wait, ready to jump out and drown us at any time.
A flood of Biblical proportions.
Love is something that happens to us, not something we do.
Is this the illusion that causes the greatest restlessness for modern man?
The one thing we can't buy, order, or get promoted to, no matter how hard we try.
And yet it seems we crave this, we long to be powerless.
To surrender to the algebra of emotional Russian roulette.
We give in to the myth.
Hoping someone will be drawn to us, so that we can finally say
"I was drawn especially for you".
And when you say it, it becomes true.
You better pray he does not come with an eraser.
khamsa fi ainek
"Five fingers in your eye"
Repeated over and over, more an antropaic mantra than aspirational,
more for personal persuasion than to ward off any potential aggressor.
You may say I am a cynic, shaking your head slowly, thinking to yourself,
'she'll never find peace with that metaphorical gun underneath her pillow'
Because protecting yourself from something only slightly probable may seem counter-productive
You may think me naïve, childish, in my quest to avoid potential, future damage.
And I tried to shed that extra layer; that thick, slippery skin.
I burnt the pages I wrote, buried the hatch, kept my eyes focused on the horizon without looking back.
But the past caught up and snatched me back, kicked me in the gut and laughed me in the face.
- you thought you were safe, didn't you?
Pushing my head down, keeping it under the surface.
and nazars in my ears, because I am not ready.
Not ready to stand there again.
Naked, open, ready to take all that life gives, without any protection.
And no matter if talismans of imaginary armour are just a cheap kind of placebo.
Bohemian, vagabond, maverick.
These are the words I wrap around myself so that I believe them.
So that you believe it, too.
Trigger
And when nothing was said and done,
she threw on her jacket, pulled it closely around her hungry body,
wondering if if would always come down to this.
The weight of all her unspeakable- or unspoken- petty concerns,
her distorted personal truths or inventions, the self-deceits and innovative illusions
suddenly pressed on her with unimaginable force.
It was not heavy, it was gravity of gargantuan proportions.
She pulled out her key and as she turned it, a stranger passing by slowed down, eyeing her closely.
- Have a good evening, he said and produced a fleeting smile before going about his ways.
Key in hand in mid-air, she paused and took a deep, unsuccessful breath.
And it all came tumbling down.
time bender
It was a coincidence, really. The place and time,
and all the strangeness of a perfectly normal meeting between two people
who briefly, incidentally, shared the same space
I am building us a narrative, because how else can I think?
Painting a picture so that - maybe- I will see what the subject is.
Looking for the strokes, perspective, angles and shadows.
You must not judge me if the colors are a little saturated,
if the music seems just a tad too erotic;
the presence of serendipity completely fictitious.
I think I remember what you said, but I know those were not your words.
My heart leapt and I thought how easy it was to slip out of that other world,
-where edges were hard and my heart had bled dry-
and into this explosion of colors, this parade of sounds.
Everything was standing still. We were moving.
I can't be sure,
Perhaps it was the other way around.
How does one ever know?
Time can be bent.
Outside of time there is not responsibility.
If two strangers met yesterday; briefly, incidentally sharing the same space.
- Would it be any different?
Would I?
ces espaces infinis
Are there no fresh emotions?
Can we never be cured from our own past, from our useless connotations,
the blanks we filled in once and that are forever imprinted on us.
They tell us JUMP! and we don't even ask how high,
We jump to save our lives.
Can we ever be new skin?
Not a replica of those who came before,
not a remedy to what we have endured and survived.
But the strange perfection of the small spaces in between us
(those infinite spaces that frighten us so)
The ever-mobile molecules that constitute us; not yours and mine.
The in-between where, somewhere, we transcend and become something else.
Surely, this is our personal version of the Big Bang
as incomprehensible as it is magnificent.
And it only happens once,
until the world starts anew.
