“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

The days drag by.

I’m choked by food,
by the shit I expel, the words I say.
The daylight that shouts at me
every morning to get up.

The sleep which is only
dreams that chase me.

— Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

The following scene is more calm. There is no trace of slapping oneself in the face and cursing out loud in the empty apartment. Kicking chairs, shaking random obstacles, people, relatives, bloggers, the heat. Counting on the absence of witnesses. On the pages everything I know is written about each vegetable form living out on the terrace. Soil, chemistry, prune and multiply. Something I am mediocre at like most of everything. Flor suggested me a new source and now I can look for more details on the internet for each of them and feeling I know more –the phrases that are useful appear to me as if highlighted on the page. But I don’t really know more I am only informed.

Life is minor now. It doesn’t matter the rage for the apparent phoniness of everything and the hypocrisy and the malfunction. I think I never had so little respect for myself as I am having now. Although there’s no bottom end to that.
From behind comes classical music, probably Bach. The first feeling when trying to focus on the effect of the music on myself is that the music sounds so modern. The superficial consideration leaves me unhappy.

Flor found me on the internet, with little investigation recognized me out here and found the blog and asked me out. The global village. What sense can have a thing like this, we have been briefly together so many years ago and so much has happened since then and now she comes. We were very young and almost totally ignorant of love but this doesn’t make that experience more relevant to me. All the contrary. I seem to remember that the sex was especially good. Or that we had fun because we both tended to be outsiders (although I was a professional outsider). But beside such vague feelings it is something dear I can barely relate to now. Life changed me anyway even if I still am an outsider. Folks don’t seem to know I want Time to pass and changes to be even when I state that I don’t want to get older (because of the failures). Walking around in the bookshop she said, you still matter to me, you always mattered. I didn’t know what to say. I felt moved and detached and embarrassed. She seemed uncomfortable and we let the topic fade away. Myself, I stopped thinking about you when masturbating years ago, I thought, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Our conversation flew easily. We always could talk of everything, and apparently we still do. At moments it even appears interesting. I am out of the world anyway.
Out of the bookshop the city was wet, the dark asphalt glimmering in the late afternoon light and the sopping walls drawing mysterious bodies of smudged films of water, the trees of the park a obscure still mass encircling the left side of Piazza Cavour, trapped behind the tall green fence, nobody around. The last days of quietness of the busy middle class city, skies moving from gray to darker gray, the light coming from the isolated open bar where the men stand against the counter and don’t talk nor move.

It was days ago and now it is the past and it doesn’t exist anymore. It is still raining above the city, and the sun light is white, the corners are damp and clothes are withdrawn from the balconies–

I understood something recently, that as much as my life can come to be a failure, as much as I keep dropping out, and as all the material means to be and fight for keep passing me by or making me fail or go mad or flee, still nothing really would interest me — enriching my present moment — simulacrum of reality — as much as love life. And I am not strictly talking about my own love life, and the satisfaction of my own desires and longings — with time my own desires and longings, my suffering and struggling and groping for love seem to become less relevant or less interesting than the general human constant reaching for love and the general wasting or losing love all around.
And as I read a honest book, or hear a true story I notice how my interest doubles or triples as soon as the element of emotion and desire, sex and good willing and wrongdoing for love appears. As soon as “I met a person” is said, “I keep thinking of him” is said. “I miss the bitch” is said. As soon as “I dreamed of you again” is said to oneself. Everything about it matters to me, provided the manifestation of love is stronger than — I don’t know, the other important things suddenly ceasing to be important. It must be that I am not capable of feeling fine in any other realm. Everything matters when it is genuine, the trivial things that keep repeating renovating and consuming themselves through the centuries through the bodies through the rooms and the drawers, and the more unpredictable, scandalous ones– Morbid affection, violence, betrayal, servitude, mysterious bonds, inverted poles, manias and eclecticisms– all coming down to my witnessing and participating, my own mixed feeling of stupor and acknowledgment: so this is love too.

And yet I am so incapable to love, in a proper reasonable way. I get so easily impatient as well as inert, bored, inept, false, lazy– because my crave is for the variety, possibly– is this why I could so little relate to the barely disclosed ambitions of Flor to go to bed with me for old time sake– like she wanted to come up (Libi being away) and I said just park here and didn’t invited her in– she had her own reasons that had nothing to do with me, and my heart isn’t prepared to bend yet. Every morning, every afternoon, every night I have someone in my mind who is far and away– my heart isn’t capable to bend yet–

Across the sleeping city we had passed near the house where I lived back then, with my father’s wife and my step-brother. Every time I walk by that place in the bourgeois hell of via Plinio, something that I systematically avoid to do, a mess of bad memories and the bare square weight of past life attacks me, and I can’t avoid to lash out my distaste and my disgust for those past days. The huge wooden door, always closed, and the precious shops, the brand new cars parked under the tall old plane milanese trees — the dog turds and cockroaches in the deli and the still loners waiting at the stop of the 60– when everything was wrong and all days were wrong and it was wrong my not being able to break out of there. My ridiculous communist so called parents so eager to settle themselves in the bourgeois neighborhoods — and the fights, my father’s yells, the humiliations and the disgust and the unbearable dishonesty of myself and who I was — And then Flor next to me said, every time I pass in front of this place I have all these nice memories of when we were together, and I came here to visit you in your room– it was so nice to be with you there, do you know? It was the sex but all the rest too– With all your rudeness you were pretty welcoming, you know?

It took me so long to come up with a post and I don’t know how to end it.

“I live of what the others don’t know about me.”

A crowd of fifteen comes for dinner. They arrive in groups and couples or one by one, smile, bring offers, say how they’re glad to be here and later say they enjoy the food and drinks. There’s a good dog who ritually needs to drink water. They need louder music and if neglected become silent and eager to go, the conversations skew in blind directions. They never know where to put out the cigarettes. They flirt and talk louder to overcome the din of the music and they change tracks over and over. Someone asks me absurd questions, like what I am doing with my life right now or what am I going to do tomorrow. They’re all Libi’s friends. Libi keeps saying she wants to hide in the bathroom to fuck. Or suck at least. Some of them conveys subtle hostility or disapproval, because they know things. I feel ridiculously out of place and uninterested and alone. I look at girls’ legs. I enjoy the moments of seriousness in face to face talks at the corners of the party, and the apparent friendliness of interested inquiries. When essentially all the dialogs, the arguments, the conversations are completely useless. Solicitous and useless. “Indeed” and “precisely” are used so often precisely when one should use a word of opposite meaning. The unexpected exchange with the other girl by the biblical name who said: “one has to downplay herself to be with the others. In the end I came to accept this.” That amazed me. We stay out on the terrace and inside, making groups whose balance constantly shifts. At one a.m. one says she’ll go and a moment later everyone goes, judging by the movement near the exit the moment proper. It makes me sad and relieved. They leave behind a mountain of empty bottles, dirty dishes, surprising silence of the turned down volume. I remember how I used to be disappointed by parties that ended early. Now we all have jobs or at least they do. In the morning I will wash the dishes using a table dragged behind the sink as a buffer. I get out to the terrace before it starts raining again and I feel sorry for the plants. Nobody cared for the plants, it was a useless party without caring for the plants sleeping in the dark right before our eyes, standing there in the dark, growing from pots of dirt, the creatures to whom I devote the most attention and who bear in them the most of my pathetic rhetoric disillusions — nobody asked anything about them even if few had even flowers on them, and others where just sticking out of the turf as if interested in the dyslexic world out there.

Invers come ona pidria
— Milanese saying

(…) Well, damage oneself, all right. But deliberately that’s the knack, thus in a perverted way, so that half of ourself remains asleep during the whole process and can later complain about it. You can do it for too much self-involvement, or too much confidence, or hatred for yourself. Self-damaging behavior is for example when we are loved, and we do everything we can to convince the lover that we do not deserve to be loved. Or it is when we deliberately damage our public face, that still gets credit, because we intimately doubts its integrity or merit, or because we hate that public face for being more popular than the unconfessed face we have. And it is a lot more than that.

Nina to Ico 05:25 pm
Come with me to Ferrara at the end of August. There’s a terrific conference about Baroque Music and Science. I have to go anyway because I present a poster. I understand why you are not answering me. I understand everything. But I am sorry not to hear from you.

Ico to Nina 5:09 am
Nina, I don’t give a shit about conferences and posters, go figure.
Anyway, it is not that I’m not calling for resentment or incomprehension. It’s just that I’m left without bridges to connect myself to the others. I’m not getting anywhere… let’s leave it at that. Libi soon will go to Paris with a girlfriend, but I don’t know what I am going to do.

Nina to Ico 9:32 am
I haven’t asked you to come to Ferrara to look at my poster. I don’t give a shit about it either, don’t you worry. I was asking you to come to be with me, but considering that you keep looking for the abysses and basically you adore this inertia of yours, stay in the deep shit where you are.

The sense of comparing someone to a upside down funnel is that a funnel cannot stand in any other way but upside down. Someone who is like that is someone integrally wrong, wrong by nature, and not seriously meant for this world, like a funnel is not meant to be piled up with the rest of the dishes and pans. Sometimes this happens because of fear, haste, or because of confusion, or because of the transiting planets. Some other time one is just born like that, invers como una pidira, upside down like a funnel. If you put two or three funnels together the results can be funny but certainly unusable. Or painfully ludicrous.

Q. what else can i say? well, an advice for free: you could avoid people commenting, so you won’t know how your readers are alike and you won’t be disappointed by them.

A. Why, mr. Girogio, I get two comments a month when I’m lucky, what difference would it make? Plus, I do want to know people’s feelings about what I write. To me, this is one of the few good reasons left for blogging… If anything, I am tired of my unknowns to be so silent. But I don’t want to really change anything, or to really complain about anything. I write so little, with such difficulty. And I’d rather stop writing in public than close the comments down. To quote that supposed anonymous blogger (which isn’t anonymous, really) in the previous post was just a way to lash a feeling out, that’s all.
I don’t know if this happens to the others too, if it happens to you. I think it is the impressions you accumulate with time. I think that I will never know how my readers are like — but I keep growing involuntary feelings about them, how they are and how they are not, layers of impressions, probably false, that can worn out the relation with this theoretical readership, and with the general idea of writing “for the readers”. Especially when writing terrifies you because it became so darn serious and personal and exposing. Which is the reason for the other quote… I think. It probably was there for those who were supposed to understand it. Although I am not so sure anymore [goes on mumbling incoherently]

“… ma io dico rubare quando il furto è fatto per mancanza d’immaginazione, di ‘genio’ come si dice a Napoli. A coloro che rubano idee dagli altri quando sono a corto delle proprie, a coloro che rubano frasi e stili e parole e trovate quando la loro immaginazione è smagrita o insecchita dal troppo sole, bisogna anzitutto far sapere che abbiamo visto, sentito, annusato. Li abbiamo visti, spezzare sbadatamente i rami nel frutteto e lasciare cartacce in giro. Bisogna mostrare loro che stanno sbagliando o sprecando tempo. Che scrivere è una strada difficile verso la verità, la verità dell’esperienza individuale beninteso. Bisogna che essi sappiano che parole e stili non sono che risultati o espedienti, i quali lasciati soli sono come innesti senza gemma. Puzzano di originalità, che è il più fasullo dei frutti. L’originalità, altrimenti indispensabile, non è necessaria se si toccano esperienze autentiche… e voglio dire, di certo non intellettuali (…)”
— Scipione Corsaro, Il mio albero

“I’m not closing this blog but I wish I had entirely different readers. I’m tired of these unknowns. I want new ones.”
— Anonymous blogger

You think you can leave the matter to your lips
and they don’t work right

— Emanuel Carnevali

This morning it seemed so important to write down the dream, but at night its importance dissolved and plays now remote like some music fading out (in my head is Leo Reisman). So many hours later it is almost as not interesting as someone else’s dream. So it happens with dreams, rapidly marvel is substituted by vague unfamiliarity and the effort to rebuild hazy details ruins it all.
Once again I toy with the idea of writing more about my so called roots or about some old classmate or relative I don’t see anymore — because I can’t stare directly at my life right now, and honest I tried to put down few posts about it but my interest on the matter so soon dries out, and what I thought was fun to write about suddenly does not even faze me anymore. With memories of the past sometimes it is like with the dream I made this morning as seen from tonight, all smudged out like a faint stain.
I visualize a two lines image of my father, where if my father gets in touch too much with the world, you know, socializing or looking out for the others, they shot him with a tranquillizer an take him to the zoo. Like one of those bears they find roaming around in Bavaria.
I think I took too much from him but my heart is much bigger, and luckily less neat.
I don’t really care when Nina tells me that she still loves that man (no, not my father, I changed subject don’t you see). Yet driving in the night to vague destinations, possibly Vigevano, I feel disturbed and intrigued by hearing once again the story. Unchanged after so many years. Disturbed, I don’t know why. Maybe because someone else’s unfulfilled loves remind me my own, and everybodies’.
ANd I care when Libi tells me she loves me so, but we can’t help each other just as well. I will think these things better later in the night, not usefully.
Not during the days, which are beautiful, warm and dry, good in the shades. The Nights, windows open on the courtyards, voices from the televisions and the dinners and the dinners in front of the televisions. The stunning full moon not right above my head. I called about the job at the University in Sardegna but it was too late already two weeks ago. Later talking on the phone with Bruma I convened, I had hoped to be helped to find a direction but it’s on by myself now. I also asked in vain, I mean with the wrong code words, what was the grown-up choice to make, but nobody seems to get that I seriously don’t know.
I dreamed it was me, a young Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico. Giampiero Epidermico is not his real name. He was a junior high classmate of mine who since then has become a Very Young Internationally Renowned Contemporary Art Critic. A cousin of mine, the one who can see in the dark, is a Contemporary Art Critic too, senior editor of a Important Magazine abroad, and at one moment of their lives, years ago, the two of them were running errands together in a famous Art Magazine in Italy. And they hated each other very much. Which surprised me when I found out. But then I saw Epidermico and I realized. He was constantly in a good mood and that was about it.
I was living in Venice back then and they came for the Biennale on different trains and visited differed pavilions but for me and my Russian friend the Biennale was good only for a good laugh and a good depression, the present only existed as a distortion of the much greater and very humid past we were living into.
I was stupidly radical about it back then. I’m not saying I was understanding. Once I said to my cousin that I thought Contemporary Art should not be called Art, you know, not to confuse it with the real thing which although it is dying, destroyed by restorations and abysmal ignorance, it is still somewhat alive, and we can at least pretend we know why it was supposed to be so great. Not that in fifteen exams of Arts I took at the university I ever met anyone capable of telling me why and how a Bellini is so great compared to a minor. No, it was all crappy theory there, all methodology (but then I learned, outside of school, and now I could tell the difference why and where.) But my cousin looked at me as if I was completely out of the world. He was probably right to look at me like that. It’s not Art I said is satire! we should call it Visual Satire or something I said. He kept looking at me like that. What he said? He said Art is what it is happening now.
In my dream Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico they went on putting green toothpaste in their pants to melt their dicks onto their balls sort of JT style and I was by myself in the dream until Allen Ginsberg came to me and told me I was cool because or even if I wasn’t putting the toothpaste on my balls. The post ends here.

I don’t get phased out by none of that, none of that
helicopters, the TV screens, the newscasters, the..
satellite dishes.. they just, wishin’
They can’t really never do that
— Mos Def

I tried to cry this morning in front of the mirror in the bathroom. I felt this thing down in my throat and the corners of the mouth turning downwards. I put my face in my hands but obviously I couldn’t cry. Except for the movies, I can’t cry. My own expression scared me when I looked up. I was ashamed. I am not gonna do it again. I am not a winner, I never was. Martina is lost for me, I will be lost for Libi. So much solitude is passing in my hands now, rivers of it — “True love leaves no traces”. I wish I knew what is true and what is not. Everything seems true to me. Like this alarms going off, I hear, like the restaurant we pick, we enter, compared to the other where we are not.

When in Mexico city sometimes we went to eat at the “Stupa”, in the Avenida 5 de Mayo. Despite the name, the “Stupa” was just another Mexican diner open around the clock, somehow always full of people, which other than being somewhere in the center had the advantage of a great choice of food and popular prices. It was fun to stay in line waiting for our table, in the busy early Saturday afternoon, doing what lovers do in these cases, wooing and causing envy or sympathy and wondering what we were soon going to order with our micheladas. Martina used to say that me and her looked exotic together, she shorter and darker, sparky, me a tall “guero” absent minded and aloof. I nodded at the description. But I thought of us as normal. I didn’t see anything exotic. Maybe except the fact that we talked so much about love and books and movies. We would sit at a white table in the larger smoking area and order and drink the bitter salted acid micheladas and have our difficult conversation, me always checking for words on the dictionary, both trying not to be distracted by the TV screens and failing. She smoked very greedily and her hands trembled as she held the cigarette.
That said my memories of the place aren’t very nice, because of the last night we went back there, as we were running out of ideas. The weather was quite bad that night, rainy season and all, but was even worse between us two. Who knows what doomed on our story then. It ended with Martina slapping a 100 pesos note on the counter (there were no table seats available and we weren’t in the mood of waiting) and running away, and me, after stupidly asking for the check and paying, running in the night after her in the wrong direction, and missing the last train. I guess we were so mad at each other for having misunderstood so many things. Coming back walking under the rain I kept promising to myself I was directly going to the hostel and to sleep. The following morning I had to catch a cab at five in the morning; I still had to pack; it was already very late. But then at parque de españa I turned left. Below the fancy hotel at the corner of the Avenida two guys were playing the spring of the sculpture-car and laughing. The car only sung “Veracruz”, which was ridiculously sad but not enough to be ironic as expected. I got to the condo where she was temporarily staying and the doorman smiled at me and opened the front door. But there was no such a good reason for me to be there and be smiled at, I knew it. Upstairs… I remember her opening the door, she had changed her clothes, ready for the night. But she wasn’t sleeping. The small apartment was full of smoke of cigarette. She asked if I was coming to continue a fight. All it was so glazed but I said I just needed to know that she was all right. We barely looked at each other and didn’t touched each other. So I said I was coming to say goodbye and she corrected the verb I used and that’s how we said goodbye. I was very careful not to slam the door as I got out. There had been moments so intense between us they were painful to even describe or think. Now any effort was lost. I was punished for leaving Mexico and going back to the other life, or maybe for something else it will took me a long time to understand. Back to the hostel I couldn’t sleep until much later, mainly thanks to the idiot in the bunk above mine that expected to fall asleep without a sheet ’cause he didn’t know how to make his own bed, and slept only with a wool blanket over a bare mattress in a room full of mosquitoes, and couldn’t close his eyes, and me with him. The morning after I got to the airport and entered into the safer mechanism of traveling, which certainly is a big illusion, but a good one though, it keeps the bad thoughts away somehow, like a good job.

There’s a chance I might be go back to work at the university. This time relocating no less than Sardegna. Which on one hand I would welcome as a god from the machine. Yet it is only a small chance and I am scared to explore it. I have to return a call and I keep postponing. Why? Maybe because so much time has passed — since when I was a normal person in the world. Will I be able to return to civilization and accept all the downside of it? But it is more important to break out, says the voice. Over and over. Why? From where? Being out is really finally being different, imagining differently, walking about differently? Is it really possible only because/if no one is there expecting you to be what you always were? Libi shakes her head in disapproval. Wish I was back in March walking with Dita down the avenues of Manhattan and knowing what I know now. It was only three months ago. I wish I could start that journey over — it’s not over.

— In picture, above: climbing the pyramid of the Sun with herds of tourists, in theotihuacan

How incredible the other day, talking to the girls at the bakery shop, as the radio reported of a philippine woman living in Italy, just outside our city, who slaughtered her entire family later trying to kill herself. The girls were joking about it like people do with events that are so remote and inconceivable that one cannot identify with it.
“She killed her husband with a knife!” said one.
“And her sons!” said the other. They were using the usual half phony sympathy tone of the milanese trades, hypocrite imitation of badly evoked old times.
It was so funny to them, because a woman had done it, and women are supposed to be defenseless or powerless compared to men. It was also funny because she was not italian, and thus such kind of disgrace had nothing to do with us, and could be treated more easily, like the thought of a inundation in India or a earthquake in Guatemala.
I couldn’t joke with them as a customer is expected to do. All I could come up with was a sort of depressed smile I was sorry for.
But c’mon. It’s years that a week doesn’t go by in my country without news of some husband killing his wife. Some father murdering his daughter or son. Some lover, some brother, killing a sister, a ex pregnant girlfriend, etc. Every week. Certain weeks many times. But the girls were bantering as if news of this sort were unheard of around here. “It took a chinese woman to do it!” It was yet another big illusion sold cheap to us by Immigration. Helping us to picture our country as if it was a completely different, innocent little thing. Well, at least for a minute or two of fake conversation.
“Aren’t italian men usually killing italian women?” I asked in the end, as the girl handed me a paper bag with in it the bread I had just payed for. “With guns, no?” I pursued. But the girls fell silent and incredulous. Could it be I was the only one who was noticing all the killing of women in the italian newspapers? I had had that same feeling before. It seemed like if these were events that no one wanted to really consider. Consumed rapidly, even if they kept turning up again and again, they didn’t mean anything compared to other events, much more abstract and conceptual, distant and showy, that were discussed forever.
But I had disrupted the pleasant atmosphere. Especially when I ended: “If there’s a gun in a house, you can be almost sure it will end up being used by a man to kill a woman! Isn’t it funny?”
“I’ll never give my husband a gun then”, the girl proposed after a short while (I was already halfway the glass door), bursting in a fake laugh which strangely moved me.
I remember that all I could think of in that moment was “What I can’t believe is that someone married you.” I am always amazed when I am informed that people are married. I don’t expect them to be. But I didn’t said that. I only gave the usual curt salute of the non customary customer and left, to the apparent relief of the street where actually nobody was laughing.

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.

— Pablo Neruda

The nervousness would pass with another jump in the sea probably. Any kind of sea, better a ocean. With a sleep in a new bed, a stranger bed. With a walk, finally, in the woods. With a argument with friends at a windy window of a bar. If I had friends. Reading a story from a book feeling that the story is really about myself (haven’t had that sensation in years). The obscenity of this diary in public is that there is no solution to what happens, no perspective. It is a shame and a betrayal to the right reasons one should write for (put some distance between you and the events. Despite the mexican loves, I am no Jack Kerouac and I’m glad I ain’t. Creativity is not a filtery flux but an alternative)
Martina had wrote “por que te amo tanto y podria amarte mas. eres tan diferente, eres la persona indicada para mi. recuerdas que en la playa me preguntaste; ¿cómo seria la persona a la que yo podría amar? y seria muy parecida a ti.” I read and I thought, how is it that I am? How can I be loved? I guess it’s a normal reaction. And it was for just a instant. Then I sucked it up, thirsty and excited and lonesome — and let love grow insanely, foolishly (now look what you have done!) It was even sweeter and stronger when the words were said face to face, mouth to ear. I don’t wish to take anything back, or to push it on. I just wish it made anything else smaller (it didn’t). I wish that the distance I feel with my parents, or better the unfriendliness, so ungrateful, would fade. Healed like a small cut. I wish for a late afternoon, idling on a wooden bench, touching the guitar and feeling placated because I did my bit, my duty, what I had to do. But what is it that I have to do? What is my bit? I think that not even once in the last ten years I felt that I did my bit. This is comic. Comic… after the argument, the night we slept in different beds, in Mexico city. I wrote her: “es la una de noche, yo he regresado recién en el hostal dormiente y silencioso. he ido caminando para el centro, un poco llovía con much ruido y un poco no, las calles estaban casi vacíe– y volviendo soy pasado abajo de tu departamento– y pasando pensaba todas las cosas del mundo, pensaba que en la cama tu pensabas a mi, esperándome– y pensaba que en aquel preciso momento tu estaba haciendo l’amor con alguien — y que yo sariá estado aliviado de descubrirlo– con una escena un poquito cómica (…)” but then I stopped thinking at all the things. Now I try not to think. I close my hands and the hands are empty, only a little dark green dirtiness beneath my fingernails remains, and I cannot think because I am not holding something in my hands. If only I could start thinking again, and walking across open doors, the last open doors before the doors to be opened. Whatever that means. To a reader I own this explanation (this custom declaration): that still in the world for me there are things of beauty, things to revere; that in between the swearing, the nervousness and the whining stays on the unceasing need to contemplate, and describe (describing being the way to give) and move into the world and be a friend of the world; that if I fail, and stumble, it is not for a moment that I seriously cease to believe that “we are worthed as much as anyone who came before us, and each one of us is destined to conquer the world. That we are close to the origins more than ever.” Amen.

— In picture, above: Volcano Poas, Costarica. Not visible in figure the smell of sulfur that the old man from Colombia described as “the thing Chavez smelled”

another day begins. the sky already in full blue, and the sun making its entrance from the left, where I can’t see it but for the warm neat light reflected by the buildings in front of the window. Then so rapidly the shadows slide down and the colors get colder, flatter and more intense. The change goes with slamming of doors, dragging of doors and windows, the ringing of alarm clocks and the early noise of a muffled drill that seems a call of a cicada. This noises make the waking up of the condo and beyond that, of the big city. Libi is asleep in the other room. Or maybe waking up too. I have prepared her coffee, and I sit here listening to my heart and the world– I think of how it is maybe not so incredible that we are being so close now, like never before — and so I know we are different in our special way, because we can move towards each other as we part– because it’s to see each other more clearly, more naked if it’s possible to say this, that makes us closer– nobody knowing if it is temporary or not. Never we talked so much, so openly, so directly. I am surprised of how many things surprise me. Never we declared our love for each other so seriously like during these days– something I always have problems to do– both feeling that we are going in the wrong direction, and that there is not much else to do. Every day is learning, I said that– and I know this is “to experience”: like when you knew something existed and it was possible (for example odd ways to be with someone or to part from someone) but until it happens to you, your own odd special thing, it remains just a empty notion of something that exists like the bottom of the pond you cannot see.
We make love a lot, I think we both need it, and I guess it’s one of those moments of a “story” when it really becomes clear that making love works, for all the things that cannot be told or done, things that cannot be declared and affirmed in any other way. Sounds rhetorical, but it’s true that we both look now at this story with tears and tenderness and regret — hoping to see it revive under more ideal conditions, preparing our hearts to the possibility that it might fade away and not come back anymore. I know we can’t see beyond the smallest hill now.
The days are made of misery and moments of despair, generic, edgeless fear, but also of a strange excitement, at hearing ourselves saying things we only thought of saying for so long, declaration of independence and dependence, statements of possibility, claims of individuality or freedom or desire. There are no words more intense of the words of the goodbyes, because goodbyes are crossroads of different worlds that are untangling– the world at our back opening, the world in front of us closing–
That’s what the days are about, too. I wonder if it’s the words we used, the courage we had to say things, to talk, that made it possible: I asked Libi if it was because we were grown-ups now. I can’t express my frustration or my anger in any other way, she said, but no, I said, I mean, one could express it by closing herself up and not wanting to understand anymore, even without expressing anger, not wanting to to see or to listen. But we’re not doing so. No, she said, we’re not doing so. And we were amazed.