El descenso

Tú fuiste, también,
Un falso profeta,
Te imaginabas movimientos
Donde sólo había ecos.

Tú estabas contemplando, también,
el infinito en el reflejo
Del reflejo en las pupilas
En la imagen del espejo.

Y no eres un genio
Ni un Cristo
Ni una flor de loto abierta
Ni un oráculo
Ni Eva
Ni el Amor
Ni la Esperanza
Ni un delfín
Ni el quinto elemento;
Ni siquiera un rencarnado,
Eres un narciso ahogado.

Tú risa no puede ser La Música,
Ni tu llanto la expiación del pueblo.
Tu canto no encantará a los árboles
Ni tu cuerpo lo abrazará el cerro.

Israel no es todos los pueblos,
No puedes ser el águila y
Al mismo tiempo la serpiente.

Lo extrapolaste todo.

Al rozar tu nombre,
te imaginaste otros
y te bautizaste infinidad de veces.
Al rozar la eternidad,
Comenzaste a flotar por encima del tiempo
como si ya hubieras muerto
o fueses inmortal.

Creíste poder despertar a los dormidos
Pero estabas en el sueño:
La embriaguez del solipsismo,
La embriaguez a secas.

Ya estás sobria,
Y despierta, creo.
Ya te sabes conejo blanco
Con reloj de arena
Que sin miedo no está cuerdo.
¡Eres vieja!
Lejana, como una estrella,
De otra dimensión.
El espejo es sólo vidrio,
Humano un nombre taxonómico.

Sólo te queda por descubrir
Si efectivamente
Todo lo que baja, tiene que subir.

Confessions of a Hair Splitter

Even when I close my eyes I see split hairs,
The frayed and dry bifurcating feminine strands.

At even the slightest instance of idleness
I find my hand threading through those oilless ends
Holding up the little Vs
To separate, to split
(To make make a split, like a contortionist ballerina)

The action is like pulling off a stubborn sticker,
Or separating the toilet papers.
I gingerly pinch each branch of strand
And try to pull as evenly as I can
(It's like a highway twisting round or like a skier curvijg down)

Sometimes it seems the right strand will be left
But in the end the left remains.
The little half a hair that has been severed is the weaker half,
Often pale and curling in my hand.
When I've been splitting for a while
My sweater's strewn with little shrivels of hair
(As of an old lady or the shavings of some wood.)

But the half left on the head
Is not much stronger than the one that fell:
Compared to the whole hairs, it's dental floss
Ready to break at the slightest pull.
Sometimes I enjoy breaking this surviving half.
(In cruelty against the big part of the wishbone)

There are are white spots
Rather near the end,
Which mark a split in another sense:
These are knots of some kind
That indicate the hair will break
If tugged at precisely at that place
(The pleasure of tearing down the dotted line!)

But I exhaust these hair mutations rather quickly,
Nervously
I find the almost invisible knots,
That break not so easily
The minuscule inverted Vs,
(Not like snake tongues but like splinters)
That my fingernails can barely grasp
And (like a surgeon or a seamstress threading a needle)
With comfortable frustration at my un-nimble fingers
And piercing concentration that obliterates the surroundings
I split not so easily.

Sometimes my sight is tricked
And the overlapping hairs give the illusion of being
Joined at the hip
But they're really two strong separate hairs
With healthy, rounded tips.
(The disappointment is of running up to a stranger
Mistaking him for a high school friend.)

I could not stop this fixation even if I wanted to.

Clean

Today I am entirely me,
The sky is red and pink behind the trees.
The sky is slowly bleeding out
Its ability to think.

Today I like the way things feel on my open pores and wind-blown hair.

I was clean for a while,
But then I was dirty.
I dirtied sheets in many
Strange tower beds.

I pondered over all his gestures
Every minute of every day.
My love was like a red red rose
(Made of cheap metaphors, of course).

Now I am clean again.
The sky reminds me I am clean,
Delivers moobeams through a quickly fading cloud.

For years I remembered too strongly.
My mind was the vibrating echo
Of an original whispered word.

Today I am only clean,
Slowly bleeding out my ability to think.

Mineral Love

I love a cold and lifeless thing
Not messy flesh
A seed of truth in its mineral core
Its porous face
I take it will take long for it to fade
Dissolve, evolve

I love the weakness of its diamond-jealous sparks that blended with its gravelly mass to spice it up.
I love how in my pocket as I pass the trees and flowers and the grass
It gives mee weight,
A cold grey anchor for the shore.

I need no kiss and no caress, no touch
Than it to hold
It pulses in my hand, it breathes
I swear it does
We were reconciled through metaphor,
My dear, my rock

The plights of old age

I remember my grandmother in the big house, watching television all day long, shouting when she spoke because her hearing was bad, getting helped into the shower by the maid. There were shelves and shelves of neglected books on philosophy and literatura from her happy days as a profesor, now caked in dust. I don’t want to end up like this, I thought. My craft, after all, is not to dance ballet, I can do it for as long as the pen does not tremble too much in my wrinkled hand. I will do yoga all my life to be fit and flexible when I’m old, not like my grandmother who would take a cab to the café down the block. I will be successful, proud of all my published books and numerous recognitions, proud of having changed lives in the classroom, hand in hand with the love of my life and our beauiful offspring. But then again, when I was little, I imagined myself at the age of twenty already having published a novel, with an adorable boyfriend, having seen much more of the world than I have, studying at some university abroad. Life has a way of making distances in time toward your goals expand, expand, and expand through some circumstance or another. However, I have always thought of the time in a lifespan as ever different, always new, because never before were you thirty, or forty, or fifty-two, and I have always disagreed with my peers who want to die a spectacular death in their late twenties to never know the plights of old age. I want to know life, to know it to the fullest degree possible, I always thought. But there are some fears. Watching my mother age, and having aged myself a little, I wonder if life really is always new. With my mother it seems to be the same depression, the same traumas, the same resentment. The same unfulfilled dreams, only different television shows on primetime. It seems that life passes you by, whizzing past all those goals that kept getting farther and farther away from your reality, and on the other hand drones on, leaving you stuck in the same spot you’ve always been. Reflecting on these matters gives me a feeling of restlessness, of insatisfaction. The plights of old age is probably just a different version of the plights of youth and the plights of middle age. Except that on top of everything, you are wrinkled and practically deformed, you have no energy, you are invaded with disease, and nobody expects anything new from you. If it really is that bad, I guess I will submit to oblivion and smoke opium for the duration of my elder years for, after all, what is the emminence of death good for if not to enjoy all the pleasures that kill you softly?

Eulogy of the Muse

She would bleed out of me uncontrollably. She would shake the hand to stumble towards a pen or any type of keyboard and discern. She was a mistress that lived in wooden pipes and rolling papers, in starry skies and bus rides, in poetry classes and nature walks. She made kaleidoscope a verb. She took away sleep or else crept her way in, where even now she lives as a ghost, dictating flashes of magic. I thought that tree of life inside my head contained an elixir of boundless existence... it was sweet, a thick whaft of words. But she is dead now, limp and lifeless. The autopsy proves she drowned. The water of the ocean rotted her wood, dissolved her powers. An Icharus. With her I felt the sparks of the sun on my face, I grabbed the twigs that burned in the campfire and she sat on the burning branches as if she were made of air. I held her hand as we plunged towards the depths of dreams in that watery tempest. An ocean death, a death in the place of origin. Now her corpse is dry as stone, porous. All deserts were once oceans. All oceans have vague memories of incandescent volcano explosions, times of heat and destructive creation. What was there in the poetry, in the jumbled prose? A vomitive cry, an itch, a restless eye. But most of all a heart consumed by fire. That fire reached the brain and linked both organs. Now the heart beats like a clock, and the brain is only ego, uninspired. I must justify my absence, honor her life by reconigzing her death. I must speak of the emptiness, the silence of cave walls. Except that there is nothing really to say. Silence and emptiness speak for themselves. Contepmlation becomes passive, passion becomes contemplative. And there is nothing new under the sun.

Manos

Manos. Manos que no se cansan de hablar, que no se cansan de tararear. Tararear... manos tumban tarareos por cualquier tipo de superficie. Como si fueran teclas, tocan ritmos tántricos. Las manos conocen liso, conocen agua y jabón. Cuando las lavas se esfuman, además de que se espuman: se convierten en fantasmas. Mis manos tocan mi cara y con uñas la arañan un poco, la rascan en puntos sensibles, bajan por mi cuello y tocan cada piedrita de mi collar, se llenan de todo. Manos de vainilla recogen el cereal que se regó por toda la cocina y lo intenan limpiar del polvo porque sí lo consumirán. Se ponen pegostiosas y polvosas. Cuando hay un hilo suelto, ellas lo desenredan y lo deshacen hasta que sean múltiples hilitos. Manos lo colocan en la orilla de la ventana del metro. Manos amasan y sienten el espacio entre los dedos como un vacío sediento que da tragos profundos y se frota en el abismo de la masa. Mis manos conocen los volúmenes de mi cuerpo, y buscan conocer los volúmenes de tu cuerpo. Sienten las páginas del libro como si buscaran aletearse mariposas y volar con ellas. Las manos sudan, se ensucian, sostienen el peso de todo cuando están en el camión que nos sacude el equilibrio, las manos también limpian el café molido que no cayó directo en la cafetera. Manos de mañana, manos de noche. Mis manos son lo que te ofrezco para que me guíes, tus manos son mis ojos y mis manos son tu corazón.

Pies

¡Ay! ¡Tanto de la vida es muerte! El suelo está lleno de muerte, de desechos. Cucarachas caminan a nuestro alrededor, por ahí corre la mugre, el agua del drenaje, los vidrios rotos, todo lo vemos. Los zapatos que nos pones muchas veces son tan blandos y tan ligeros que sentimos todo. Sudamos fácilmente y olemos mal. Pero a veces nos toca caminar por pasto o por arena… el pasto que Whitman llamó un pañuelo de Dios. La arena de las dunas, la eterna arena que nos exfolia y nos hunde como agua seca. Cuando eras chiquita nos lamías el sudor. Te gustaba la sal, sólo te torcías en tu cama y nos lamías como si fuéramos tu helado del postre de la comida. Se sentía bien, se ha sentido bien cuando tus novios han decidido colocarnos en su boca y besarnos, aunque tú te mueras de la pena porque sabes que olemos, tendemos a oler muy, bastante mal. Sobre todo cuando nos pones alpargatas. En la prepa Claudia te decía Patas chuecas, o sólo Patas, ¿te acuerdas? Siempre nos ha gustado extendernos hacia afuera, hacer un triángulo como si estuviéramos practicando ballet. ¡Y luego cuánto trabajo nos costaba pararte! Cuando te sentabas en el suelo te azotabas y te parábamos con muchos dobleces de pierna e impulsos extraños con tu trasero al aire. Nos acordamos del último día en la clínica, cómo nos volvimos locos y empezamos a temblar en esa partecita difícil de ubicar, muy en el centro de nosotros, sobre todo del izquierdo, y las enfermeras te decían que tus pies se te estaban adelantando a tu partida, que andaban emocionados. Sí andábamos emocionados pero también nerviosos, ansiosos, llevábamos mucho tiempo andando en círculos y con los mismos zapatos mansos, cómodos, sobre el mismo suelo de linóleo. Volver a caminar distancias largas… ¡qué travesía! Nos gusta caminar, nos gusta llevarte aunque nos cueste trabajo ajustarnos a los zapatos que nos pones, son casi siempre demasiado grandes. Luego nos da comezón y no entendemos por qué, cuando nos rascas a veces se mezcla con cosquillas y nos damos cuenta que somos muy sensibles. Nos gusta que nos eches crema y que nos mimes, y aunque nos gusta estar descalzos (no amamos los calcetines) no aguantamos la mugre, estar negros. Muchas veces llegaste a casa después de un largo día y nos postraste sobre el lavamanos para lavapiearnos. Nos pasa algo con las rayas del piso, con los pilares de los barandales, con las sombras y las luces. El pie derecho tiene que pisar donde justo atraviese estas cosas, pero a veces cambia y el chiste es justo pisar donde NO hay raya, o que el pie izquierdo sea el que pise la raya. A veces se siente raro pisar el punto del piso mojado o que tiene una basura atravesando la línea del pie porque el otro lado no siente nada, y luego nos confundimos con qué pie debe pisar qué… siempre hay un sentimiento de incompletud con eso de pisar las rayas o las sombras… es todo un juego con el espacio que dominamos y a veces nos saltamos un escalón para que caiga donde debe cada uno de nosotros. No lo podemos explicar… sólo nosotros nos entendemos.

Someday is a long time

... And the feeling's not quite there
Like that of body bobbing in the sea
The sensation leaves one bare
A stocking hanging out the basket of laundry
(No rhymes that fit, only vain attempts at symmetry
The storyteller fails in some rythmic sense),
Is what happens when...

You imagine a story that can't be told.
You let your shoes infest with mold.
You buy and you yourself are sold.
You dissect a species incredibly old.

Through nothing you can someday sometimes attain
A silent treasure as a gain
But someday is a long time.

A naked angel on the front window prophesying rain
Is your only comfort on an empty day
At least the cores of trees will cry with you through their fingered leaves.
Nothing can cure this emptiness
Like that of body bobbing in the sea.

Languid

I feel lulled, an invisible barrier blocks my mind. I feel the literature boiling up inside, the prolongued mmmmm's, the moon escaping my eyes through the thoughtless clouds, the bubble wrap in the dining table, and all the other settings in which I feel a certain detatchment, when I see those little sparks flame up that are only in my head, when i remember the beauty of the ocean waves, the excitement of my dog while I am lying on the bed, her tail wagging in curious furious little circles. But no stories fall from this sad mouth, no force possesses these languid fingers but the pulse to key whatever board I can and make at least a mushy composition. I feel the emotions of effortless effort bundled up inside, I cannot sleep because a dog upstais is wailing, abandoned somehow. I love my lamp and my lushy curtains, the broken down books on the table, the childish quilt with trains on it. I love my sister's bike when it takes me to the yoga shala where I lie on my mat and try to get some sleep back because I want to bend this way and that but I'm also still trying to retrieve the world of my last dream. They say that April's a rough month. All this I live, and heave, and sweat, and many puddles do I skip over, and many dreams do I let rot and die, and many bursts of sobbing sighs, of anxiety fits and little pills and books I read that get to me. It is time passing through me, like water my fingers, leaving no trace in words behind, how does it do that? How does it come and leave wordless? How does it hit and leave no sort of bump or bruise? I'm stale, like a rock left by the side of the road, trembling on the edge, outside the wheel of fortune. I am a languid rock that rocks in place and wants to scribble whatever scribblings in the sand it may.

Musick

This is not music.
Playing with slippery fingers that fall at any memory.
This is not music.
Watching you play as I sleep through the day.
This is not music.
Breathing hard, suffocated under your deformed sprawl.
This is not music.
This is not yearning, hearing the songs at the back of my mind.
This is not music.
This is not love, wishing for cracked silence after every sigh.
This is not music.
This is a mantra, always level with your soul, affecting cadence but
This is not music.
Not poetry to rearrange some sad ideas in verse and definitely
This is not music.
Not only dreams the ones that pull you down to bed and make you hug it
This is not music
Never wanting to wake up because it just keeps getting deeper
This is not music.
There are no muses, they only come to those delirious
They make not music.
While we are only in places of noise and babble
We make not love. We cannot. Only sickness.
This is not love.
This is not music.

Steady fall

Maybe on a ship telling a story
Or killing a mockingbird, or
Suffering a trial.
The testaments betrayed,
The heart of darkness swayed,
Flowers for some white mouse.
The awakening is always pure,
A clensing of the finer senses.
A little tinge in the third eye.
He always knew it would happen to him,
Just didn't know the time.
Who ever knows the time as we space?
It was thick but not foggy,
The presence of his Conscious Light
Worth spreading, worth juggling about.
But as time spaced him out
Fear and darkness seeped
Through the creases the fin
Of a shark could be seen.
He picked up a dead rose on the sidewalk.
He discovered new bones in his body every day
Like pockets for angel wings
That shone in absence.
He walked under ladders and
Slipped in the mud
And began to be sure that some freak accident
Was just around the corner
The cars seemed to leer with their
Spotlight eyes at him
And so he went inside and forgot
All about the Light
And he remembered the flaws and the
Downward spirals of night's mare.

Don't try to reach the top, we aren't
Swimming in no body of water.
Whatever goes down will not rise to float again.
Whatever goes up must go down.

And that's the gravity of the situation.

Silands

These are places where people live.
There are spaces where people can't breathe.
Swift scenes on screens of crowds give us the idea
That we've seen more of the world
Than it has of us
With some sort of spectral silence,
Like the moon about to bounce on our round horizon lines.

But what's in a silence?
Your face, somewhat blurred
Full of questions for asked answers
To letters you never replied to.
Your silence fills my head with echoes
Imagined, unforgotten.
Lapses, like all the angles you'll never see of me:
In the mirror, changing my hair, laughing heartily,
Discovering the world.
It is a fantasy.

There are islands and mainland always just ahead,
For we are navigating our way like magicians from this place.
Who knows where or what we are or were
And who knows the symbolism of rabbits.
Silence.

Web skin

You belong to a simple time
your skin of spider web
with all its soft spots and
your bones
all jumbled, crypting on
some secret message
have no thirst for adventure and
what is more
would be comfortable dreaming always,
even strange dark dreams,
on a soft water bed by the ocean
and nothing more.

Forgiveness

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it"

Yes it must be something
Like Mark Twain said,
A sort of smell from
Fish to Fine; to Flower.
An urge inside our heads
Of hearts that are never
Satisfied and still see bumps,
Think them their own
(Own others' faults)
And burn up a river like salmon
To try and find some Voice of Apology,
So that sometimes
Even when no one says sorry
They want to forgive.

Forgive is to give and
Forget is to get.
We forgive never for get
And are in this pathetic,
Gazing admiringly at
Our empty soft hands.

Fanmail to Lemony Snicket

Dear Mr Snicket,

You probably remember me as the little girl of about twelve years old who tried to hide the lo mein noodle stains on her shirt and was accompanied by the flamboyant -a word which here means "not very shy at all"- peer who exclaimed that your pseudonym -a word which here means "pen name"- sounded like dishwashing detergent at your book signing in Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, many years ago. Or, most likely, you don't remember me at all. Back then, your books were something I had in common with my friends an my siter as we all marelled over the mysteries of VFD. Your unauthorized autobiography gave me the creeps and made me jump at sounds that of course were "only the wind".

I grew up and came back to my native land, Mexico, but your books stayed on the shelf of my bookcase next to Roald Dahl and Philip Pullman and the like. The book you had autographed, however, was lost by my siter, a loss which I bitterly mourned. I couldn't stay angry at her forever, of course, and eventually she bought me a replacement to The Bad Beginning and the series was complete. I went on to study English Literature and moved on to more exciting and elevated poems and essays.

I never imagined the series would come in handy at a psyhiatric clinic a month before my 20th birthday, but that was, as some would say, my destiny.

I had been going down the road frequently travelled by which I thought was the road never before travelled by of Messianic -a word which here means "thoughts of being the Antichrist, the Third Eve of mankind come to tempt the serpent an redeem a doomed world beginning with a collective meditation in Tepoztlan the day after Christmas with certain soul mates which would each play a role, such as oracles, pearls of wisdom, and devil's advocates"- thoughts induced by too much pot and LSD.

So I ended up at the psychiatric clinic. It took me two weeks to react to the medication they were injecting me with and even longer to really land and wake up to reality. In my psychosis, I adopted a phrase that had stuck in my mind from early days: "The world is quiet here". Oh, how I wished the world were quiet! I wished it so hard it made me mad. Maybe this memory detonated a desire to read the series again: I knew it would not bore me in the anxiety and dullness of the clinic routine, of the separation from all my loved ones, of the constant uncertainty of when I would leave and what I had done and what my life would be like when I got out.

All the nurses an nuns marvelled at how many books in English I had in my room: your series was accompanied by Joyce's Dubliners, Chejov's stories, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, and the Oxford Anthology of English Literature vol II. But your books I could read effortlessly, and find amusement as they brought me back down to Earth. I had dreams at night that I was Violet Baudelaire (although I'm much more like Klaus in many ways). Your books reminded me that more tragic things can occur than my predicament, and that we can't carry the weight of all the trechery and decadence, as well as the shared opinion that tea should be as bitter as wormwood. Nothing beats Count Olaf quoting Philip Larkin at his death-sand. The books also helped me remember that I truly was not an orphan; thanks to my very real parents who supported me I was surviving this great mental fire.

I tend to view it all in a humoristic light now. Your life is certainly not unfortunate as far as I can gather and as for me, this tragedy, instead of creating more schisms, has created a harmony between my separated parents that I had never seen before. I believe in miracles now and consider myself The Little Engine that Could, but Couldn't. Certainly what I couldn't do was save the world, and what I can't do ever again is drink or do drugs because I already sat on a wall and had a great fall and thank God that all the king's horses and all the king's men COULD,so that I didn't end up like Gollum or like a fellow (but permanent) patient at the clinic; an old lady who exclaimed whenever you approached her "¿No me van a cortar la cabeza, verdad?"

We all have to know our limitations, and I write this to you as an associate, a volunteer who wishes to be quotable one day, and perhaps comfort other young minds as they realize that being well-read is not normal, and probably will never be.

Thank you for your Series of Unfortunate Events that made my recovery far more fortunate. You are still being read and re-read, and I can only imagine how good that must feel.

Sincerely,
Adriana Toledano Kolteniuk

Locura inminente

Empecé a comprobar que me estaba volviendo loca: que me estaba acercando cada vez más a lo intraducible. Pero seguía siendo una historia. Seguía siendo una historia del personaje trabado de la novela que estaba escribiendo, de la novela que a futuro iba a ser cosechada, asimilada, terminada y, finalmente, comunicada. De todas formas, seguía siendo una realidad alterna totalmente controlable.

mm… ¿sí? ¿verdad?

"Tenemos nuestro retrato de Dorian Gray pero lo estamos cuidando".

Igual ni sé a qué viene el nosotros, ni el preguntar. Estamos en este camino solos y sin más remedio que la gotita de agua y la risa para hacerle cosquillas al mundo, nada más, como tenue mago silencioso. Y eso si queremos, si nos alcanza la voluntad o la bondad o lo que quieran llamarle. Por eso sí, tener tu retrato real es bueno, es un salto hacia tu libertad, pero haces lo que puedes.

Ya me respondí a mí misma la pregunta. ¿Ves? Eso es el diálogo. Sí, sigue habiendo “yo” y “tú”. Sigue habiendo musas y silencio, musas como luciérnagas que corren a los dedos y silencio que absorbe el tiempo turbio, que lo bebe, y se consuela con las musas que musan incesantes, varias mujeres chillonas, las únicas que no mienten. Así hay pasión en la palabra, así y tal vez de alguna otra forma, por otro camino de amor hacia alguna otra voz de verdad externa, de eso y aquello y nosotros.

Pero solamente se trata de conectarte realmente con la poesía y con el poema para ser un poeta vivo, ese mago tenue, realmente, y no una copia barata amargada consigo misma, variante pleonásmica de la existencia de la consciencia como materia que se sabe materia que… ah… quién sabe de qué tanto sirva. Sirve, porque siempre logrará su mágico efecto; no sirve, porque es siempre insuficiente. No deja de haber erupciones de más poesía para poetizarla; no tiene fin el vómito existencial de la metáfora como epifanía sobre el mundo creado por el hombre, y siempre seguirá sucediendo porque ocurre el contagio de algo tan surreal, tan acercado a nuestro polo que apunta hacia el Nacimiento, que nos enteramos que por distraídos hemos limitado nuestra sabiduría natural y nunca nos entendemos cuando hablamos de esas cosas aunque parecen haber muchos tipos de acuerdos más bien tácitos con un sello de “institucionalizado”.

Y este discurso ya contiene un rasgo de crítica social, uno de psicológica, otro de evolución y progreso. Finalmente son puros monólogos atropellados de una persona atrapada entre sus posibilidades imaginables y sus aspiraciones perennes, entre sus jaulas fatalmente establecidas y que con fatalidad odia, y escribe de madera y de árboles como si sólo la tierra la entendiera y que se estremeció de niña cuando escuchó el bello título “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”.

Apenas estás descubriendo tu retrato, le estás levantando el velo, la tela, y empezando a reconocer que siempre te agarraste muy fuerte de tus realidades y también de tu inocencia, de tu esperanza y delirios de pureza. Pero está bien, se trata de no agarrarlos tan fuerte, de no apretarlos. Y así, agarrar las riendas del caballo y conducirlo por el camino dorado, sin miedo porque es el camino a casa.

El camino siempre implicará APRENDIZAJE, y eso se libra del hermetismo del conocimiento autodidacta: sí implica un auto-exilio de ti mismo. Quién sabe a quién o qué le diste la mano cuando te empeñaste en ser un Odiseo en tu masculinidad y una Antígona en tu feminidad, pero lo hiciste. Caminas por una tierra extraña y no alcanzas ver el fin.

¿La novela es el retrato entonces? ¿El retrato es la novela? ¿Ser esclava de un cuadernito es el camino hacia la “vida verdadera”, estar pensando todo el tiempo en esquemas narrativos, acomodos posibles, planos de recuerdos y más maquinaciones? Sí, eso pensé. Eso, por lo menos, le mostraba la historia.

Your dreams won’t let you live until you listen to them.