nada es muy poco

21 April 2004 - 14:22

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>

He asks me where I want to talk. Somewhere a little less high up, somewhere a little more comfortable. We go down to an open air patio. There are mountains/volcanoes hundreds of thousands of feet high on one side, the sea on the other. There are levels to our little veranda, fountains, tile, stucco, archways, trailing vines. The five of us are all there, under the stars, under molten rock shooting across the sky. This time the new world will begin in Mexico.

*
Driving north from Ensenada, he and I discuss the night before. He says, 'When I'm *out*, on anything, I look for what is constant. The place in me that doesn't change. I knew who I was...'

I say, 'Last night I didn't have a place like that. There was no self, nor even a centerless system to try to make sense of it all. "I" just let go of everything, until I was water, no -- air, no -- void. It was the only way to ease the discomfort. I don't have anything constant in that state.'

*
Things are only as easy as you let them be. A sentence scrawled across a scrap of cardboard as his eye is blackening, his breaths heavy on the ground in the alley where he sleeps. After I realize the person I love is nowhere behind the face yelling at me, the fists punching his own cheeks, I wrap a blanket from home around me, walk away and stare at the ground.

I hug myself tightly, my stare vacant and dissociated, although tonight I am sober. Am I hurt right now? I ask myself. Am I, directly or indirectly, in large ways or small, hurt right now? Will I feel the pain of this later?

No.

*
As a little girl (and now), I wouldn't go to bed angry. Or, even if I did, not without saying 'I love you.'

Once (weeks ago) he asked me when we were fighting, 'Can you let go of all this right now, just let it fall away, because we know nothing we're saying or doing in this moment has to do with what we really are? Can you even erase the past?'

'Yes, of course.' Like water, like air, like something less substantial...

*
Yesterday before the fight I walked through Balboa park, where years before I lingered at the end of a relationship until I was turned away. The leaf skeletons of words said on that far-away afternoon rustled across my thoughts as I sat in the white ampitheater where they were spoken: 'I don't love you. I don't want to make a life with you. I don't even want you in front of me right now.' The worst words to me.

Last night I heard them again, although he didn't mean them. If I could tell you how small the gesture that inspired them... If I could tell you the extent of the violent, disproportionate reaction... If I could tell you the ocean lives inside me...

Constant. Void. Constant void. A screen that goes black. With peace.


Plexi, plexi bend don't shatter
Once you're broken shape won't matter
--Jack Johnson

Que hora son mi corazon...so many nights, the merry blues... -- Manu Chao