Affective ambush

 

It is territorial, being. Therefore, when we say that a certain place is ours, it means that we are attached to it, that without it we are less us and more figurative islands. Affects govern motivations, whether negative or positive. Leave or stay, what binds me to the place?

And I crystallize into a tree, the same old and barren tree that gives shade to our entrance, flanked by shrubs and daisies that grow in the trough. And by those ancient stairs, by which we ascended to what we once called heaven, when the mother was alive and irreplaceable, which are sometimes climbed two by two, sometimes ascended slowly, for them I am waiting for the time to dry sorrows or to leave. I don't know how to leave until the puzzle is ready. There must be a signal given for this to happen, whether it comes from the lowered window into the yard, from the sliver of light on the door of the great entrance hall, or even from the chimney which, spewing gray smoke in the puffs of a train, It will warn me that we have all, all been replaced. That there are no more ghosts pending. I will be the last to use the family name, to scratch, like the old linden tree, the existence of this place that was ours. I know I'm dead, but I'm still missing my hair hanging from an old bow that I've become accustomed to, my mouth drooping, unaware of childhood smiles, because I've lost their habits. The dull, dying and faded eyes, long forgotten of the freshness of hope. The lit and white soul indicative of life that I no longer have. I can't. I shall see this mangy and ugly dog nibbling at my ankle and tossing and turning to the wagging tail, wrapped, without anyone understanding or seeing me. Or the litter of remorseful cats that nest under the old linden tree, purring meows and regrets that are not mine. Tilia acoite can last for eons! Oh, they won't be the same eternities as in heaven, no. I said goodbye to you, still alive. Certain that I was dying. Uncertain of my own death. And now, I, too, a corpse without a body, am hostile. That I should have hugged you much more, biting your lips as if I were tasting papayas and holding me in your fruit strands. And embrace you with all the fingers and tips of your limbs sticking in, not allowing you to leave me. Would you still be alive? 

And if you lie dead, deader than I, where you wander that I do not find you, neither on the stairs nor in the wilderness where I let myself be carried by the winds, where they walk alive and gone, together in the sadness of the seasons. Non-stop stations, like boats without a sea. I only see them going out of return. There's no turning back, lately. And I thought that when I died, I was reborn. And I feel like I'm dying in the boredom of having arms without hugging you, of having eyes without seeing you. I clung to this old linden tree that knows more about me than I know myself. From the cobs that curled my fingertips, next to my nails and caused me pain that I muffled with my teeth; Woe who cleaned thy carnations with the leaves, 32 thou hast that I have counted them. My love, I still remember that love was easy, an easy word that I digested on your lips, on that moist and sweet tongue, on your warm and minty mouth, on your arid and rare lap. We ran out of time. Forbidden to love. And God, your God has robbed you without warning, without telegrams and without flowers. He robbed us of your identity on the way to death to which you were averse. Died. Even you let yourself be overcome by both. And I, who was always the weakest in their mouths, sat on top of the centuries, refusing to mourn, to mourn. I have not yet done so. Idiot, my unconscious tells me. Grief happens when the other who dies disappears without a trace. Leaving all your things to the living. But not yours, my love. If your devoted God had warned me that you would leave so quickly and so far, I swear I would have let myself go by now, in that light of transport. But, as much as you tell me, what this Divine being failed about your departure, somehow, the limbo of the good times does not allow me to withdraw. I have run aground between two states and neither of them leads me to anything. This waiting, from where I see stairs and shadows and rain, where cats and dogs shelter and where I give myself the song of birds, is the long interregnum of non-acceptance. And life becomes a bitterness of continuous seconds, with a mask of reality. As long as I don't see people climbing, people alive on these stairs that are still mine, I become tentacular, between one thought and another, where my truth has become the unreality of everything. I ran aground.