I'LL FORGET YOU WHEN FEBRUARY HAS THIRTY DAYS

 That jacket served me as much as his escape. I threw it away, but his denial didn't know how to do it. Or it would have. No one is born to be a masochist. This is me talking to myself, of course. I would never have the courage to reveal it to anyone. Not in this way. 

I've been magical, ouch, and me magic, it's round and round to the brain. Not because i'm very smart or because i have a brain the size of the silo-auto. I often think it was unfair to be born so disproportionate. I am a sensual animal, mysterious and eager for knowledge, but when it comes to taking the right steps, the moon bothers me a lot. If I still had it in Cancer or in Taurus, but in this chapter it didn't come out so rewarding. Yes, Dad, I could have been born with more IQ and less sex appeal. Or the other way around, dammit! Or the moon could be somewhere else, not twins. It makes me feel like a peculiar little animal and I would rather be an animal like the others. Why not? I would still like to know what my father thinks about some of the outbursts that are being directed at him. I look for his gaze on the wall, but it's his great-grandfather's that greets me, and always in the same affectionate way. 

-Tell me dear, write, debate, walk in your thoughts!

-Bisa, put yourself in my place: you know it's him, that, only that one, nothing else, no lozenge or suppository, no vitamin or anything chemical or lyrical to contain my feeling. Void it. Conceal? How, great-great-will, do I wake up and go to bed thinking about him? If I repeat five hundred times that a man who does not value the love I have for him can only be innocent, ignorant, ignoble, but not him, great, you know that he is the opposite of all defects, the completeness of all my longings! Fight on my side, encore. Conspire in my favor! I miss him so much! And I would already be cured, if I weren't so proud!  He also said to me: come here, sit here next to me, look how you make me just look at you! But I ran away! And then, I ran away again! Why do I run away from being happy??? Can't you tell me?

The great-grandfather says to me: daughter, tell you what? You know the answer as well as I do! You run away because you're afraid it's not real, that he won't feel the same as you, that he might die after you hug him! And you deserve to hug him so much! If it were in my power, you would be with him, believe me! You have fewer friends than most of the people you've met in these fifty years! Now, let me tell you what else you have: Some enemies! In the bosom of your own family! And I'm not talking about the majority. I'm talking about half a dozen! And outside the family! Some of them are just opportunistic shams, you know, girl, envious! I've never said this to anyone. I could only say to you: you are so much like me that sometimes while I am here in the group cheering for you, in my idleness, I wonder how is it possible for her to be my great-granddaughter, if she is more like me than my own children! And you're Cristina! You know how to read people like no one else! Look, do you think he doesn't think about you when he goes to bed? Even when you have the other in your arms? And when he wakes up, who do you think he's thinking about? I didn't want to tell you, but he knows who you are to him! 

-Bisa, I don't see him anymore, I don't smell him, I haven't touched him for more than two years! I mean, I haven't made love to him anymore, like this, skin to skin, mouth to mouth for over twenty-five years! I'm terrible at math, but if I was twenty-nine the last time this happened, four years from now it will be THIRTY YEARS! Great-grandfather, thirty years is a lifetime! Why didn't I die when he left?

-But you died! and you have died so much! And dying is what you do constantly, when you are immersed in pain, when you fall asleep crying! when you wet his picture, when you kiss ours! If there's anyone who's been dying a lot, believe me, it's you! You are worth five hundred of this kind! What I tell you is confidential, but it's very true! I knew Chico was a good seed! You're even better! But don't get distracted! Write your revolt, your love, unravel it as if they were tales from your rosary!

-But they are, great-grandfather, I have never seen a rosary with so many fat tears, with so many beads of sorrows, with so much wasted love!

-Look, you're wrong and you know it well! Nothing in love is wasted! It's not like when you go to the fishmonger and ask to get the fish to eat or the vegetables for the soup, that you throw away waste. In love, nothing is wasted and I know you know that! No love is thrown away. Nor recycled. And it's not like the wings of angels, which you cut off so you can walk better, nothing like that! The more you clip their wings, the more they grow, so is love! You've seen it, you know it! And you didn't have adults teach you! You know, my dear! Now I'm going to leave you, today I don't want to see you in tears! Today I have an appointment that cannot be postponed, but we will talk again!

That's what it takes, talking to the elderly! Even they have commitments that cannot be postponed! And I wanted so much to have an unpostponable commitment to you and nothing! Nothing! Nothing times nothing, it's zero, Grandpa Rodrigo used to tell me! Do you want to see that it will give you another value?! And there's no point in coming with five o'clock teas or seven o'clock sermons, it'll be the same! I'm a girl from Porto who loves a guy from Trás-os-Montes who doesn't care about her for anything! Zero! And this girl can't take this no till now!

But this "no" that I don't accept (what a remedy) is a crazy no! It's not even a concrete no! It's not a no that comes after a question, nothing! If there were any people asking questions, it wasn't me, it was him! And I replied vaguely, it's not rain, it's not people, and the donkey doesn't answer like that. And I'm giving it to you! And I shelved the fucking lack of love on the fifth floor, I didn't love myself, of course, because I thought I loved myself first, but I've seen that even in love I'm wasteful, because I love him above all else! You have to be very stupid to love above yourself! Aunt Carmen was right. Stupid! On top of that, you don't even look like you're from Porto! I accept everything, you can tell me everything! There's nothing else they tell me that can irritate me, decenter me, not even if it's my enemies (whether they are declared or hidden) telling me, it's going to be the same, I'm in the paints! I insult myself, none of the insults that others may give me will be greater or more important than mine! Oh! That is your karma! Mine is being spent these seconds, days, hours, weeks, months, years hanging, in the position of a sucker, which is an oracle card that I call a trainee card, depending on the previous card or the later card. If it's a three of spades and the hanged man is the big sucker, and that even changes with the later card, like three of diamonds or six of spades. If it's a six of spades followed by a hanged man, oh man, it's voluntarism that wants to impose itself on the mind thirsty for knowing more. Or the other perspective. I've always liked perspectives. One day I dreamed that I was rich in perspectives and that made me happy. Because I always go to that safe, hidden on the fifth floor and I come from there more comforted. 

With the whole world, the change of perspective works, but with you, nepia! There's no turning back, you know? I hang on and that's what happens, I get hung up. By the penants! The more I want to forget you, the more you come to mind and look how stubborn I am to get there. I accept what I don't understand, but I need to understand with you! And I watch the conversations, the looks, i go back with the keyboard in my hands, the notes G, DO, D, E, jumping, reinventing themselves in forex chords, the fucking keyboard is heavy as chayote, now think of a chayote, it has nothing to do with it, it's even worse! Twelve scales in the ex50 and each one heavier than the other, me in the doria and you in the phrygian and me going to lydia and you coming to a minor scale, which is not your kind at all, but them, the fucking scales, poor things, To serve as an excuse for me to go see you, I mean the key of the sun, of course, it's always the sun, always the sun being silent, but the others out of tune, all in chorus moaning me in one hand, inside the bag! You'll think it's easy, take an excuse as heavy as a keyboard and take it just to see you! By the way, just to see you, I tore off key by key, I would take everything apart, to see you fix it, to see your hands on the solder, on the circuits, sliding on the keys, and mine, holding them so as not to caress your face, your arm, not to kiss you, not to draw you a striptease there, immediately after watching the sun fall on your hands, what a girl from Porto has to do to restrain herself,  Such is the desire to grab you and not resist anymore!

I have always been against my resistance and before it comes, courage, i run away, a lioness running away from a lion! A scene completely out of my manual, you even remind me that I must be the hardest geek in the avatar notebook you've ever met! Oh yes! That's a lot of control! And I go back to where I've been, countless times, my love, I come back and live in that turn that time has given, there I hung like a duke and a sad scene! For you, I would go to the end of the world, just for you! And you've never been just anyone. Although I think that no one, no person is anyone, for me close to you, everyone loses any value, as persons, I do not see them, I do not recognize them, neither virtues nor defects. A complete disinterest takes over me and I only go on red alert if I think you can read everything I write! It was funny! And in a way, that's what I really wanted! To know that you read! For it is for you and for you that I write what I write, when I write. And when I write, it's just me on this side, but it's just you on this one! And the world is getting bigger again. And I'm going to give you one more piece of information. You are my centaur Chiron. If you ever said to me, "You are my Chiron," as I tell you, I would not stand on the ground, rise into the air, inflate, hover, fly, glide. And as Tomás says: then you wake up and tap your hand on the bedside table! And speaking of nightstands, dreams, I still remember our bedside tables, I still remember the music to fall asleep and to wake up, I still remember the shows, I still remember the summers, the springs, the winters and the autumns and the many other seasons that bloomed between your eyes and mine,  And by the way, I still remember the big smiles, your good mood, your lively intelligence, your generosity! Of your surrender, of your love, of all of you, naked, clothed, wet, dry, whole, always whole and always more! Always bigger than the stars together, always cheerful and in a good mood, always creative and healthy, always, always, my love! And if everything I remember about you is so flowery, fragrant and intoxicating, you see that I cannot accept a no that has not been said, to a love that has never died, that has never been dismantled, never dismantled, or undone, or evaporated, or ceased to happen. Because every day I continue to love you, every day to think and feel you, no fingers, no touches, no messages, no calls, not even a simple one: hello, I'm alive, or hello, disappear! I continue to populate my universe with the memories that I have of you, that I keep, that are my gold. All my gold! And it is of this wealth that I am made, and you of basalt stones and abundant springs, and I of stars, and you of flaming suns, and I of feathers, and you of light. And it's no use coming here with a bang, ordering me to bug, praying witchcraft, gibberish and sangria, I'm hard to convince, not even my elders try, they know me as a ginjeira. I am a gem tripeira and a lover of the beautiful and eternal. And I came into the world to love you. I really came! And one day I'll repeat it, in a face-to-face, in a tête-a-tête. Give me time to weave courage and when you least expect it, bam, I'll be at your door, and if you don't open it, I'll open it, I'll serenade you right there, publicly, on the beautiful street, next to where Grandpa Rodrigo worked, right next to where we had a studio, next door where we spend days and nights working and talking about everything and nothing. There, there, where you are, which is the same as saying that's where my sun is, the note G on my keyboard!