Dying at halftime

 

I've written to you a lot, since the last time I laid eyes on you. I deleted all the messages, all the poems, everything, everything that united me to you, everything I feel and wrote, daily. I don't even know if you had blocked me, or if your daughter or the bib read what I wrote to you. I don't even want to know. It was for you. It has always been for you. As if it was me who was talking. And, after all, it was always with me. Not once did you answer me. Not a word. You could have done the same for me, when she came into our life, you could have respected me as much, as you do now, with this other person. I wrote to you every day, at any time, sometimes hours at a time, as if there was a source within me (sources are born within me) connected to the divine and it captured me by the chest and made my fingers on the keyboard sound like a lyrical composition that I still hear, only me, always me. I told you about us, about what we had, what happened, what was stolen from me, about what I allowed, about what I tried to build after that, about my hopes, always eternal, always internal, worn, tired, and now yes, dissipated in a fog that I myself created so as not to see the truth. That you don't love me. And run away from this truth. The truth does not exist. We can love someone who doesn't love us. Who will love someone else who doesn't love them. Who, in turn, will love someone else who may love the same. I wrote to you as if I were confessing to my father, I always call my higher self father, I like the idea of having someone pure, untouchable, impartial who does not give in to my whims as a creature and not as a creator. I wrote to you. Although for me, it was you who addressed me, because your figure has become immaterial and unconditional. I wrote to you when the divine light was still shining on my chest, and I, who suffocated with longing for you, had to tell you. And I could only do it at a safe distance from your absence.  To the friend, much more than to the lover, because your fingers touched keyboards and other women's arms and bodies and glasses and cutlery and pianos and life happening, but your fingers stayed on me. And I continued to write to you with mine. As I always did. Measuring the amps and volts of what unites me to you, deconstructing everything, still with a flash of faith igniting my longing. I wrote to you so much. Maybe even more than I've told you during the years we've lived together. Unforgivable of me not to have exposed it in words, even if it was for me, to read what I had inside. I believe that we do not always know the dimension of the feelings we carry with us everywhere. Which become palpable, visible to the naked eye of a good observer. I ran away from you as well as from us, and I also told you in writing. I fled, cowardly, accepting defeat as if by losing love, I was given back another way of living, another way of feeling that erased your absence in me. You have left terraces that are worth as much pain as the necessary dissolution of the fog that permanently drags me to this private place, where I find you. Always in me, untouchable, unconditional, growing, eloquent. But all these adjectives are not mine, they come from you, from what I know of you, from your greatness, from your mastery and rulership in me. You played the right notes in me and then you gave me over to the silence of life, to the empty space where you were no longer and where there was only me and your ghost. I got used to sharing with you all my life, you in the corner of my heart, with iron bars that prevented you from waking me up the seasons, you are dead, I told you many times, I kill you every day, you died or else, it was I who died waiting for the promise that would never be fulfilled. I said to Jorge, when he was at the light table, I no longer remember the name of the sound partner, next to him, I don't remember and I strive for details that lead me to exhaustion, I told him I couldn't want to, but I was watching you play, you were there, on stage, with everyone, it wasn't even daytime,  you couldn't see me and I asked him a lot, I asked him please not to tell you that I went to see you, from afar, far away, there was a crowd of people and you continued to play and I pretended that on stage there were only musicians on stage while Ivo sang, I pretended I didn't hear her voice, I pretended! God, how can a woman pretend not to see the obvious?! And I must have said a lot of bad words, I don't even remember what I said to him exactly, but I know that I argued with him, as if you were the one listening to me and, when they looked at me, I lowered my voice and apologized, sorry Jorge, sorry, but I'm going to wait for him, and he, in profile for me, with his mustache and his dark melenas,  his profile changed by a sneer, as if he wanted to hug me and tell me that it was a nightmare, that there was no reason for me to be like this. Maybe he felt sorry for me, maybe he even imagined his own wife and what it would be like to see her pain, if by chance he did the same to her. I don't know, I don't know, I know that I felt his pity in me when he told me: do you think he likes her??? Think? And he brought jargon to the conversation and that's when I ran away. I ran away again. I fled, as if a devil was coming after me who wanted to put me on the cross, like a demon who wanted to chain me and force me to look at her with you, she on stage doing choirs, she was always a chorus girl, she never went beyond that, but I needed to see it and I refused to do it. Today, you know, today I need to drop the load. To vomit this past that tripled me again the day you came to see me. You didn't come to see me. You came because you were there. Because you weren't alone. You came because you brought our son and so you wouldn't be bad, or maybe so he could leave faster, or maybe because you had some curiosity, you came back. I don't know. I know you should never have come again. You shouldn't. You don't even know how much it cost me to drown you in the wreckage of the days and nights that followed your departure! If you had been aware, perhaps you could have spared me your visit. Maybe you would. Surely you would. Blimey! You have always been sensitive, you have always been concerned about not causing damage, not leaving tears, not destroying the world around you, as you passed by. WHY DIDN'T YOU DO IT TO ME? Me? Why?

I never told anyone close to me about this. The only one who has always heard your name is called Fonseca, who got used to shaking his head every time I spelled your name. PLEASE!!! The dude, you, he goes on tthe same woman, the idea I have is that you were crystallized, friend, wake up! He who took me to the Order to be operated, he who saw me drunk two or three times, he who told me: girl, you need to be hospitalized! My friend Fonseca. I was with him about three years ago. He was sick. But doing shows anyway. He heard your name again, in the onion park, here in this land. He heard your name again in Nova Doce, he put up with my daydreams again and I always said to him: do you want the truth? Don't ask me anything! But he was never able not to ask. He only respects the silence that comes after pronouncing your name, perhaps because your presence spreads and gains a dimension that drowns out his voice. Mine. And see me become small, in my apathy, in the sadness of your name in the space where you are not there. Perhaps. I never spoke to him again. Poor Fonseca! So many years carrying your name, when he ask me about me. As I wrote, I could have written to you before and torn it all up. I never did. I have NEVER returned to you, in all these years. When I dared, I tore everything up, reduced everything to nothing, to the nothing you left me! I didn't want to think about you. Dreaming of you. I was not allowed. I couldn't. I couldn't, for my own good and sanity! YOU, who know me better than anyone, should know that. I killed myself a thousand times, I destroyed myself a thousand times more, just so I wouldn't look at you, so I wouldn't see you, I never went back to the photos, I kept them and I never looked at them again. NEVER AGAIN! But then, I would see your sister, or she would come to see me or I would see the other sister, or your sister and Almerinda. And you were there, always, in my head you were there, in them, with them, with me. When she went to see me at the store, I shuddered with fear. But she didn't tell me about of you. But you were there, anyway. 

You have to be very weak to forget your vulnerability! Never return to the place where you were happy. And since then, the precipice is already there! To try to kill you, inside, always inside, I never went to see you directly. That was the principle. That regulated everything. I could not fail in this rule. It was the most effective. Not going, not seeing, not knowing, not wanting to know. That night when I last went to see you and where I promised myself, after Jorge's commiseration and after having told him that I would wait for you all my life, never to look at you again, was engraved in my mind. I told him that she would use you as a ladder, I told him that when she got what she wanted, she would drop you and I would be there, no matter where, I didn't even think about any of it, I just thought that I knew in advance that it was going to be like this, time was an irregular given, measured by the affliction of having lost you and still having you within reach of half a dozen steps,  If I dared to give them, therefore, what would happen perhaps in two or three years, five at most, and many more have passed. You went to the ladder. You were used. You. Me too. Before. And then. I let them use me. I let them kill me over and over again until I really wanted it to be the real one, the last death. Until the dignified one, the greatest, the one of the body, the one of the earth, the one that consumes everything and ploughed into ashes what I never knew how to erase from me, tear you out of my chest. What are iron or steel bars inside the chest? One less breath, when one breathes exhausted. Exhausted. Dying has always been an aspired boon. Expected. Because we die every day, when we sleep. Every day, if we sleep. Die. We die and we never die entirely. What does not let us die when that is our desire? It is some breath of life that has forgotten to wither. And I continue to cowardly try to diminish you during the day and the night comes and I hear you call me, you call my name while I sleep and when I wake up, you are not. You were never again. Never, never, never. Everyone dies, except me. Everyone sleeps, why not me? The task is not complete. And we cannot renounce it. The tasks must be completed, carried through to the end. The commitments that have been written on the invisible thread and that remain beyond our will or strength. The curtain that falls and muffles the applause of those who remain alive after our departure. Then, the applause ends, people leave the scene, some observations, some feather falling like a tear that dries, before leaving the building, a rustling bird, some smiles also muffled by political correctness, then you hear the footsteps farther and farther until they are just a roll of wings. The curtains smell musty. The lights finally go out and the one in the opposite scenes, with beer in one hand, tobacco in the other, goes down the stairs, the man from the funeral home, the one from the owler, in his impeccable suit that is the same one that leads to weddings, Dário, the dude who sees death as I look at the spines of books,  to see if I recognize them, he continues down the stairs, one at a time, in shuffling steps and music is heard in the distance. It seems to me that it is not mine. It's not me yet. My turn has not yet come. And in the meantime, in which I wait with the ticket in my hand, an ugly, drunken man crosses, staggering and carrying a trident. He smiled at me, sloppy and similar to the News. He introduces himself, saying that I look tired. I tell him that I am. Tired. And he tells me to enjoy his stay. That i should get a chair and sit me down. That he is neptune and that there is nothing else to do but sleep. Sleep on it. And when I prepare to do so, one comes with a severe air, purer, less drunk, more demanding, with the same circumspect air as Berto, when he does not laugh, carrying a reed in his hand and tells me that he is Saturn. And that he goes fishing and when he come back, he want me to have erased you FOREVER from memory. And I didn't even know Saturn knew how to fish. Or that he was benevolent. Who offers me a reasonable deadline, like the college professors. It's not a quarter. I don't think he gives me any more time because he doesn't want his respect or fame to be lost.  And he argues something in my ear. That will help me. Finally, a charitable and serious soul, willing to help me in the process. There is no number yet, he throws it at me, behind my neck, he, as if to say, the river is in Porto, I go on foot, it takes me about three weeks to catch something and be back. You will grill me the fish from the Douro River and then we will talk. I will bring a gift with me. I promise you'll like it. This coming from Saturn, leaves me with the flea behind my ear. Saturn has never been one of pleasures and leisure. I'm going to go in through the wood inside. Maybe i will even fail the fucking exam. But I started today to burn the stage of time he gave me. And as I have left everything in life to solve on my knees, I leave everything to the last, I decided that I will change this in myself and that's it. For anticipating the evil teacher's homework. You are the first to die. And I say this, not knowing if when I die, you won't be the one to play the funeral march, the music I designed to touch me at the end. But then only Saturn and perhaps the ugly Neptune will help me. Homework has already begun. I'm not worried about grades or lead. I intend to finish everything before Saturn arrives. I never liked fried fish from the river. Only you. And that's it, I leave you immersed in the waters. Drown today. If Jorge was reading me, he would laugh a lot because he couldn't see my face. Because he was distressed by what he saw. I get uglier than a staggering neptune, much more than if I just had a sinusitis crisis, which I stomp all the veins on my face, trying to relieve the pain. My only joy at the moment is alprazolam. Just five milligrams and Neptune doing the rest, lending me one of his songs so I can sleep. The waves go and seem to come back, but it's all an illusion, the water is no longer the same, the intensity is different, the foam and even the fog have changed. There is something between the beach and the space between the beach and the seabed. And it is water, a lot, and only water can carry the water that I carry in my eyes because of you. And it is in it that I immerse you, while I burn the hours, the cigarettes, the stupidity, on a low heat, that Saturn does not like anything to run, it is all malembe, malembe, and I have always been obedient, I follow his instructions. First, I'll erase your name. No, I'm going to reverse it. Onitsuaf. EvoL. EFIL. Now mine. Anitsirc. Tomorrow I'll erase your letters and reduce you to the dimension where not even a magnifying glass can read you in me. Saturn will be pleased with me. I set goals. I choose the music that will accompany the beginning of your end. And I'm going to Kurt Weill, Brell, Ferré. I begin the end here. With Adriana Queiroz. With time chewed. With the intimate chords and with the evil chronos that keeps you, you, in your life, me in the cowardice that I chose to begin to dismantle the pain of your presence left in me. Die Dantas. Die, pim.