Self-centered therapy

 

I haven't been you for a long time. I am now only you, perhaps a shadow of something that has landed in you, lived within you and has not accommodated itself to your absence. I did the math on the human calendar. You have been missing me for 9496.5 days. There are many days and nights, hours, seconds of agony. And when you left, I didn't even look you in the face, because I would have to strangle the ambivalent feelings that pulsated, in a limbo of fear and hopelessness. 

You left through the front door or I will be wrong and it will all be a miscalculation of my illusion that continues in absurd preambles and monologues. I am still in negotiations with myself. I remember that I went to the balcony of our room, that the palm tree in the garden hid your exit, and that, as I predicted, you went to the café at the end of the street, with no way out, where I saw your shoes drag in and walk out. I couldn't see your face. I remember the lock of hair over the car, seeing you get in and I remember that my inner child must have died there. There was a blackout. A major blackout. Fever. Fear. We make decisions in the heat of the moment and that's when anger takes revenge, frustration remains, intemperance reigns. I was left alone. I wasn't able to go down the stairs to life. To the kitchen, to the living room, to open the door and have the courage to see you leave. I've always been impetuous. And in love. And this ego of mine dominating my mind, you are right, you are always right, that was the monologue. Fissures will open every night of your absence. And I look, at this moment at the day, outside, loud and clear, the sun that shines, but I, you know, am still on the first night of your absence. Lying on our bed, watching the shadows of the palm tree draw monsters on the walls of the room. The memory is terrible, and I carry everything with me. I am not surprised by my tiredness. It could not be otherwise, than this, this body is just a body that drags itself into the eternal becoming of the days that are grey, so grey, because it was you who coloured them. That night was not night. That night was the end. Of a decade of life, of being happy, of being whole. I have always been whole with you. You never diminished me. On the contrary, you always saw the freedom that I carried inside and the nights lingered in me, with this farewell. Broke. My child is gone. My dream is dead. In pieces, there, he didn't even go down the stairs to ask for help, nothing. I couldn't even bear to hear human voices that tried to reconcile my life. Commiseration, consensus, dreaming were forbidden. I was just indignation for you, for me, for everything, that everything broke, there, that same day. 

Then it was to avoid everything that was associated with you, work, music, devices, the rigorous scrutiny of avoiding everything that life contained, where you fell, your associated name, punishing myself and avoiding looking, avoiding feeling, how good I was during these years at closing everything inside, believing myself to be empty. Certainly, he would wait for the miracle of disappearance. Everything that dies, withers. Add up. And you didn't. You were whole, inside, immaculate. How dare you? After everything, all the pains and experiences and wounds and scars, after all the races and juggling, the escapes forward, the escapes, you are still whole, just like my cats on the doorpost, with their whiskers in the sun, cuddly and happy, you are still in me, sweet, tender, intelligent, agile, strong, scientist,  modern, internal and you continue to live in another latitude and I continue to dream of your steps. Life is this succession of incomprehensible things, of mutations and dates, of forbidden loves and declining events and gardens and seasons and all the desires to leave. 

Afterwards, life never stopped happening. I was always saved by animals. Always. When humans burst in, conjecturing challenges and exerting my energy to another space, another project, another way of living, animals were always with me. And I with them. They have always saved me the coiro, they have always been the upholstery, the safe haven of bitterness that is, thus, a kind of crude drawings that we erase distractedly, without even measuring consequences, because we believe that deeper cannot hurt, there is no more depth, there is no more inside, when it is inside that this fire burns and razes the foundation,  The original inclination towards passion, towards the dream that has lost dimension, that has crumbled all over the ground, the beams remain standing, a lifetime, even, to remind us of what we dare to forget. There is no construction that builds if the base is watery, if it is a cry, a lake of fetid and still waters, nothing is built on top of quicksand. What is built is the illusion, all cute, all arranged and ready and unprepared for the certain and unforeseen detonation. 

I go, from point to point, rebuilding the building to understand the foundation again. In the beginning I was whole. Now here is the sketch that I am adding, one day yes and another less and another no and another nothing, I am reconstructing the one I was, which was the one that was whole, the original, before the collapse, the fall, the implosion, the axe in my house. The palm tree is no longer the same. It could not be transplanted. The swing was destroyed by the weather, the old and worn bench no longer receives tails on top, falling under the weight of humans. Only birds can perch on it, and cats. I tidy up the shelves of affections, dust off my arms that no longer embrace and have forgotten the path that leads to yours. I put on my mouth the translucent lipstick, from this mouth that is only used in intermittent speech with this and that human, with this and that animal, in boring meals and on my feet, which sustain my dream, I put on the informal sandals. It's still summer outside, but inside I'm fed by your winters. And this is the closest I feel to what I felt before. Everything else is foam, it's wind, it's boiling water. I still dream of the day when you will visit me in the keep, where you will play for me the elegy of nostalgia and you will see the dream that I still have in my lap, now warm, which will soon detach, reaching the top of your boulders and flying away, paying homage to love and freedom. Not here, on this plane, I want you to find me in Castelo. That's where I've lived, since you left me. I don't look back anymore, not today. I don't correct it. Not amending. I do not add. I leave the remaining agonies for other days. There is always time to heal wounds.