With the beach of love in the shallow eyes of water

 

I saw in myself, finally, the handycap, the vulnerability through which it had led me, several times, to the very same crossroads, so well known, so poorly perceived. Je ne sais pas porquoi. After all, the answers that had been delayed were not God's fault or the absence of the grace of the holy spirit which, I stubbornly insisted, resided outside, but the obtuse and persistent blindness of not wanting to see myself, in that perspective of guinea pig, which would result in years, exhausting experiences, rich in unnecessary suffering. I burned in the bonfire of vanities the immense records where I saw myself happy and unconscious. Egos that did not survive the flames. When we know who we are, we do not accept any less or more, any less or more that comes to subtract the full essence of our attained knowledge. The painful experiences served, in the end, to reach this consensus between mind and spirit, between the present and tired body and the inhabited consciousness that we deserve more, better, yes, insufficient, which had seen me in this way, had given me an account not only of my sufficiency, but of the love that had inhabited me, despite any of the crossroads I had lived until then. Nothing was permanent or acquired, that life obeyed cycles, where we moved like high tides, leaking elsewhere, in the constancy of the weather and in the modulation of will.

I could finally embrace my weaknesses that had become fortresses to the law of forge and pain. I could recognize myself as a warrior who, although blind, had never let her guard down, neither for me, nor for others, nor for the cause or thing in which I had believed. That was my value. The courage to assume that I am small in the dimensions and social statutes required, but enormous in the face of my constant ideals. By taking over my being entirely. Nothing had been in vain. It never is.

As in a low tide, where the barquitos anchor themselves in the laziness of the waltz of the waters, or take advantage of furors and seek turbulent and abundant waters of crustaceans, men treading the sands and mosses, in their wellies, aided by quick reflexes in their arms, buckets and knives, peered at limpets and mussels in the rounded maritime pebbles, and I looked at the spectacle of humanity as the observer of a time that will not return. I memorized the colors of the sky that insisted on declining for winter, I decorated the meekness of the clouds, despite the color and weight, I memorized the flight of the seagulls on the threshold of a world to happen. I saw the love in me, overwhelming and growing, harmonious and warm, running across the horizon and reaching, like natural wreckage, all the others, the entire landscape. It seemed to me that joy had returned to me, infecting me consecutively, again and again, slowly and slowly. The observer narrating the stop of an hourglass that brought omens of blackness, such as the density of the clouds and the circumspect air of the men of the television news, of active corruptions, of decadent politics. That there, if they were there, all they could receive was the joy of a sea surrendered to human terraces, of an insistent and double rainbow that did not surrender to the flight or chirping of birds or to the moan of the waves against the rocks.

Yesterday I burned the memories, the cabins, the images that vacillated for years between my fearful fingers and my eyes blind from wanting to see so much. Yesterday we died. Yesterday, I buried us in a small circle where only these images shrunk by the fire could fit, diminished by the extensive and uncontrolled heat of the colored paper in the face of the burning of that hourglass that had debited the last grain of my patience in the time of Kronos. I burned ourselves, but not even this desire to liquidate the former existence was fulfilled, because by killing the past, I had not drained the love, which had been sustained by faith, no image or its disappearance gave me back the promise I had torn to the spirits who walked with me. There it was, intact and at variance, a growing fire of the spirit that presented itself, without images or mental support. Equal, always the same, I saw you parading before my blind eyes, denying me the possibility of extinction, that everything has its time and why, that nothing happens without being foreseen, unexpectedly, and I let my tears join my smile, the contemplation of the beach, that they join the sea air, the buckets of shellfish, to the curvature of the colors of the rainbow, to the soft and undulating threshold of the weight of the clouds on the ebb tide. I settled you in me, as if by emptying myself of things, you had become greater than things, that you had become evident to them and, finally, I could understand you in the angular perspective of the master. To what you resist, insist. I ask myself to surrender and the tide rises, the algae smell of iodine, the towering seagulls skim the flight, before I turn to the buildings where poetry feels uncomfortable and helpless.

I turn slowly, I imagine the men advancing their wellies towards the beach, with their buckets full of foam and scrub, utensils and watering, and the small boats make the slow approach to land. Neruda, certainly, passed by here, that I smelled lavender and cigarettes, and I raise my shoulders, wrap myself in my own embrace, closing the flaps of my coat and climbing the dunes that separate me from civilization and the realization that life does not dissolve, it is absorbed in the breath of breathing between musical tempos and pauses, between heavy and sunset silences. Oblivion is not for everyone. Neither does love. What is imperative is present, as I let go of my footprints on this moist sand and carry you in the lap of my eyes, in the lassitude of my hope that, in parturient, will secure itself from a dark corner where it will become light again and break the bonds of omission, where they want me chained.