The Love of My Life

 

I've always had difficulty facing myself when it came to feelings. I was born diminished. To deny you went beyond the limits of my heart's jurisdiction. To deny you was to face you, first and foremost, but even before that, myself. I was denying you in reality. Without any possibility of rounding things off or turning around. To no longer look at you. An escape within the mirror. In the game of hide-and-seek, there you were, always in sight—I who didn't say your name but made others say it, I who didn't seek you out but others sought you out in my name, I who compared the world to you and everyone fell short of your heels. I wanted a comma for you. I didn't want a period for you, to give you the importance you had. I didn't want you to have it. I didn't want to truly know. Now, I understand the reason for this gigantic denial. Unconsciously, my soul, which already knows the beyond, the ahead, the after, the future, knew you would be faced, recognized, after the comma, a jargon, an ode, a fit of lyricism, a storm of whining and love, a pain greater than music, always came to me from you, rose above me, and so many names overlapped yours, so many hopes to erase you, and you grew, climbing walls, building a wall, a pantheon, and I saw you, from your big toe to your curls, to your eyes, to your chest, on your back, where I became a woman, from the womb you healed when you made me a mother, what else is left for me, but to scream at you for the decades you stole from me, the dreams and hopes, like children growing, only to later become a confirmation of your not being eternal, here in the third ded.

I hated you my whole life in reverse. Without saying your name. Always on the corner, in the verbal square meter of shouting you out. However, the density of the superficial, of the pleasurable, took hold within me, so that remembering you was the opposite. It hurt. You always hurt me. Your escape, the underlying issue, what had led to, finally, all the "ifs" that gain space and grow, transfiguring the silences, until they give birth to false questions and other adornments. Escaping was postponing. Fleeing the mirror. It's true that I made you forbidden. I forbade myself from re-examining the procedures, the memories, the unfolding, the misalignments that infiltrated, of course, but of course, external influences existed. As long as we move, it's in the three of them that the shit happens, under external influences. Will internal ones precede? Or the other way around? What does it matter, it's just another verse, another prism, another schism, another refrain, but only for those who can escape the exercise without pain and sheltered from other things, other causes.

Now that I've grown up inside, that I think outside the box I forced myself into, now that I've matured on the walls, in the celestial vaults, watching the rain fall, producing storms, if you think about it, there's no more room for escapes and escapes other than your figure associated with your name. Only you. Uranus made you, Jupiter dissolved your boundaries, and Mercury made you a Hermit. I stop my moon here and reserve the right to refuse to be mercurial with me. I see you in Neptune every night. I go to bed and wake up with you, inconclusive in the score I'll assign you for that final escape.

I brought a thousand men, as Neruda said to his lover, but unlike her, you couldn't carry them in your hair, nor in your gaze, nor in your desire, nor in your memory. Because it was this arid, stained plain that was responsible for your not being here by my side forever, like the cat in the window, like your photo that looks at me as soon as I wake, within reach of my tired hands, in the vast field of future possibilities, within each one of them!

It's not appropriate to talk about feelings, nor about heartbreak, nor illnesses, nor about anything important enough to cause harm, like the harm of having lost you in 1998 and never having, effectively, left your absent body figure in the past.

Twenty-five years, almost twenty-six years later, you circle within me entirely, though you seem like a postscript. And casting aside blinders, which translate into boundaries, widening the landscape, I still add requiem to my steps.

If I die tomorrow—which is to say, if I physically disappear, yes, tomorrow or the day after, one of these days—you will become my requiem, you will compose my requiem, and if you don't, perhaps I will become like a phantom of the opera, who will live in your attic, tapping your little toe, making repressions and sounds, sometimes monotonous, sometimes full of octaves of D, like shackles dragging in an eternal waltz. You will lay your head in her lap, on the arm of the sofa, in the cool of a late afternoon, or at dinner, in a beautiful autumnal breakfast, where, listening to the river, a fountain, her moan, her cry underestimating your intelligence, in the absence of concupiscence or in herself, there you will revisit me, still alive, in that diary of my shadows and you will reproduce a sigh of boredom and longing that, perhaps, is lonely and only you recognize it as my ghost, or who knows, perhaps she can, without you saying anything, identify that it is I who haunt you, that by having left me on the other side of oblivion, by fighting back and denying me, as one only does to a great love, you have not, in fact, forgotten me and I am more alive than her body that, when touching you, no longer produces more than a slight discomfort in your drowsiness, and secretly, without being able to see you, your own shadow, you will go to the book of electronics, the old cell phone, the hidden photo, checking and confirming that I still exist within you, a ghost, with the dimples on my face from a smile you truly haven't forgotten, with a look only you saw and that you can't erase, and you confirm that that dress, that color, back then you were happy, you were happy and denied yourself the possibility of being happy again. Because of her, or because of everyone else. Because you weren't the same anymore, we weren't the same anymore. We would never return to the place that made us happy one day, many days, many years, it would be madness to repeat, to even try to do so, that valuing love would be a hideous hyperbole, if only it were a concupiscence, that it was more of the same as your father lived, yes, that yes, much easier, it would be worse than a shortcut, to cut life short that way, rather cut it short this way, that you are in the comfort zone, which is the closest to the discomfort of not being truly you, but now that your body is asking for rest, that in dreams you have already told me, you would like to have an Aladdin's lamp and, when you rub his belly, that from that edge the magician would appear and you could ask him for wishes, you would ask him to let you go back to one thousand nine hundred and eighty-five. And if you went back, maybe you'd want to go straight to two thousand and twenty-one and call me again, you'd certainly be brief, sparing your words as before, and after picking me up, taking me, showing me what you showed her, enthusiastically, perhaps, if you'd learned anything, in two thousand and twenty-one, maybe you'd ask me the right question, and not a bunch of vague ones, and maybe, and I say maybe, without much certainty, with some doubt that your silence encrypted, it seems to me like I'm cutting watermelon wedges with my fingers, and I would answer the right amount of all the things you had asked me and, maybe I wouldn't have run off, maybe I wouldn't have fallen flat on the floor, or broken the cell phone, maybe you wouldn't have gotten stuck in me like insomnia, like a fucking migraine, like menopause full of symptoms and proliferated with longing and edemas of the passion I still have for you. And could finally enclose you, intermittency or recess, or sorrow, opulence, protuberance, acquiescence, reluctance. That this longing is the science God created to incubate you in the corpuscular reminiscence of the agape I dedicate to you, only to you who are far more than Pablo Milanés or Pablo Neruda, who I multiply and reduce to nothingness, which is already all the angels have covered me with since the day I saw you.