There is the constant movement of filling up an empty space, like the form they ask you to fill out in the bank. The previous home will always remain full (however emptied), and the new home will always remain empty (however filled). That is how memory works.
Chaos readies itself again like musical instruments that are tuned before the electronic music begins.
The last act to complete the cycle was to fuck in a semi-furnished apartment with someone known from the past. The keys to the old place are already handed in, and you added new ones on your keychain because you still have to enter somewhere when the night falls. You don’t care where. Give me a desk and I will make it work.
What I write you is serious. It will become a hard, imperishable object. What is coming is unexpected. To be uselessly sincere I must say that now it is six fifteen in the morning.
Prague is the perfect city. And I think he was not even that passionate the other night, or that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Prague is so fertile, for writing. Obviously I am charmed by the city and “work” has proudly been put in second place. After sightseeing. And ice cream comes third. I have a mountain on my street. I came here to write you.
It suddenly occurred to me that you don’t need order to live. There is a pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn’t even exist: I am born.
Everything takes time now. Before, it was, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. Everything takes their real time now. 20 minutes. One day. 24 years. I’m off the paper watching the street. My two arms holding both papers against the wind. I remembered how destroyed, or broken everything was when we spoke. I remembered how cleanliness is important when I walked barefoot in the apartment, and how much I enjoy cider when I took a sip. How kindness, yes, is a way of living but how much it is also a choice, when especially no one is demanding. I can’t tell if my memory is getting better or worse. Did you have a mole on your neck?
I’ll keep talking to you and taking the risk of disconnection:
This sun! And the moon last night. Truly real. Truly surreal. Prague. That I’m here. That you are also here. Truly real. Truly unreal. Like the work I’m trying to put together or like my bedroom. Three bedrooms. The bed frame I’m sleeping in now is the one I had six months ago. The edges of the frame accumulate a lot of dust. Silly design. Silly order of things. That I miss you still, or that I bring you up on a hill in a conversation.
I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.
I need to make an assembly manual. An inventory list. A text. An existing poem to print. The curtain. The light switch. The detector. The full moon last night. And the sun this morning. Life is here, in Prague.
I know what I’m doing here: I’m improvising. improvising as in jazz they improvised music, improvise fury, improvising in front of the crowd.
I told them you hurt me. They told me you hurt me. I told them I love you. They told me it’s okay. I told them you were special. They told me it’s not a problem. It’s a bad story with too many characters.
What is there between never and ever that links them so indirectly and intimately?
This song you taught me. There was the sound of a twinkling star
signaling something to look forward to
before reality could even ripen.
Then there was the sound of a spinning wheel, or the wind, it was so loud I couldn’t even hear. Then sound cracked into noise like leaking wood or leek soup, I was so numb I couldn’t even taste it. Mint?
The noise bursted in long nights or in any space where we could lie down, together, not catching any eye. Just words. At some point the noise was all there was.
Until it slowly was into nothing
for the reality to ripen
into silence.
Nights got shorter, softer.
I am ultimately very happy to have met you.
I am feeling the martyrdom of an untimely sensuality. In the early hours I awake full of fruit. Who will come collect it?
The soft covering of an understanding and the seductive moment of its lifting, like taking off stockings with leg hair rubbing and electrified against it. You want to understand but you don’t. Or the other way around. Words are coming today but it is as if almost they don’t want to. They feel more comfortable when I don’t call myself anything. Words only come to no ones. They only come to those who don’t use words to talk about themselves. Words like people who don’t speak. They like people who don’t speak about themselves.
Would I recognize the truth if it were proven?
Prague smells like as if the entire city itself is wearing this powdery perfume, passionate though not everyday, but every now and then, though not on special days but whenever it wants.
Now, it’s early morning again.
And I have to pay attention.
*in italics: excerpts from Água Viva by Clarice Lispector