7

IN ADDITION TO experiencing this whole amorous grind with urgency and a certain carelessness, I did other things of lesser importance to survive during that time. For me, anything that isn’t falling in love has never merited much attention. That giddiness from proximity or bodies or, specifically, from mouths or jawbones or from a sort of sensation of recognition, the recognition of a mouth or finger or birthmark, something that was a catastrophe when it happened. And the first catastrophe came for me in some premature experience, with a tongue, when I was six years old, and from then on, I lost interest in everything else. I won’t talk about the everything else. Perhaps it’s worth saying that Monday through Friday I went to an office. In that office were unsolvable tasks that entertained me and allowed me certain economic solvency. There were family matters that demanded my attention, minor family matters that I luckily resolved on Sundays, one Sunday with my mother, one Sunday with my dad. It was cold back then, always, a perpetual cold that at night clung to my feet. I felt like it was snowing inside my fingers and that caused me pleasure, feeling my extremities harden was part of the pain earned after pleasure. I wrote back then, too, poetry, lines, every morning, as part of an amorous chore. The lines were terrible, containing phrases like the next sadness or unfractured willpower or ill-fated night or, even worse, like clovers, violets, wild thoughts. They were lines with which I tried to construct poems, but the poems didn’t come together. I gathered the most sentimental images that contained the desire for everything I was missing, that which I couldn’t figure out how to articulate, an old melancholy trying to make a place for itself or crash between the worlds and the words or perhaps it was just the need to organize the thoughts that the solitude and cold brought, a frequenting of my urgent intimacy. My mom says that as a child I cried a lot, for no reason, that I always had a melancholic tendency. I also remember childhood as a happy time. I remember the nights were difficult, but when I’d wake up, I’d feel a happy fullness that, later, as an adult, disappeared. I haven’t identified when it went away. What’s true is that now, debilitated by that desire, by everything lost, I had no choice but to sublimate a feeling that, being a monstrous unity, was also, above all, cascades of bittersweet sentimentality falling—like the image of the moths—onto the surface of some material: I chewed my fingers, bit my tongue until it bled, watched old telenovelas on YouTube. Sometimes I also watched soft porn because what’s always turned me on most is watching people kiss. I paid for a woman to touch my body until I was crushed by the pain, and I ran every morning with the hope of some air entering my body because its weight overwhelmed me. I also sometimes got out the skates and eagerly studied them and only sometimes, always at night, took them out for a spin. I also visited the cave once or twice a week. Something else I did, that I’ve always done, is look for and listen to other people’s conversations and feel a morbidity exacerbated by the holes and, to a lesser but equally powerful extent, by the lies. In addition to the poems, running, domestic and family errands, imagining holes, massages, and the letters I fervently wrote and the nights I dared to skate, I also frequented bars and got drunk with my friends. And one day, in one of those drunken states in some bar, I got a message that exacerbated everything.