Ah, la marea

Today is the day I go back to writing on my blog after a long time away. Not many things have passed since then, or rather, many things have taken place that probably did not acquire the weight for them to be kept in memory. Or maybe they are stored up there in my brain, but I prefer not to talk about them at the moment. Life has been, lately, just a series of events occurring in the haze of weed and alcohol. I have been guilty for not being able to take ownership over my time. The envisioned summer where I get to read and work on becoming proficient in things that matter to me has not come to fruition. It was not until today, after having started some book in prior weeks, that I decided to make a change in my routine while being off school. I read a second chapter of Wolf Solent this morning before getting to write my thoughts down. I struggled to find joy in my time of leisure. I was a bit depressed in the first days of my summer break. I found it hard to join those people I saw outside my window in their enthusiasm for the beach life. I acknowledged the beauty of the place, but everything seemed meaningless. I still was, and still am, craving for that moment when I find a companion in life. I still fantasize about Pk. And at this point I have lost track of what is real and of what is delusion.

I get mad sometimes because I still designate a good amount of time to thinking of him. I still miss having him around in my life, in my surroundings. I mostly miss that one time I had him in my arms. There are moments of awareness when I realize he is just another human being, not more special than any other being living here on earth. And I don’t know if it’s limerence still making me prey of its effects, but I want him. And it could be that I miss him because I am clinging to the version of himself that only exists in my brain, because I fabricated it. While the real version of Pk is one that does not think of me, and one who lives comfortably without me in his life. I have to admit that there’s some shift taking place in my brain, I think. Even when these thoughts occupy my mind frequently, I have been able to become aware of them, and with the awareness comes a sense of the triviality of this endeavor: thinking of someone and letting this thinking govern my days as they are being doled out to me by the mystery of the forces that keep this life going on in all its forms.

I think I saw him in a picture my friend Bn sent me yesterday by text. The picture depicted a gathering of people in vigil of a murder that took place early in the morning in the town I work at. The incident involved agents from ICE shooting a Colombian man at his refusal to stop his vehicle at their request. The video evidence shared with me during the day showed an agent clinging to the window of a white car while the driver directed the car in circles in an attempt to make the agent let go of his grip and be able to drive away. This event is very sad, but that sadness vanished once I saw him within the group of people gathered to mourn the life of a person shot to death. So many things ran through my head. I thought about how beautiful Pk stood there. I can’t really tell when was the last time I saw him, but yesterday his beauty brought a feeling of loss, of having let go of him, of knowing it was me who decided to get away from him, from his life. Because I thought it was better to stay on my own. Because I felt he didn’t want me the same way I wanted him in my life.

Then I felt embarrassed to be focusing on these matters of the heart while his heart is in the things that matter in life, like showing up at a vigil to mourn the life of a brown person like me, whose life was taken at the beginning of a new day. He who did not know that, after being taken out of his car and falling limp with a thud on the concrete, he would acquire the power to congregate people. It is the power of death.

At times it feels like I am lively dead, too alive in the wrong direction, stuck in the search for love in the wrong places, forgetting about Ax and what he offers me within what he allows himself to give me, dismissive of the changes he’s made to open up more to me, of the efforts to meet my needs in his own understanding of what it means to connect with someone like me.

There’s a mourning feeling hanging in the air, and as I walked towards the coffee shop this morning I thought I needed to write about what happened yesterday. Because this life that was taken so indifferently by the executors was deserving of love, not the love that has been poured over a fence at Mechanics Park in the form of words to express the feeling. I thought about what love means in the lives of marginalized communities. I thought that maybe love is not being taken away from this world on a Monday morning. Maybe love is being able to enjoy another day after work with your loved ones. Maybe love is not having the pressure to look over your shoulder at every step of the way. While for me, for now, it is being able to enjoy life here right now, straining toward the love of someone who would walk these streets with me so we won’t be alone anymore. That person who will go by my side and, when the moment comes, will unsheathe the sword so we can fight for our lives, because in my delusional way of seeing the world, I would die in the name of love.

Today will be the day I will see you again after a period of silence and space I asked for, after you said you only wanted to be my friend. Since then limerence kicked in and made me its prey. I could easily write an endless recount of what the fantasy has built for you and me in this story sustained by delusion.

If I say I want to kiss you. Do I really want to? I ask this because I recall the times we kissed and I honestly thought you were a terrible kisser. So I thought my job is, maybe, to teach you how to kiss. How by interlocking our lips, either your or my upper lip in the opening of the mouth can really make a difference. I want to tell you that kissing is a mystery. Sometimes you find that mouths just find their other half. I will meet you at a diner in Portland and it will be a moment of the ordinary. I will hear from your mouth things about your life that I’d prefer not to learn because they will shatter the plans I’ve built about a version of you and I that will never be.

In the quiet of my seat I’ll get to watch your beauty. The luck your good genes bring to you for just being you. I will eagerly, without your knowledge, scan your sexy frame. Your slender body that moves around as if waddling. I have to confess that the motions of your walk weaken me, they make me want to fall at your feet and tell you I’m your dog. Walk me.

I will hear the timbre of your voice delivering sentences that probably, as soon as they leave your mouth, will become daggers to fall deep right in my heart. Whatever happens today I’ll get to experience you in person, either if you kill me or spare me one of my nine lives, this heart of mine will resume its beating to live a life of its own, a life without you. A life where having me is enough and final.

(Unsent letter, summer 2025)

A. M.,

This morning, after reading your text—“I miss you, too. Don’t be like that, please”—I went for a walk. That line lingered, echoing as I moved, shaping the way I noticed everything around me. Before leaving my apartment, I made myself a cup of coffee. I didn’t want to go outside empty-handed; it makes me anxious. I need something to hold onto as I hold myself. At times, it feels as if all eyes are on me and I want the ground to swallow me whole, but I know that can’t be true. I poured the coffee into a cup that could hold it warm as I stepped into the morning, and I thought about your message again, and then about you—about who you are and what you let me see.

I thought about the chances for us to meet in the right place, at the right moment. The mystery of daily life makes me wonder if the way we see the world is less our own than a map handed down by others, their interests stitched into the fabric of our perception. This morning, I found it funny how we have all these objects to contain things—the cup, the labels, the names. We want to hold things, contain them, delimit them. Some of these containers are practical; others respond to societal expectation, ergonomics, consumerism. And yet, your text reminded me that even small things—a line of words—can shift the way we hold ourselves in the world.

I wish I had all the words to communicate everything I can’t even say in my mother language. Language is everything, and even when we know the code, we struggle to understand each other. In our case, words have failed us. Even when you say I communicate my feelings well, we can’t seem to understand each other fully. Perhaps it’s that we haven’t learned the vocabulary to express what we feel, nor the habit of telling each other. Your text shows me that sometimes we try anyway, even when the words aren’t enough.

I thought of what I read the other day, about how Black women resisted by making homes where dignity could exist, where one could be a subject and not an object, despite hardship. Perhaps love is learned the same way—through attention, care, repetition. Perhaps even a small pulse of a text, a line of words, can be one way of teaching a language we never had before, a language we are inventing together, even if we’re still learning how to speak it.

I wore the wifebeater you left at my apartment, a leftover from our time together, carrying the weight of what we shared. The white of it reminded me of waves, of foam, of how the body speaks in ways words cannot. Even a garment—called a wifebeater—can carry tenderness, desire, care, reshaped in the space between us. Your text, though small and digital, was part of that language too—an attempt to reach across the space between us, to bridge absence with intention.

So no familiar princes, no gentleness, no perfect vocabulary. And what are we? What words, what gestures, what silences are we teaching each other in this acquaintance that has become familiar, even as we step into something new we don’t yet know how to hold?

Xinthotolt

"Long-life, speak your name So tired of the guessing game But something is moving just out of frame Slow heart, brace and aim"

I am on the chair waiting for words to come to my rescue. Only words seem to be on my side in the quietness of the day. There's a big sign I can see from the window that faces my desk, and I know that just a little further than the sign there's the sea. This sign will always remind me of waters that are contained by the shore as it reads WAVES. It's the name of the resort that ascribes its name to the place, to the environment. One would say a very appropriate name to attract the visitors who dare to come to this side of the world. This side of east that keeps on living while the summer is gone. This margin of land occupied by inhabitants whose hearts keep on living on the lands that ask nothing of you but to stay alive. The beating of a heart we become conscious of whenever we wake up in the morning to the rays of sun coming from the ortus.

In the stillness of the day the wind runs wild outside my window. A blizzard is hitting this coastal town I've adopted as the premises to inhabit. The little motions that took place up to this moment have served as a series of efforts I make daily to sustain me, to keep me alive and well enough to sit at my desk to tell you that I've made blueberry pancakes for the child in me this morning. The making of the mix, the heating up of the milk. The moves I've made to blend the egg, the milk, the flour, the vanilla and the hopeful feeling of wanting to tend to myself. These are little rituals I perform daily, in the solitude of a life that requires nothing to be lived, to be carried on with dignity and love for the self.

I am starting to inhabit my life just like I inhabit this physical box I live in by the water, on this coastal town that lives like a ghost while the warmer weather has left to give some warmth to others in other parts of this world, but one that keeps on thriving through existence just as the snow falls and melts, or as the tide rises and recedes according to the laws of nature. You see, everything is in motion in the stillness of the day. As I inhabit these moments, I take myself to places to see on the orient of this place of America. The motion it took to drive myself up north to Camden, a moment to stay with myself to find me drinking a cup of chai at a coffee shop whose patrons had no knowledge of my existence until my throat made me its prey as I chewed an orange baby cake whose granular consistency made it burst into a coughing fit that in turn made me feel seen, but also made me feel human, not so detached from existence.

To feel alive is to tend to the quiet moments I spent at a bench on Harbor Park, overlooking the Megunticook falls. As I sipped from my bottle of Moringa tea, I experienced the breeze caressing my face, and I wondered if this was a manifestation of love from nature. I pondered the idea of letting myself be a vessel for love to come to me in the ways I have yet not learned how to receive. The tea burned my tongue as I sat there moored to a bench, just like the boats standing in apparent stillness were being kept in place by their berths right in front of my eyes. Another thought came to me then, in the quietness of the morning with the sun also showing up to manifest his love for me — I wondered who is my berth, and where my tender is. As my mind began its machinery of intrusive thoughts that detached me from the place, the sound of birds in the naked bushes anchored me back to the present moment, to take awareness in the flavor of the tea, the flavor of light, and the flavor of lighting a cigarette, to feel its effects give you a pinch that reminds you the body can feel.

Above the bench where I sat asking who my tender was, there was a building that housed a library — the Camden Public Library. I always want to be in a library. There is something comforting about a place that contains books everyone can read. We may never read them all, but the knowledge that a building carries them gives the mind peace of mind. I resolved to explore the sanctuary of knowledge and as I entered the building I noticed a small section of books for sale, and there it was — Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. I took the sighting as a sign, I knew then there were converging forces for me to pay attention to. The cover showed a painting by Ernest Eurich — Still Life, Lyme Regis. A small plant bearing fruit sat in a blue and white pot on a windowsill, the rooftops of a coastal town visible through the glass behind it. A contained life with the sea just out of frame. I recognized myself in it immediately. I knew then it was time to leave the premises, the universe had called and I had answered. I paid for it between coughs, the body once again insisting on being present for something the mind had not yet understood.

I am sitting here now, back at my desk, with the blizzard running wild outside my window and Joanna Newsom playing. It was sixteen years ago today that she released these words into the world — long-life, speak your name, so tired of the guessing game, but something is moving just out of frame, slow heart, brace and aim. I did not know then, and perhaps she did not know either, that these words would find me here, on this margin of land that asks nothing of you but to stay alive, having driven north to Camden to find a book that would become my map. The something moving just out of frame was the sea beyond the WAVES sign, the library sitting above the bench where I sat asking who my berth was, the love that does not arrive as another person but as a pancake made with care, a cup of Moringa tea burning the tongue, a cigarette's pinch, a sentence that holds you. Slow heart, brace and aim. The universe has answered. Literature is my berth. And Barbara Pym is my tender.

Mildred Lathbury, the excellent woman at the center of the novel, is needed by everyone and desired by no one. She arranges flowers, makes cups of tea, observes the lives of others from a quiet and dignified distance. One might read this as a tragedy of invisibility. I read it as a map. Because what Mildred understands, and what I am learning, is that the small efforts are not the waiting room for a larger life. They are the life itself. The blueberry pancakes made for the child in me. The drive north. The bench. The birds in the naked bushes pulling me back into my own body. These are not the consolations of a person unloved. These are the forms love takes when you finally stop waiting for someone else to deliver it.

Excellent people — the ones who show up quietly, who tend to themselves and others, who observe, who carry on with dignity in the stillness of the day — are not waiting for life to begin. They are the ones paying attention. And it is attention, finally, that sustains.

The WAVES sign holds its place against the white sky. The sea is there even when I cannot see it. I am at my desk. I am writing. I am, in this small and sufficient way, alive.

I started reading Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue, and even when I am having a hard time reading, I find it really cool. I sometimes wish I could write just like her. I learned she started writing when she was 30. She did not get any formal education in writing; in fact, her education was truncated at a very early age due to the political turmoil in her country, China.

I like how philosophical her writing is. She doesn't just describe moral conundrums, she dissolves them. She writes about things like people having a relationship and still finding sexual pleasure in other people, or should I say with other people. The behavior, which is common enough to be unshocking, is presented without the expected emotional or ethical friction. What shocks me is how these characters don't seem to be bothered by partners engaging sexually with others, and sometimes they even incentivize it because they just want their peers to find happiness, more than they want them to find love. There's a strangeness in their being with someone and seemingly excited with their current partners, but suddenly you realize they have other people in mind they actually want to be with.

I love how her writing is making me excited. It makes me think deeply about my own reality and how I connect with other people. It adds this mystic aspect to it, as though we’re bubbles about to merge with others, and when it happens, it seems like a door to another world, one that is a combination of our realities. And even when from the tired way of living things may seem inconsequential, in Can Xue’s view it’s the opposite. It’s full of meaning and charged with so much symbolism.

I like how her book is making me go back to journaling. This is the first time in a while that I decided to write on the white page. It happens when I read a book that shakes my brain, one that questions my beliefs. I’m about to go out and share a meal with a man I pursue. The very fact of meeting with him makes me think of all the possibilities for our encounter. It makes me think of it in a very esoteric way, as if I were about to open a door to a world that could remain closed if I didn’t commit to it today. That choosing to meet with him would take my journey on a new path, and I am not aware of what that path holds for me. Part of me wants to believe in the esoteric world of Can Xue, a place where morality holds no sway, consequently allowing for connections between individuals that are utterly unconstrained and bound only by possibility. I’m fantasizing of a moment where we can be extremely intimate with our bodies and not feel shame. One where once the encounter is over, we both go back to our regular lives and nothing is thought of what happened other than the experience was fulfilling and informative to understand more of ourselves.

This is the other side of green. After my being was altered by my sitting next to him, I realized there’s not much I wanted from him. To be honest, it is facing my fortune more than anything that brings sadness or some type of melancholy to my essence at this hour, at this place where I’ve dragged myself. I don’t want to explain things, but what is the purpose of my writing if not a channel to process the mundane—the esoteric series of events that shape the hours of my living here in this strange, cold place in Maine…in America. In America, like in any other place, love doesn't come to me in a way I think of. Sometimes I want to believe that there are parts of me, parts that I've fostered over years of living, that they somehow will work as powerful magnets to seduce men I’m interested in with such force they won't have any option but to stick around. I wish I could live in Can Xue’s world —I want to have that captivating feature that is only developed over years in the trenches while at the bottom of a muddy hole, fighting darkness and disappointment.

J.

I wasn’t sure whether to respond to your messages or not—partly because it felt unnecessary, and partly because I questioned whether the effort was worth it. We barely know each other, we don’t even know each other’s names. My name is not Julian, by the way. It felt a bit strange to read a message directed to someone whose name isn’t mine. But you’re not to blame for assuming my name was Julian; it was that moment that made me realize the estrangement of our relationship or whatever this acquaintance may be.

I think we’ve had a great time together. I find you really hot, and I think that’s why I kept seeing you over all this time. You’ve been extremely kind, respectful, and caring when we’ve met, and I’m grateful for that.

On the other hand, it isn’t fair for me to be available only when it suits you, when you feel brave enough, or when you can sneak away. I don’t know why, but I resented the fact that after sending me a message saying you didn’t want to see me, you sent another the next week, completely disregarding the first and assuming I’d just go back to meeting with you without offering an apology or an explanation. It felt undignifying, but it was also another moment of clarity.

I can’t resent you for putting your needs before mine, or for not being able to see from my perspective. In a way, I admire you for being able to advocate for your desire with such determination—and such callousness. At the end of the day, isn’t that what people are supposed to do? We’re just creatures living in survival mode.

As for me, fascination blinds me and pulls me out of that survival instinct. I don’t want to keep fantasizing about something that doesn’t exist. The truth is, there’s nothing here that can sustain this acquaintance we’ve built. I want to reclaim some dignity by letting go of this, to move on in hopes of a more balanced way of living. A more dignified one, at least.

Thank you, and goodbye.

I love you (For A. & B.)

M,

I’m writing to tell you I am surrendering to you and to your bigness, as vast as Ashbery’s gigantic plateau. When I got the news I felt like collapsing into an open sea–a creature so close to me that I could reach it within minutes. I felt like Ramona going to Bob to cry about misery and clouded thoughts that aren't real, but are the product of the imagery that reigns my vision of the world.

Oh, to be in the highlands of your mind. Oh, to be in the highlands of your locus amoenus.

I'm going down when you're going up. I am going deep into the waters of learning and understanding a reality that concerns me, because I am part of it. My being in it has resulted in a mindset that struggles to grasp the meaning of my place in this little box I live in. Unlike you, I am Ashbery's thought of being barely tolerated, having to be rescued on the brink of destruction with nary an Orlando to find me.

This story was written centuries ago: I am Orlando Furioso, and you are Angelica. You're at the part where you found Medoro, I am at the point of going furioso; yet we both live under the same flickering bulbs that hover up in the sky, and it is true that the being of my sentences, fostered in the climate I've conjured by the idea of you, is not yours to own, like Medoro, but to be without–alone and desperate.

"‘My thoughts’ he cried, ‘that freeze and burn my heart, and cause this pain that gnaws at me alway, what shall I do, who, at the very start, appeared too late, while others won the day?"

This is a tale that purports no epic battles, for I am a simple man with nothing but a lonely heart in search of love. This is a tale that seeks to be an oblation to your power, for some of us were born to be Orlandos, and some, like you, are destined to be Angelicas. This is an offering to your beauty, to your faulty candor, to your mesmerizing voice, to your hypnotizing gaze. May this be an altar for the spirits to let me sleep, free at last, so minuscule in your gigantic plateau; for this too has been my ambition: to be small and clear and free.

These have been the hazards of the tempest: you are the player and I, who has struggled at the game, was simply a spectator. So I think it is time for me to start my journey to the moon, for I am in need of my Elijah and his miracle elixir that can extract the stone of madness.

When did these misfortunes begin? Not that I want to know. All I want is silence, for myself and for the selves I used to be, a silence like the magical cottage in the forest that lost children find in fairy tales. What am I supposed to know of what is to become of me, in the absence of rhyme or reason?

"And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing: the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago."

This is the day and the time. This is the day I decided to sit in front of my computer screen to write again. This is the time when I am not sure what the purpose of writing is. As I think of all the possible combinations of words I could write down, I recall the times I believed I saw your face. I am never sure if it is you whom I see. As years go by, I understand that my mind is not reliable at all. It forgets things. It refuses to learn what really matters, like learning how to play the harp, or how to DJ, or how to speak Portuguese fluently. Perhaps what I really want is to make the most of myself by abandoning the possessorship and achievement of things so that I could own myself, develop my own elements, and grow in my own form. To make my own music and hear it myself. Instead, my mind gets stuck on the idea of you, a fictional character who is not even close to what you really are but one that seems convenient to justify my existence in suffering. This is the time when tears impair my vision, distorting the frustrating reality of being one of the common people who look for reasons to live, as if life alone didn’t justify itself. This is the day when I forgive myself for being mixed up inside, unable to understand whether my apprehensiveness is genuine desire for you or simply inability to cope with your rejection. These are the times when I fear madness, when I feel ill, far from the ideal creature with easy and comfortable reasoning—far from the human being you’d give your love to. Far from the man you idealize and I’ll never become, whom I scorn with the arrogance that only those who suffer have. On days like these I seek help from the kind of men you’re into and I envy: beautiful and perfect—full of heroic simplicity.

The memory of your face is engraved into my psyche to the point of delusion. In the sleepless hours of the night, when I struggled to piece together your image in my mind, wearied by the futility of my efforts, you appeared to me as an elusive shadow—grand and shifting, both menacing and remote. Like a storm that stirs the ocean’s depths to reveal the hidden secrets beneath its surface, I could only ever summon you by unraveling myself, returning to the self I once was when I first saw you and constructed you in my mind. I subjected myself to endless self-reproach, loathed my own reflection, and, wounded and heartbroken, enshrined you with vivid intensity within the depths of my psyche.

This is the day and the time I’ve come to grasp a truth about those who chase intense sensations to confirm their own existence. I, too, embarked on this perilous journey, so meager against the vastness of our deepest fears, and nearly always disappointing. I learned to set my soul aflame, only to discover that, in the quiet depths of my being, I can remain ever vigilant and cool, merely a spectator to the grand spectacle I have conjured: you.

"I've cried a thousand storms, / I've blown away the clouds. / The heartbeat of the sun is racing mine, / and listen how my heart is waiting." I don’t know anything about love. This is the day and the time when I simply remember that I fear and seek you.

Can I tell you something? I saw someone yesterday at the bar next door to the one you and I met. I did not pick the place, it was him who did it. The parking spot I found when I got there, I'd say, was the same or close to the spot I parked at on the very and only day you and I hung out together.

It was around the same time of the day of our encounter. As I arrived half an hour early I decided to take a walk around the block so I could calm my nerves; being back to that same spot triggers melancholy thoughts. I went up the street, I walked past the the first bar we met at that evening in May. I didn't get as sad I as thought I would, I just saw myself by the bar waiting patiently for you, being anxious to see you in person. Those memories came to me along with the one of my asking you to go to another place because I was overwhelmed by the crowd that surrounded us. Then I fast-forwarded to the now. Nothing I dreamt of that day came true. I'm back at the same location and you're still not mine, still a person I don't know.

I put on my headphones so as to trick my mind with music. I don't think it was a successful attempt but music helped my thoughts to diversify, to veer into other directions. I don't want to think about you anymore. I look back at that only moment we had in person and I can't believe it still resonates with me. I don't want you to think I still want you, I don't believe I do; or at least I've come to terms with my delusional mind that refuses to give up on the idea of you to understand there is nothing that could happen between us.

I am here writing just to tell you that I've learned that language is transgressive. Words that didn't have any meaning before you they come to me now with a vengeance as if it was yesterday. The words acquire a voice that materializes in my brain. It is the compounds of letters that become shapes, it is a performance that calls for feelings, emotions I would prefer not to experience. The letters that form your name are now a weapon, the names of the places I've been with you are now charged with memories reluctant to ghost me like you did me. Those words I associate with you are not longer just words, but exact moments in the history of my time here on earth.

I think of another language we never got to use, the language of touch. How I exist in this not so new territory unable to find those genuine hugs, spur-of-the-moment taps on the shoulder. As I sat across from you on the day we met all I wanted to do was to touch you. To feel the warmth of your body; to place my hand on your knee for a while, to raise it to your face to feel your stubble or simply get close enough so I could feel another body next to mine. I think that the vast distances between me and people have left invisible wounds on my skin. Can I tell you that I believe touch is so vital, that I see it as the primordial ooze?

We no longer ‘keep in touch’, which means I am no longer touched by your kind gesture of getting to know me. So I met someone else who does want to be in touch with me, someone who touched me with his smile because it reminded me of yours. I want to change the meaning of the language I have regarding you. All I want is to be able to say: "Não posso ficar nem mais um minuto com você / sinto muito, amor, mas não pode ser... / Eu tenho minha casa pra olhar."

I have been absent for some time. I’ve been absent minded. I’ve purposely driven my mind to not think, to fall into a languid stage to suppress thoughts and feelings that never find absolution. What if the point is to just feel them with all their intricacies. With their pungent throbbing. I am in the air on a plane that is taking me “home”. I don’t know what home is really. I just learned to call it that way. My body is allegedly a shelter for me to rest in, to find solace and respite. As years go by my body does nothing but to act the more strangely. It doesn’t seem to be aligned with my brain. I call it out as the morning begins, I try to hug it as the stars begin to appear in the endless firmament of nothingness. It seems to run away from me, it rejects my need to hold it tight to mend the scars it shows to me daily.

I have given it a dose numbness. I think it wants a break from the tumultuous time it is living. “A rejected body and losing it it’s constant, but such a lonely place.” At times I think I love it when other people praise its left over youth. It doesn’t happen frequently, I’ve learned. I put picture of it on the internet for it to be available to other men to see. There are so many bodies, they look at mine and there’s something about it they just do not find attractive. So I spend my days dictated by the logic of a virtual power that profits from my desire, my lack of confidence, my lack of love for myself. Some say the secret lies in the willingness to make believe. I don’t know if that’s true. I find snakes to be despiteful and ugly, but I understand that judgement comes from a belief that was given to me by my ancestors. At some point the great snake adored by the Aztecs fell from grace and so my father started killing it anytime he saw one. He learned how to draw the machete from its sheath, and strike on the snake with the dull side of the blade rather than the sharp one. He told me a snake could sill bite even if its body has been chopped in two. “You have to outsmart nature, son!” he said one day when he took me to woods to collect fire wood. I also find bats to be repulsive, and I wonder who can tell me why I dislike such beautiful creatures.

I fathom, I am maybe a snake. No matter how beautiful my skin is, they still hunt me to be made into something to be carried on, dead. No matter how willed my purpose is to make friends with men, they’ll always find me an annoyance in their path, a threat. Who will be the one who will take me home free of prejudice? Who will make a terrarium for me to inhabit so my peculiar existence will provide endless entertainment? I want to love, there’s so much love under a skin that sheds often because the laws of nature made it so that it won’t adjust to the growing of my body. So I need to shed it, I need to seem like I can’t hold something eternally. Love is there. Underneath this flexible spine with muscles attached to my rib bones there’s a heart that pumps blood through all my slithery body. So if there’s blood, there’s desire. Who on earth to match it?

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey” Ocean Vuong

I am told there's a space for me to flourish – like a flower in the beginning of spring. I told M. my favorite season is spring, that my favorite color is green. I said I like seeing things being reborn, how strange & beautiful is to die to be born again, to be beaten down by the environment that surrounds you to the bare minimum –a root. To be there, pure fiber underground, waiting to for the right moment to spring out with the agency to to do it all over again. M. said he likes winter because the cold makes him feel alive, that there's a kind of pain that pierces through you to inform you about physics & chemistry all at once. I didn't know what to say, I smiled at him & told him he was crazy. M. just laughed with some kind of satisfaction, as if having a different preference from mine made him win.

I am told there a place for me to be free, & I sometimes wonder where it all begins as well as where it all ends. M. said he likes having the freedom to choose whatever he wants to do. He likes being busy in his freedom. I told him there's a feeling like freedom when I am underneath a body that wants me to be a deposit for desire. I told him, for me, it's all about holding & being held. Don't think I am that smart, everything I say belongs to someone else. These words have already been written. These thoughts have been expressed before in a better manner with better words that convey freedom in arrogance. Think of me as a robber, an embezzler, that is what my condition affords me. My privilege extends as far as my proficiency of a language that is not mine allows me. There are invisible walls I just can't take down, there are things I want to express that simply remain untold. I am being held by the invisible powers of your mother tongue, not my mother's tongue. I am free to indulge in the economy of words.

I couldn't bring myself to tell M. about my ventures into submission in the privacy of closed doors. I feared he wouldn't grasp the idea of the abandonment of my body for others to use. I didn't have the words to explain what I've learned in the secrecy of my room, that there is freedom in the violence of being held by them to suffice a dormant desire that asks for fulfillment. I wanted to say he didn't need to feel pity for me, because in this abandonment I have a say in the way they use the orifices of my body – I can decide on the level of pain it is inflicted while they enter me. My lacking of words didn't grant me the liberty to say that sometimes I think it is me who has the power, that even when it doesn't seem to be true, I have the power to control the beast with the softness of my lips, the warmth of my mouth. I wanted to tell him that it is in my room where my operating as a thief becomes clearer because I steal those bodies from their households they belong to, if only for a moment in time. I don't know if he would believe I've driven men to madness with the things I've trained my body to do out of need, out of desire, out of fear of not having them again. My room is a rink where cyclops meet to battle. It is a fight from which both of them exit as winners so long they both shed a white tear – that may be the place I flourish like a rose.

M. told me he likes it when I give him papers with information on them even though I already gave him those same papers before. He likes to learn things I am told. That is his prerogative, to ask & to be given. "Just look, even their romance / made us masters & slaves / & now things keep getting worse / while staying so eerily the same.

"Come build your burial grounds on our burial grounds / but you won't kill death that way. I don't know 'bout you, but I'll take the love songs / & give you the future in exchange."

“The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world where there is so little happiness. Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word.” Clarice Lispector

And so I walk these streets I've walked countless times before. This is Portland, a town I've been learning to love –I've foolishly been trying to make this city mine. I walk aimlessly trying to recreate what I once did when I once was fifteen years of age in a different country, in a different city five thousand miles south from here. My feet are tired now, the beauty of this coastal town is not enough to get lost in it. As I try to recapture the same spirit I got while I walked that big city, something feels inadequate, unfamiliar, cold.

I look at the edifices around and their cold beauty speaks to me about a time that is gone now, a colonial time when glass became more common so windows could have individual panes. It is the windows that give way to symmetry and repetition. Some other buildings reveal to me an old urge for revival with their street facing gables that function as pediments. How to ignore the arrogance they give from standing erect supported by big, tall columns? How about those estructures with pointed arched windows, steep roofs, and ornate chimneys? They face me all decorated as if they were trying to separate themselves from the traditional proportion and symmetry of the conglomerate of buildings they are amongst. What can I say about the houses that inform me about a time when the middle class could afford some luxury? It's all in the details and the material. I can sense the need for an upturn.

This is the feeling I get as I walked this land of the free: a pressure to better myself. I relate to these inanimate structures as a moving entity who needs a revival, a rebirth of sorts. I get to think that maybe I am not so distant from the reflection these shop windows provide as I turned to them to see who is the one in the other dimension. I can say I adore the brownness that translates into nothingness for I feel no sense of belonging. I can make out the words of the man reflecting on the glass as his lips move to say, "I am alone in the world and I don't believe in anyone." Revelations like this only come to me when I am alone. I lack the ability to communicate in sentences for I am a man of no words. I make believe that there was a time while being in the big city when I was not so conscious of myself and made no demands on anyone – a time where I was free from self-surveillance.

Lately I need several hours of solitude every day. I am only true when I'm alone. "Life is, it's never what you think it's for / and I can't seem to set it off. / And lately I've been insecure / the chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve." As a boy, I was always afraid of falling into a bottomless pit at any moment. Clarice once said, "why do the clouds keep afloat when everything else drops to the ground? The explanation is simple: the gravity is less than the force of air that sustains the clouds. Clever, don't you think? Yes, but sooner or later they fall in the form of rain." So I am walking down these cobblestone streets surrounded by beautiful brick walls, waiting for the fall, time and time again.

I sit here on a January morning writing to the unknown. Rays of sun fall upon my face to give it some glow, one that is not visible unless there's light to enhance it. As for the skin this light falls upon, mine is a mixture of colors: red, yellow, and blue – as of dark wood or rich soil. That’s what the dictionary says.

I am here, sunbathed, looking at a familiar space filled with edifices placed consecutively one after another. It's as though they were too cold, so in an attempt to keep some warmth among the inanimateness of the space that separates them, they stand close. I'm here anthropomorphizing as the usual action of the day. Is it the lack of human connection that awakes in me the need to seek life out of dullness? The romanization of an environment that doesn't care about the sentimentality of the human mind. There's a synergy that lies untouched underneath the ground I've been told. There's communication happening at a different speed. Naked trees have lost their fur due to the laws of nature —the changing of seasons have marked the passing of time. All the while, a road remains hostile to the snow left from the last storm. The white takes over the shoulders as you move along the road. It has been displaced to the sides where it lies inert, not really a bother to disturb the daily business that takes place here on this coastal land: a ghost town near the water. Throughout a long narrow street stand lodging businesses of all kinds. The architecture is similar although the buildings keep a particular quaintness to them that makes them unique in their appearance —at least that was the impression this town gives me. These buildings have reclaimed the silence that inhabits them before the summer time kicks in.

I write from the hollowness of this land I now call home. I write from the emptiness of this body that I call mine. I write from the vacant space I call mind. I envy the hand that moves nimbly to describe all things accurately. All I see is "the big white, / and there ain't no day / and there ain't no night. / Into the white" that's where I am. Haven't you heard? White is clean, white is simple, white is purity, white is innocence, white is cleanliness, white is new possibilities. As for now, white is the color that makes my brown to stand out. White is the the canvas I get lost in. White is your skin I crave that can't be mine. White is unreachable to me — a space so unknown as your body is to me, a blank canvas I am unable to fill in. So I am here without your body, without words or language to convey meaning. Wouldn't you say I am white, wouldn't you say I am an empty canvas for you to work on. Come write on me, tell my story with your own language – one I can't speak nor write in, a language so white as the luminous “big quasar.”

I've thought a lot about you since that time I saw you online again. The more I've thought, the more I've come to be overtaken by a sense of loneliness. I have struggled to deal with the concepts of happiness and beauty. Are you happy? Do you cry as much as I do? Do you see beauty in me? I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself deeply while fruitlessly pondering what I represent to you. I say this not as an excuse for you to pity me –although at times while suffering from your rejection I thought that if you saw me that way, you would have mercy on me –but because it is true.

I never meant to be in this position. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. "You seem to live with fingertips / wrapped around your face. / Does it keep the dark away? / Talk to me and tell me that all of them are wrong / and all my dreams will come in time." I often envy that in you. I am not completely certain you are that way, but on the odd occasion I get that impression from the little pieces of information I've collected here and there over these few months since the day I met you to they day I expressed my feelings for you. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of courtship and romance—to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. But you never gave that to me. You didn't say anything at all. You slighted me.

In any case, I myself feel detached from what is happening outside me. I have sat on my couch for hours staring at a wall, a quiet world cut off from the paranoia that consumes us all. How lucky I am to be able to write something, to feel like putting my thoughts down here to a person, to put my thoughts into words like this is a privilege. Of course, once I do put them into words I can only say trifles of what's on my mind —if only the blank space could be filled accurately with the thousand ideas that flutter around in my brain. I’m happy just to be able to feel I want to write, that's the gift you inadvertently have given to me. And so I am writing to you. You who will not read.

This could be a case of my not being able adapt to my deformities. I say deformities because I think of myself as a whole perfect round shape that over the years has been smashed with hammers to the point of shapelessness. I find it hard to find room inside me for the pain and suffering that these deformities bring, so I am here now to fight them with words. This is the humblest way I've learned to get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because I know that I am “deformed.” That’s what distinguishes me from the outside world: most people go about their lives there unconscious of their deformities, while in this little world of mine the deformities are a precondition that I wear in the open. Just like I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am here in the unknown place. I live here quietly so as not to hurt anyone. My words are guns, but what are they without eyes to find them? They won't do harm with no hands to shoot the target.

In the middle of the day, I stop to think of all the things I should tell you. They all amount to the same idea: I disliked the way life has developed for me. I tend to ask myself what it would be like to have you here with me. Is it just a whim of mine to not accept things as they are? I sometimes think something went wrong, or maybe –to be more accurate– that I am responsible for how the story unfolded.

Darkness has fallen over here. I once read something you shared, it was about how we can create mind. I think I grasped that idea wrongly. My understanding of it was between the lines of being able to detach yourself from the current ideology, and having the power to create your narrative. Does it happen to you that sometimes we don't try to understand things, but rather we associate the words we see with an idea that is already familiar to us? This is what happened to me when I read a caption you used to accompany a poem by an ancient Eastern thinker –I am not sure about the accuracy of this. I thought of what I've read about the idea of “me” as a fictional concept – what in Buddhism is called anatta: the “no self”. The idea is foreign to me since I've been raised within Western traditions. From what I remember, in Eastern philosophy the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind; that is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought. Without thought, the self does not exist.

The hardest thing for me is to understand how mistakenly I've come to see the process of thinking, as one that is orthodox. My fictional self narrates the world, determines my beliefs, replays my memories, identifies with my physical body, creates projections of what might happen in the future, and constructs judgments about the past. It is the past that gets in the way of creating a mind that is detached from all the trauma I've experienced –If you could only lean over to see the darkness that inhabits the bottomless pit that is my brain. I felt envious to think that you've arrived at this moment of consciousness, that stage where you can differentiate the story of who you think you are from who you truly are.

I stay here in the common place, wishing you could be mine and suffering from your rejection. Is this the reason for my unhappiness, my inability to change the narrative of this story? What if I delusionally keep wishing you'll someday come to me to match my love for you? Is this what I feel for you genuine? Can you give me an answer? "In a fable that's like a dream / of another man / or another you / your eyes are stones. It's too many ways / what arе you trying to say?" The impenetrable YOU. The unlivable ME.

His is a world of walls. His is the world of the orthodox mind. His is the world of ajar doors, ajar windows. His is a world of lust that’s rigid. In the coldness of a room he lies down on the floor. He lies naked as if to be open to the environment around, although he is in a room guarded by walls and maybe a few windows that don’t open all the way. There he lies open to the secluded space with a face of marble. Jenny has asked this before: "How do you kiss, how do you kiss / a piece of marble / or a piece of gold?" His is a face of marble, stiff, serious as if not wanting to give way to emotions. I'm asking you –whoever you are– who have been granted access to undo the metamorphism of the limestone his face is made of? Maybe you can be kind to me, perhaps through you I'll get to know him. His a world of limiting understanding for the other. He has a rigid way of mind just as he thinks of himself as open to the views of the world. He has traveled around to have a vision for things foreign. He has found knowledge through the music he’s heard, he's listened to. All the things he’s seen with those eyes of indigo. He's a blue unicorn, and just like in the song I played not long ago, he'll run away. So there you have him open to the world, lying on the floor holding a phone to capture the essence of what he is. A face looking at the unknown. One could say he’s looking at the prospects who will come to him to ask to be let in. I sense he has a specific idea of what he expects from them, and it is in this specificity that the doors he’s opened close in. Here and there he lies, without clothes to swathe a body that is pale. "The shape around the others / in a silent pageant / away from emotion."