Your warm shoulder tries to reach my cold mouth; a cold emptiness of space extends itself between us. There is a parasite which wanders this blackness; the vain parasitic word owner of nothing, continuously filling our mouths with hay. We choke then spit and try to build ourselves elsewhere, and you, amiga, always assist me in my artificial breathing. Now a concatenated and syllabic con-ca-te-na-tion flows between you-and-me, a meeting place is suddenly created. You look at me very closely, our eagle noses almost touch. You look at me very closely and I seem to understand you, a dialectic seems to flow, el contacto parece una posibilidad.
Castilian chestnut curls, relations between figures of style. You utter a sentence and the hasty breeze jolts/collides against my metal ridden earlobes. We then change roles, I am now the utterer and your hand pierces the mist, gently breaking the thin film of plastic that is soaked with vapour on contact with the breath. Your hand breaks the thin film and your breath reaches my still mouth, my skinned cheek. You arrive out of nowhere, your arrival appears to me like a minimalistic monolith, like a brutalist tower. You make yourself seen and I see you, and I overcome the great impression that looking at you makes on me/ that is made on me by looking at you. The overwhelming impact of discerning a figure in the fog, of processing a presence, of witnessing a thought.
Your arrival appears to me, my friend, as that of a gentle titan. As a gentle titan, you sit in the chair next to mine, positioning yourself as The Thinker. I find that your anatomy then disappears and you present yourself as an abstract entity, in that position. You position yourself hand-under-mouth knees crossed in full listening. In this posture your hair-nose-ears evaporate, your cat eyes seem to fade away. I translate the phonemes your flotant bright red mouth produces, and I greatly wonder how-is-this-possible, our very own linguistic phenomenon. Then I go and remember a class with a great teacher who with a cloudy string would thread around us an intangible world of fictions. I could not reach with him the grasp/ understanding that we came to reach last night. The thread that we passed hand in hand that we shared that we tied to pillars and rocks and pneumonic greenness. It also happens that I lose this understanding I forget between our encounters, and I doubt the quasi-miracle produced between eyes and hands and heads hanging from door frames. There remains only a vague sensation, an almost tangible memory of warmth. Kind titan, I am not intimidated by your presence. I plant myself in a parterre that is the palm of your extensive hand, and my roots grow through the soil that is your flesh.
Farmers of affection, you plant at dawn the seed of kindliness. Tirelessly you build and build a cottage. Straw doll that scares away the black crow of loneliness, seagull that flies over the wide sea. Drops of sweat and earthy dirt conflux in the skin that hugs our skulls, together we hum collection songs lost in wheaty golden fields and decades later the bread is made. Every day the flour is ground, and the byproducts of our grind are traded fairly. Every day the mixture is kneaded, every day a hand under the table meets mine. Sun-burnt skin whose warmth doesn’t rely on the steadiness of the light, your heat emanates from the very centre of the crumb. Not rock but buckwheat, seas of golden matter.
Your skin now touches mine. There is a bright red ocean between us, and your skin still touches mine. Touch-quietness-ferocity. There is now between us a paved intertwining, a silver deviation of the railway. The ideas flow from me to her; from her to me and on the way they grow like a sick child, uncertain of his capacity to reach adulthood, laughing still in his attempt. They grow up as children, our ideas, as children they learn to use the potty. They take their first step; they fall. They have no meaning outside of their context, no name outside of the womb. In you, amiga, they find a roof and a childhood, shelter and steady defence.
You are my homeland, mi amor. And a homeland, for those who love, always has the light scent of a prison. This, however, does not scare me, amiga;
I will joyfully surrender to you my freedom.
14/04/2023
Sofía Danailov Esteban