La noche-vieja
"Bemylover/myladyriver"
Bella mia,
The fireworks light up the sky as souls light the moments of weakness. And I look attentive. A climbing yellow burst divides into eight and then a green one into six. And while my shadow on itself extends below this Diwali of the clouds, I light a match that projects the cigar on the table, and makes my fingers, mixed with the green, the red and the orange, look slightly more than yellow.
Why should love be perennial Bellamia? I wonder as this rain of lights darkens me. Will paradise be a place where everything is ephemeral? A place where the love for a woman lasts what two looks crossing in a Tokyo subway or the time that ten fingers take to write a letter in the Olivetti of a famished New York hotel room?
It rains in New York, Bellamia. It rains a slim continuous snow that makes me feel the cracks between my fingers, on my fingers, on my palms white as the background of an imaginary tunnel. When I bring my palms inside the soft dark fleece pockets, my nose seems to want to fall down, as if all the cold once intended for my hands, centered now in the middle of my face.
Why should love be lasting-everlasting, Bellamia? Why cannot it simply be the act of laying one’s ear on the back of a dark-silky-skinned muse, and caress her back from the shoulders to its bottom, flooding oneself of her smell of fable that is in reality the smell of wood mixed with caramel.
I walk Hauston (said as it sounds rather than as it is written) and before reaching Nolita the world becomes a jungle. The green grows besides me and sings a cricket, and then another and then another. And it’s the cyclical repetition of the symmetric sounds that terrifies me, God knows well why. In the continuing walk, the smell of chlorophyll consumes my attention, Bella, and when I want to trigger a new memory, the crickets have become an integral part of my ear and my ear an integral part of the forest that grows on each side of my arms, from right-to-left, left-right. And as I go, I progressively, cease to hear your voice creeping through my mind until, in the midst of this noisy jungle, rises a blind silence of you that makes me forget whether you sound in Farsi or French or simple argentinian spanish.
Why should love be transcendent, Bellamia? Why should it rise and remain and transform itself into an autonomous being willing to last forever as an old privet fighting for survival by the side of an even older road?
The bells of the old-eve ring, Bellamia, and your nonexistent look digs into the vast gray tiled floor not surrounded by a jungle. You cannot look at me and I cannot see you. And through the silence, we extend the idea that together we are a different universe of violet skies and infinite spaces, unoccupied, timeless, silent, expanding, coming back on themselves, over themselves, themselves that is us, standing, facing each other, without looking at any of us, without seeing, in silence.
Why should love be eternal and indestructible, Bellamia? Why cannot it be the intertwining of my fingers in your hair and the digging of my nails in your head as soon as we meet each other: the clinging of my self to your hand; the disimulated hanging of your right arm from my jacket, the wanting to approach someone without actually showing it, in the way of a mute mimic of silent lips that desire not be heard whispering I love you.
We've learned to live clinging to everything around us, Bellamia, to 'what’s mine' that are 'my' things and to the love of 'my' life.
Why should love belong to us forever Bellamia? What if love was not 'mine', or yours, or from one-another, or anyone? What if love was a foreign particle that stops and floats and stops and restarts floating like a butterfly alights on a flower who knowing of its inevitable departure, lets the butterfly, reach, operate, stay and fly away with the certain feeling that another butterfly will come to repeat the same sequence.
My fingers crawl through the neck of a tiny princess that is Belgian or maybe Spanish and who is called Elisa or Rada or something with 4 or 5 characters. And my nails sink straight into the sigh of her closed eyes, her leaning back head, her slightly open mouth. There is time for little more, Bellamia. I guess it as my fingers and her hair alienate from each other, as the connection disappears and we begin to become again me-hand and her-princess.
The time that comes to an end runs downhill like watch hands that are released from the centre.
The early morning love eludes me and flows through the lattice of another year that escapes surrounded by meaningless names of disappearing months.
My hand separates from your head.
New York fades and the cold warms up.
The jungle is no longer green nor gray are the tiles.
Your tender accent vanishes, your half esses stop rolling, as go your lean shoulders, your perfect dropper-dispensed smile.
And I sit.
Under the canopy of lights, I see my finger’s shadow quintessentially yellow extend itself to a further kingdom and think of the temporality of this time, of the non-perennial nature of this misunderstood love, of the words that I write, of the no-longer old-eve, of your imaginary unforgettable smile.
The lights disappear and with them my finger and its shadows, and the last sigh of the intangible particles of this love that is not love but rather the unfinished dream that sooner or later, in the suburbs of a gloomy day or lit up night, I will find you next to love, for real, in this life.
