Paris

Paris
“Cause a dream is only a dream as long as it does not become true / Cause dreamers feel like strangers in the real world”
                                                                                                    Dubai, October 2011.



The dark thick clouds float low through our open window. Next to me you breath deeply, in comfort, dreaming of some Eastern-Asian-Persian night that occurred thousands of years before us, millions of years before this cloud being water and cloud and then water again. In the streets the rain wakes up the asphalt from an absent night of late drivers with the sluggishness of the waves of the dead-sea. There will be no sun rising this morning of early September in which the black dark masses of steam have decided to invade the sky and made life a show of their own. The humidity in the room gives the air the smell of oxidized old grandmother’s houses, and plagues it with it a remotely imported homely feeling of a western Argentinean chalet. I hug you. With my right arm crossing over your body and wrapping you over, cuddling my legs over yours, bringing my nose close to your back-head, smelling your neck, making you a part of the air that provides oxygen to my veins, that keeps my heart running. And again you breathe. Only that now your left eye is open, and, with your rusty morning voice, after smiling in an almost imperceptible manner, you ask me about the time. I think it’s around midday but do not answer. Instead I look deep into the spiral of your open iris hiding vast labyrinths of sand intricately open and impassable. This side of the open window, inside this humid bedroom, time has become something between inexistent and irrelevant and the dunes of the desert disintegrating in the depth of your black eyes disappear as you continue to close your tab. Like turtles hiding heads in their carapaces we cover ourselves with the sheets afraid that beyond this bed, outside of our shell, out there in the streets where people run for shelter, there could be no magic, no hugging, no bed, no us; there could be time destroying the sand, undoing the desert. Underneath the sheets we play games of love and hate, games of caressing and biting and grabbing and pushing and coming together and apart and being one and two and one and two again in the agitated revolution that we create in each other’s body with the simple touch of a hand. As we come back from the hundredth kiss and the last first time that we make love to each other, finding a new piece of skin yet to be explored, still under the safety of the sheets; as we recover the breath and with it our voices still breaking between gasps, we start talking about your childhood. It is a childhood of princesses and butlers and drivers and comfort and getting everything that is desired with the simple lift of a finger. And in the silence of my always working mind shooting in 40 different directions, hearing the water and remembering the red painting on your wall that I discovered as I opened my right eye this morning, I admire the persons you have come to be, the potential persons you will, some day, become. I admire the mother of a smart cheeky daughter trying to explain the sadness of death and the daughter of an aging mother trying to provide comfort to a mother over the irrelevance of a death that will only trigger a new beginning, a new rain in the streets of a French city, a new intricately vast desert in the eyes of a new person. I admire your freshness and your intelligence and the way you have seen it all before its time: this bed, this Paris’ rain, this two turtles living at every second a little bit more, dying a little bit less. This stillness of a world full of turtles and rabbits choosing to die for irrelevant things such as purses and cars and comfort of lifes of princesses and butlers that may provide no happiness if they are not just the preamble of a morning like this one, with the window open and the rain ‘moistening’ the parquet floor, in Paris.

Suddenly, I find myself tangled in your messy hair; my ideas flowing through your mind with the naturalness of a bicycle running through the streets of Amsterdam. We have come to be one, I think. The shape of this room that you have decorated 'your way' I had seen a million times before grabbing the bronze knob and crossing the wooden green deteriorated door for the first time. The red painting I had chosen a 100 times before you picked it from a collectors shop in Camden town. And the white cloths covering the bed, where I will continue to hide from the reality that may catch us in the streets, are the sheets of my bed and not yours. It is sheets on which I have dreamt of tangling in a hair that I thought I knew from ancient times, while I strolled through the mind of a person that I had come to known in another dream. A dream where I was looking at a red painting in a shop in Camden Town  next to a messy haired young girl that was trying to imagine how the red would contrast with the green of the door of her fourth floor Parisian apartment.


Waking up has never been easy but it has become notably hard this morning. I refused myself to abandon the cold warmth of this open bedroom of white peeling walls. My fear of the unknown has paralyzed my hands underneath the soft pillows and made me yawn more than countable times. It is the classical hard cover Mathnavi copy mingled in the floor with ‘El Aleph’ and ‘Los Conjurados’ what drives me out of bed. I have woken up with my left foot first but I have not noticed. The floor was comfortably freezing. As I pick Borges and Rumi (one in each hand) I see Keats and Ernest in the distance. ‘A song about myself’ lies beneath ‘The old man and the sea’ and I wonder if this morning was not the preamble of ‘A movable Feast’. ‘In the unseen, rain and cloud of different kind/ Al cabo de los años he observado que la belleza, como la felicidad, es frecuente/ Different sun and sky confound the mind / No pasa un día en que no estemos, un instante, en el paraíso’; I read out loud while you wake up and ask me with a sarcastically funny smile if that is something that I had written. Outside the rain intensifies and the lighting show entering through your back gives yourself a sinister beauty reflected in the man-tall mirror that lies in the floor next to Hemingway. You wear a military green hooded trench coat over long pants and rain boots. I, on the other hand, plan for a white polo shirt, jeans and vans shoes to defy the water. To feel the reality of an inclement weather to which I have returned after a long dream of dry countries.

In the dark marbled circular corridor of seven green doors, when the peeling walls have become a remote memory of a perfect awakening, I notice that we have not said a word to each other since your question about the text I was reading. I still carry Rumi in my left back pocket. The cage climbs the three stories slowly, carrying, once again through the pulling power of its quasi-rotten cables thousands of kilos of bronze, metal, wood and mirrored glass. I open the scissors-door for you and close it behind me. The descent is slow and noisy in the outside as always, but silent as never before in the inside. The walk towards the street door feels like the walk of a green mile. It is impossible to abandon  a dream and return to the real life without the feeling that we are abandoning something perfect to go into the uncertainty of the imperfect. With all the strength in my right arm I open the giant door of bars and glass with the feeling of leaving behind a perfect prison. And as we walk out of the building, when this raining Paris has become a reality; as the first drop of rain hits the slide of my nose and with a nodding smile you tell me that I should not open the umbrella, preparing ourselves to get soaked through the imperial cobblestoned streets of this beautiful city; I notice that everything that happened inside that room was real and that I am not dreaming. So, in between a hesitating shake of my mind, I think, as I give the first step towards the North through this mysterious empty Rue de Seine, that maybe, when we seat in the cafe of the coming corner, if my guts allow it, and the time is right, if my fear goes away and the shield pulverizes like the deserts pulverized in your eyes this morning, I should tell you that I have now noticed how much I have always loved you.