On love letters

It´s a shame people have forgotten the power of letters. I love letters, and, above all, the love letters. This year, I spent months reading the letters written by George Orwell. I can´t say he wrote love letters, but there´s one where he gets as close to that, where he proposes marriage to a young woman he had met. He is harshly honest about his health problems: he would die of tuberculosis (four years after he had written the letter), his possible infertility. He mentions he doesn´t care if she would have love affairs, because he believed the true fidelity, and the one he was looking for, was the intellectual one. He was a widow with a very young son, a man of slender means at that period of his life. In a way, he was always poor. His fame was posthumous one. I guess the answer to his proposal was a no, but he got to remarry again, days before he died of TB in a hospital. I guess the woman to whom he married truly loved and admired him deeply.

I haven´t written too many love letters, I guess. And I think I have received very few as well. That seems fare. Maybe, I should have loved more than I did.

Ever since I´ve seen this little girl performing, I couldn’t forget her.  Because, as much as I consider myself a letter lover, a faithful devotee to the power of words, there are times I think they are completely unnecessary.

A crack in the wall of everyday life: from Pink Floyd to Suzanne Vega

It´s been a while. I could say I was busy, I was tired, I was lazy, and that I was all those things, maybe all of them at the same time, and I wouldn´t be lying. As a modern woman, I am as busy as modern women usually are: always in a hurry, worried about many things, waking up and rushing in, having a feeling of physical and mental weariness from the moment I get up from my bed and face the mirror for the first time with the mouth full of toothpaste. I try to concentrate particularly on the toothpaste and not on the creases around my eyes or on the dark circles around the same pair of eyes. I am a sort of an old humanized panda, and that´s why I focus on brushing my teeth.

The modern life. A friend sent me an audio with the famous commencement speech to Kenyon College Class of 2005 written by David Foster Wallace. He knows I am a huge fan of his. I particularly like his essays and short stories, and I know some consider this speech bad, one of the worst things he has ever written, but there are many truths there, especially when he describes the everyday life almost every living person who happens to be alive and kicking in a modern society. We live in cities, we face huge traffic jams, pollution, violence of different types. We eat in a hurry, we´re bombed by information while we try to digest our food altogether with the news coming from the TV, or tablets or smartphones, or from all of them at the same time. 

And all of those things reminded me of a very old video that I never really liked from a song that was never among my favorites, but one of the terrible things about our memory is that we don´t really control what we do remember and what we do forget. Sometimes, we would love to forget somethings but never do, and that´s really unfortunate, but I remember a scene from a Pink Floyd video, The Wall: kids being grinded and turned into sausages. And this is how I feel: as I am being grinded, and turned into minced beef .

And another great aspect of Wallace´s speech is when he makes us realize that that´s the way the world is and that is nothing personal, since many others are in the same traffic jam with us. It´s nothing personal. In fact, it´s just the exact opposite: it´s all about not being personal at all! More than seven billion of us, trying to make a living, being turned into minced meat. 

But don´t you gonna be thinking that I would rather give up living in a city and having the comforts of a modern life. No way. I would just love having some slow motion moments in my daily routine, some starring at the wall moments, looking for a crack, who knows? A breach to a different world. 

  

When I reached 5 ft, 6.9 in

I spent almost my whole life with the feeling I was too small, too short, as if I had taken one of the potions or eaten one of the sides of the mushroom that were so conveniently available in the world of Alice. But I would always have the share that would make people shrink.

Growing up takes time, it takes years, and I guess it is like that because we need to get to know the surface and limits of our bodies. It´s funny, but, as I was reading a book, and this happens a lot to me, I find in a book something that I was thinking about, And I love this, the wonders of coincidence! Anyway, as I was going through Monsieur Test, by Paul Valèry, I came up with this:
"During our childhood, we get to know ourselves slowly, by discovering the space occupied of our bodies, by expressing its singularities through a series of physical efforts".
We get to conquer the height we reach inch by inch, by exerting great efforts to overcome limits of the physical world around us. Existing and thriving requires lots of stamina: By falling, we learn the principle of gravity. By pushing our limits, we learn the principle of inertia.
I don´t know if I wasn´t able to test and discover the limits of my body to its fullest extent as I was growing up, so I was always unable to feel I was 5 ft, 6.9.
Few days ago, it all changed. All of a sudden, I felt 5 ft, 6.9 in for the first time. As if my innerself had finally taken the entire area of my body, not a small part of it. I was fully 5 feet, 6.9 inches tall.
It took me 44 years to grow up.

short note

A fraud, that´s how I felt for many years.

I wans´t sure of what to do about it. It was a hard feeling to deal with, a permanent discomfort, something as  wearing somebody elses´clothes. Or worse: somebody elses´shoes, too tight or too large.

For many years in my life, I tried to find ways out of this. Of letting to be a fraud and become me, or something that felt more truly me or that it felt more like the true me.

The problem with this life we live is there´s always some sort or level of expectation we´re supose to reach or achieve somehow. We´re supose to fit a certain pattern that is usually too tight: the perfect family, the dream job, the dream house, so on and so forth. 

And I guess this some is an impressive number of people that spend their lives fighting against this discomfort.

"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory", said Tenesse Williams, and I´ve heard and read similar sentences from different types of artists. I am not sure if every artist is always someone whose not satisfied with his/her life. I would dare to say so.

Once I understood life wasn´t satisfactory, that I had to find my way to deal with the dissatisfaction I had inside, I begun to change. It hasn´t been easier, though, but I could find my way to my own satisfaction. 

Now, I´m no longer  a fraud. I´m something else, somehting I still cannot grasp, but that doesn´t matter to me. As long as I don´t feel like a fraud, I´m all right.        

Seing things for the first time

I saw a very nice video the other day; a three year old girl is standing at a train station. Her father is filming her during their short wait. She´s overloaded with joy and excitement. Her entire face glows. She laughs and giggles,she cannot help to let her tiny arms go up and down. She opens and closes her hands many times, and then, her father tells her the train is coming... The train is coming! A real one, a powerful and huge machine, not a small plastic toy. She cannot find words to describe what she feels, she´s only three, her vocabulary is still incipient so as her life experiences. But the joy she feels! It might sound corny, but it made me think of the wonderful piece of music composed by the great Beethoven, his Ode to Joy. To me, this symphony is the close one can get, not to the idea of God, not in the religious sense, but to the feeling of divinity, to the realization of the miracle of being alive, seeing things, experiencing tastes, sounds, feeling one´s heart beating fast with exhilaration, what a wonderful word.

I was so touched because I realized that I´ve lost almost all this hability of seeing things for the first time. By thinking about it, my main excuse was that I have lived. Not for too long, but I kind of thought the things I could see for the first time were already few, which is a stupid argument, I know it well. Everytime we open our eyes to a new day, there are things we´re seeing for the first time. 

So I tried. And, as I was stuck in trafic, I looked up, to the bright sky and paid attention to a pack of clouds, and I was amazed, truly amazed with the extreme beauty right there, over my head, a live spectacle, since clouds are being constantly changed by the winds. 

I thought I should have taken a picture but I gave up, because, if I did stop to pick the cellphone, I would miss that instant. I don´t need a picture. The image is already engraved on my memory, as I believe the image of the her first train is in the mind of that little three year old girl.

    

The fortune at the bottom of coffee cups: a short story

* This is a short story I wrote for my first book. I tried to translated it to English. Here it is.

The Fortune at the bottom of the coffee cups

Jumping, running, pretending and climbing. The adult males were all together, pretending to be serious after the Sunday meal, digesting and discussing serious subjects comfortably seated in chairs around the porch, while the adult females served coffee and desserts. Joanna killed two big chickens for the supper. The chickens were alive and noisy just before their necks were broken. Right after that, inanimate objects, almost as if they were pillows. Large, quiet feather pillows resting in the morning sun.  Having  witnessed  the occurrence of death, felt me with disgust.  I couldn´t eat the roasted chicken. I feared I would swallow death, or that I would end up the killing, tearing up the meat fibers with my milk teeth. I had mashed potatoes with those round and green things… peas!  And there were also roasted pork, huge, its skin turned into a crispy surface, its open mouth holding an apple, its eyes turned into hard pieces of charcoal. And then, the desserts. My mother´s delicious pudding, creams, cakes and fruits in syrup: peaches, plums and sanguine oranges. The garden´s lawn was deep green; the sun was always there, over our heads. Don´t stay in the sun after eating, my mother yelled at me, I can see her by the porch, her hands around her mouth. It was winter, my uncle took a nap at the hammock, my grandfather smoked his old pipe, I do remember. Women served desserts and coffee. My grandfather looked so old! He read the future in the coffee powder that rested in the bottom of coffee cups. “Where is he, my grandpa?” Dead; I can see him inside his casket, old and wasted, but, no, he is alive, reading people´s fortune in the coffee powder that rested at the bottom of coffee cups.  Once, he told me: you going to live many, many years.   “How many years, grandpa?” “Many, many years. Many more than I would live”. So I asked if live many years was a good or a bad thing. He laughed, showing his ugly teeth.   It´s so bright today, isn´t it? It´s the sun, always there, over our heads.  Grandma Henrietta was older than grandpa. She had a mouth with no teeth in it, her tongue danced around as it could sense something her eyes couldn´t as lizards do. The difference was she had legs she couldn´t use, and a blanket covering their uselessness. And there was Cousin Joachim, such an evil creature. He used to kill birds with a slingshot, targeting the most beautiful ones because he was so ugly and he hated being condemned to a live standing in his both feet, unable to fly. He knew, he knew that even though he could climb the tallest trees and pretend to be a bird, he would end up as all the other humans; we belong to earth, to the soil we have under our feet. Life is made of some ups and some downs, most downs, mainly once we reach the old age, and then there is the moment we end up under the soil we once have under our feet. He would kill the birds in revenge. But, this Sunday sunny afternoon, there was no trace of death and the old ones were my grandpa and grandma Henrietta with her legs covered with a sad blanket.

Cousin Joachim, I hated him, but I also admired his ability to never miss one single shot. I would beg him not to, beg him to spare the little sparrow, but he wouldn´t listen, he never listened, and the result was I had a dying bird in the palm of my hand and wanted to cry and wanted to kill my cousin for having killed. My hand would tremble, my body would crumble, as it does tremble and crumbles today. He also killed ants and snails with the help of a magnifier. The sun light and the sun heat would be magnified by the lens and the ants and snails would burst in flames, what an awful death.

He challenged me saying I would never climb the old guava tree. I said I would, so we made a deal. If I didn´t, he would have my collection of stamps. If I did, I would have his collection of butterfly wings.

I was scared, but would never have him have my collection of stamps, a present from my daddy.  I thought about my dad and a dull pain pierced my chest. My dad, where is he? A salesman making a living from selling things around the country far, far away from us, from everything. When he returns, it´s like he had never left. He always brings us presents. For me, stamps and adventures books, for Lao, a knife or a magnifier, the one that Joachim later used to kill the ants, for Leah, a nice ribbon for her light brown hair, for my mother, a nice piece of cloth, a perfume. My mother, where is she? I do remember a ceremony at the church, a closed casket with someone inside.  I was so scared.

“Cut it now, stop crying. Don´t you see? It was meant for him to die”.  I recall my father´s voice and the image of his long legs in front of me. Why, I asked. “That´s life. He gave his life so we could have what to eat, that´s why we raise animals. Tomorrow is Easter”. A bunny or a lamb? A lamb. So tiny, so fragile… I was responsible for caring and giving him food. But now, the lamb is dead, my father killed my lamb. “No, dad, no!” I yelled at him, I hated him. He killed my lamb, and I yelled at him, I called him murder, and then I run away from him, away from the sight of the butchered lamb. I climbed the highest tree of my aunt´s garden and I stayed there, I would have stayed there forever, but I came down because she begged me to, or because I was tired and needed to go home. When I got home, my mother wanted me to tell me father I was sorry, but I wasn´t, so I wouldn´t. She hit me hard, five times. But I didn´t say I was sorry because I wasn´t.  I remember my father´s eyes at me. He was sad, I was furious. The next day, it was Easter. I was grounded and didn´t have lunch. And then, my father travelled. I didn’t say goodbye, I couldn´t forgive him. After he left, I almost felt happy with his absence, but time passed and passed, and he wouldn´t come back.  I started to wish he would come back.

“It´s about time to get inside, dad”. 

Dad? The sun light is so bright I can´t hardly see.  Daddy ´s back! But my legs hurt, I can´t move them. Joachim and I, we were there, high up there at the highest branches of the guava tree . And I fell. My legs hurt so badly, I couldn´t move. My dad came to rescue me, took me in his arms and then to the doctor who lived nearby. Don´t you worry, son, everything´s going to be all right, he said to me, looking into my eyes with his good old eyes. His hair has grown gray, so gray. Dad, I am sorry, I didn´t know, I was mad at you, I am sorry, can you forgive me, daddy?  My legs hurt, I cannot move. The lamb, the roasted pork, the snails and the ants. You going to live many, many years, the coffee powder at the bottom of the coffee cups.

 No, I don´t want to! I want my dad, my dad is with me right now, taking care of my broken legs. I feel the pain, I feel I cannot control my legs, my life. Where is my life? Where are my brother and sister, my cousin, and grandfather, my mother and my father?

 Father?

 “Ok, daddy, that´s enough. Relax now. Let´s go inside. You´ve got to rest a little”.

My grandfather used to read people´s fortune by looking at the coffee powder at the bottom of coffee cups. Once he told me: you´re going to live many, many years.

“How many, grandpa?”

 “Many more than I would live”. 

       

        

Signs

My oldest daughter is starting to show the first signs of puberty. It is time. If I think about my life, I can remember I was about her age when I realized I was growing old, I was becoming an adult. Up to that point, I guess I only thought I was growing up, getting taller without actually thinking my height meant something else than being able to look my mother straight into her eyes.

She is still my girl, a sweet child who loves to play with her favorite toys, but, little by little, she´s changing, she´s being changed by the passage of time. In a question of months, she will be bloming into a beautiful young woman. 

In a very short period of time, she will be looking at me straight into my eyes, as an equal.  

I just hope I will be wise enough in helping her in making some sense of what it means to be a woman.            

September 22

On a September 22, my grandfather was born, a hundred and fourteen years ago. He ceased to exist long before that date, although he lived longer than he had probably expected: ninety six years. He outlived his wife, my grandmother, with whom he had a turbulent  marriage, in almost ten years. On the last three years of his life, he wasn´t able to recognize none of us. When he saw his son, my father, he tought he was seeing his own father. He kept on calling: daddy, daddy, and his son would go to him in an attempt to comfort his agonies, his uneasiness. What was he thinking then? We never knew. 

My grandfather had a long life, I´m not sure if it was a happy one. He had a harsh childhood, an agitated adulthood due to his personal political beliefs and actions,  and lived longer to see the collapse of some of his cherished ideas. 

I miss my grandfather dearly. He was not the tender and caring type of person, but he was the only grandfather I met. He was extremely inteligent and had a strange sense of humor, and when I was born, he wrote me a poem. What else could I ask for?

Eighteen  years have passed since the death of my grandfather, and I still remember his birthday. I can clearly hear his voice, and I can picture him right in front of his old house walking his dog. And, when I look at my father as he is today, I see a litttle (or a lot, depending on the day) of my grandfather. And it makes me feel better to think that part of him is still around.

        

A perfect day

This is the closest I get to an idyllic saturday:

- a cup of coffee (or maybe two);
- a good book (I´ve gotten this fantastic comic book called Daytripper, written and ilustrated by two twin brothers: Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá);
- peace and quiet;
- reading by the window, the sunlight occasionally iluminating the pages;
- the company of a cat;
- drinking a glass of red wine (or maybe two), just enough to feel lighter;
- eyelids closed for a while, still enjoying the peace and quiet;
- finishing the book and have this feeling of being blown away by a great history;
- getting to write a little bit;
- taking a walk and coming back;
- shower, salad, orange juice.
- Bed.

In a Blink of an eye

I´ve finished reading Watchmen recently, what a great and positive surprise. I had no idea it was that good, so good that I can´t really say for sure which is my favorite character, but there´s one in particular I´ve felt somehow connected with and that was Dr. Manhattan.

The guy has been through a lot. Being desintegrated during a nuclear accident is not something easy, but  he gets to pull himself together somehow. He becomes a different type of being with superpowers such as teletransportation. He can teletransport himself and others to pretty much wherever he wants to. He gets well fine, but the same cannot be said to ordinary human beings; some can experience minor side effects, such as vomits, and others can go through major ones, such as massive heart attacks.
What I thought it was really cool was his understanding of time. To him, there´s no past, present and future, everything is happening simultaneously, and nothing really ends. If I knew that would be possible, I would agree on submitting myself to nuclear experiences.
My time is short, always in a hurry, always late. I´ve heard during a lecture this week that time really flies when we live in cities, people walk faster, talk faster, do everything faster in cities. I´m not sure, but I would guess the speed is directed related with the size of the city, so I´m almost happy I live in a reasonable sized town and not in Sao Paulo, Tokio or New York. I mean, I would desintegrate with the effort of keeping up with the life speed in places like that.
I blinked and it was March, I had the whole year in front of me. I blinked again and it is August. When I blink the next time, the year would be over. I wish I could be teletransported to somewhere else.
Time´s up. Gotta go.  

The right to be forgotten

I´ve heard (and read) about the changes the top European Community court  of justice is requiring Google to adopt: whenever asked, the company has to remove from its search results data that is considered by the demanding part as inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relavant (see links HERE). It´s a complex subject, involving delicate aspects; on one side, the right for privacy claimed by european citizens. On the other,the so called freedom of expression claimed by Google. However, what really caught my attention was the tittle of the proposal: The right to be forgotten.

The right to be forgotten.  Five words that can tell a whole story, or many different stories, depending on the reader understanding of what´s behind of a carefull selection of words. One example: If you read one of the most famous short stories ever written, supposedly by Hemingway, using only six words: "For sale: baby shoes never worn", and burst into tears - as many has done before you, as you can check by reading this LINK -, you´ve imagined a terrible drama: a couple that has lost a child. Was it during labor? Was it after for an unexpected desease? As consequence of an accident? It could be whatever you choose to, including something completely different. What if the baby was born healthy and heavy, bigger than the mother expected and the clothes simply didn´t fit? The story loses its dramatic strenght, for sure, but not everybody appreciates sad endings. There are the ones who love the happy ones. The story goes on according to the reader´s imagination.

The right to be forgotten, a legitimate claim. Thinking about that sentence, about this sequence of words, all I could envision was a collection of dramas: couples that split, families torn apart by different types of tragedies. As much as I tried, I couldn´t come up with a happy ending story. But that´s me, I´m quite dramatic. And there was something else that came up to my mind. It´s funny how sometimes we choose a specific  sequence of words that have a very clear meaning if we take them literally, but we wish for the exact opposite of what we´re saying. There are times when leave me alone means don´t leave me alone. So, for me, in many cases, ask to be forgotten means you wish you wouldn´t be. Humans are strange animals, don´t you think?
I´ve also heard (and read) that sad stories can make great art, whereas the happy ones hardly ever. Why would that be? I´m not sure. I guess Tolstoy has the best explanation I´ve read: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Happyness is worth living, not reading about it.
And this song in particular is a wonderful example of pain turned into art. Enjoy.

  


 

    

The cracked house

Draw a cracked house, I´ve heard. No, it wasn´t exaclty what he said. I had a hard time trying to translate such a simple sentence from Portuguese to English, but what am I saying? There´s no such a thing as a simple sentence. Anyway, what he meant was that we should come up with a house that was somehow wrong, inappropriate, and he said that in his lovely peninsular accent.


I draw the first thing that came to my mind: a corner, the encounter of two walls forming a right angle, which is interesting considering I was supposed to draw a cracked house. Then I draw a hole on the floor. One of my walls had, well, a huge crack, and from the fissure the branches of a tree could be seen. There was a window and, from the outside, faces staring at the emptiness of the inside.
The others came up with different ideas: houses with no doors or windows, houses that were placed upside down, all inappropriate because living between those walls was impossible. At the end, we all came up with representations of empty spaces. Ultimately, a cracked house is not a place to live in.  

memories of losses

The first thing I remember to lose was a teddy bear. As a toddler, I guess I was always carrying it around, and that´s why I´ came to lose it.

I was at an airport waiting for someone. I´m not sure, but I think I was waiting for my dad. I was probably excited. Going to the airport was something I enjoyed doing at that age, I was probably fascinated with airplanes as all kids are. Anyway, I can clearly see my arms around that relatively big teddy bear. We sat for a while, maybe to have something to drink and/or eat, and I put Geroncio (that was his name, I remember) on a chair right in front of me. I can still see his round, dark, unexpressive eyes starring at me.

The fact is I forgot my teddy bear on that chair, at that airport. When I realized my arms where missing something, we came back but it was too late. Someone else has taken him away.

I felt sad. And guilty. How could I have forgotten my teddy bear? How can we forget things that are so damn important, so dear to us? And I did it not only once, many times. That was my first. The first time I´ve lost something dear to me.

I´ve lost books, and for a person who loves reading and writing, losing books is very bad. I´ve lost Decameron inside a bus when I was going to the beach for my summer vacation. And the book wasn´t even mine. I´ve lost another one, about the Russian Revolution at an airport in Michigan. And I realized, while I was writting this post, how much I still regret those losses. I realized how much I hate losing things I love and care about.

And the losses kept on happening. I started to lose not only things, but also living things that we basically lose to death; first it was my dog, then, years later, family members: granparents, aunts, uncles... And as much as I know that that´s the way life is, I never stopped missing them, and hating the fact that they were taken away from me.

I´ve also lost friends. I believe most of them are doing well, living their lives the best way they can, but we lost contact. It wouldn´t be difficult to find out about some of them if I really wanted to. However, I have this feeling that I shouldn´t. People change, I´ve changed. And maybe what we once shared has vanished as well, so getting together could be a huge mistake. Either way, thinking about those lost friends make me feel deeply sorry.

For the last few days, I´ve been feeling gloomy and I could not tell why. This is very strange to me, because I usually know what is bothering me or hurting me very well, that was never a problem I had, not knowing what was wrong. So, when I started feeling this way, I begun to think, trying to find out what was the problem. And then I thought about losses. The small and the big ones, so I think that was it.  I feel sorry for things I´ve lost, for people I´ve once loved, and that are gone forever. Knowing that didn´t make the feeling go away. But that was never the reason why I kept on thinking. I just wanted to understand. And now I do.         

Baby Teeth

Baby Teeth

Babies have no teeth when they are born, only rosy gums full of promisses and a strong tongue.
Baby teeth are also known as milk teeth, and milk is what babies should have before having any teeth showing up on their gums. For sucking milk from their mothers, they only need a strong tongue.
When babies reach four to six months, the first incisors, two, erupt from their gums.
Children usually have twenty baby teeth that will occasioanlly fall, giving place to the permanent ones.
I´ve seen the eruption of 40 baby teeth, 20 per child.
Last week, I pulled two baby teeth, one per child.
I´ve pulled more teeth than I dare to count.
I wish I didn´t have to pull their teeth, but I have to.
My children do not believe in the Tooth Fairy anymore.
Will they remember I had to pull their teeth when they´re grown?
Will they remember I was their Tooth Fairy when I´m gone?

Bridges

Some time ago, I read an article about bridges (HERE). Well, not exactly. It was about suicide, and the fascination bridges caused in suicidals. There is one in particular that attracts many:  The Golden Gate, in San Francisco, CA., and a friend mentioned that there´s a movie about that, which I haven´t seen, but planned to. Someday.
Bridges are connections that allow us to reach what was once unreachable. It seems that, for suicidals,  they are seen as exit doors to this life. A passage to a different other, perhaps.
Very few of those who jumped from The Golden Gate lived to tell how it was to nearly die. They had multiple fractures, but before hitting the water, they experienced an euphoric relief while falling, a sense of self-annihilation that then led to the realization suicide was not the solution. It seems the suicide attempt worked as a sort of a rebirth. To a very few.

To Kafka, the bridge is not made of concrete, stones, iron cables; it´s made of flash and bones, a human being fighting not to colapse. The fear of collapsing to the burdens of life, to the cruelty of others, what a powerful metaphor.

Kafka lived a sad, short life. Happiness was always out of his reach, it seems. Tuberculosis killed him at the age of 37. The bridge he needed simply didn´t exist at that time.











It´s hard to go through life without experiencing periods of deep sadness.  Looking for a way out is not an easy task, because, many times, and I know it very well, there´s seems to be none. But there is. And there will be a bridge. No to help you plunge into desperation, but to ease your way out of it. As long as there´s life, there´s hope.

Oddity

I was in between births; my mother´s first, my father´s second child.

My brother, the first. Older, much older than me at that time, eager to plunge into the fleshy years of his adolecence, while I was just unaware of everything. I adored him, and I know he loved me back, but we were light years apart.

Then came my sisters; twins, always together, never alone.

I was the odd. 

Circumstances. Unplanned, mundane sequences of facts. Parts of everybody else´s life. But that was my life.

I was the odd. And I will always be.

  

a million years

I was reading an interview with Alex Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand lead singer, and he mentioned he still feels as he was in his late twenties, or early thirties (not sure), the same age as he started the band. Having a rock band makes you fell like that, forever young. Take a look at Keith Richards. Despite all his creases, he plays and sound as young as he was when he and Mick started the Rolling Stones. The same with Bowie. His new album was probably one of the best of 2013, and he is in his late sixties.
My examples are kind of way up there, right? Not really. It seems to also work for those who happened to have a small band as well. It´s not the success, it´s the attitude.  I´ve  heard the same from a person who once had one. And it´s true, he has that rock n´roll attitude, and that makes all the difference.
I never had a band. I sing, but in private. My first time facing an audience was a stressful experience. Being the center of the attention was never really something I felt comfortable with. I´d rather be on the backstage, but I had no choice, I had to be in the front this time. I did sing, but I´m not sure how.I had the weird feeling of not being able to move my lips, how can someone sing without moving the lips? Anyway, I did, and, when I was done I´ve got some compliments, which means I didn´t blew it completely. What I can say is that I don´t think I´m ready for another try. There is no way I will start a band, so I will not feel young. Or younger.
But, to be honest, I never felt young even when I was. Many of the things my friends enjoyed during our youth weren´t exactly appealing to me. Considering the triad sex, drugs and rock n´roll; except for the least, and I have to confess I had some horrible preferences that I can no longer stand in terms of music; drugs were out of question - I always thought I would better have some control of my mind than no control at all-  ; and sex, well, who can actually brag to have had a satisfying sex life during his/hers teenage years?  I was the introverted type of girl, the one who was always paying attention to the stories told by others much older than me. I liked to read, especially things that I found in my father´s library, and that was when I fisrt read Oscar Wilde for the first time, the portrait of Dorian Gray.  

So maybe by reading that book at that age had affected me  more than I could have imagined at the time. The thing is, in a way, I felt as I was somehow similar to Wilde´s most famous character. I felt I had a million years. I don´t show it, but I do.
When I was autographing my book, I´ve heard from a person that she was expecting to see someone older, someone with more life experience. I just smiled and thought of Dorian, who always looked fresh and younger, but had an old, vicious, imperfect version of himself  hidden  somewhere, and thought: you have no idea.    

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Shoes

Shoes, some of my old memories involve observing my feet taking me somewhere; to the kindergarten, wearing a black pair, small steps, one foot in front of the other. I think the grass was green, I mean, grass is always green, but what I wanted to say is I wasn´t dreaming. I´ve heard once we don´t dream in colours, and I don´t know if this is true or not, I hardly ever remember my dreams. Anyway, this is probably one of my oldest memories, my feet walking me to school.

There´s another pair, red ones this time, and I am not going anywhere, I am just spinning around in excitement before my birthday party. I could do that for a long time without getting dizzy, the faster the better, what a strange thing. I just lost this ability of not getting giddy.
What I´ve never lost was an ability to twist my ankles, or maybe an inability to avoid missteps would be a better way to put it, so that´s maybe the main reason why I was always paying attention to my feet.
I like to think my feet took me places and not the other way around, that I was deliberately choosing my paths. That would be the perfect excuse for all the dead ends I faced in my lifetime.  

  

Scars

I have some in my body, remembrances of my mortality, of  my imperfections. Human imperfections, better said, since the wounds inflicted to our bodies heal, tissues recover, but not completely. Warning signs, that´s what scars are, just like those we see on the side of the roads: do not exceed the speed limit, do not pass, keep your right, keep your left. It´s the way nature found to warn us not to exceed our limits, to be more cautious the next time. 

So I have scars, it´s almost impossible to go through life without gaining some during childhood. From that period, I have one on the sole of my foot. It was caused by a huge nail that pierced my skin as I step on it. Frighthening experience from which I have very imprecise memories.  

Others were caused by medical interventions. Two C-sections brought my daughters into this world, so I am very proud of having that one (the incisions were made at the same spot twice, resulting in a single scar). Another two were the resulst of a plastic surgery. Was it worth it? I don´t know. All I can say is that it was an interesting experience to lose consciousness  and step into a condition of temporary non-existence, and then return to life with the realization that only the living could suffer from such an excrutiating pain.

I have other scars as well. They look and feel ugly to me, but are not exactly visible to others. Results of difficult healing processes, deep wounds caused by disappointments, and that is also something we cannot completely avoid during our lives; we suffer and cause suffering. Sometimes accidentally, unintentionally, sometimes with the deliberate intention of hurting as deep as possible.

And there are the scars we choose to have. Signs that only make sense to ourselves. Permanent inasmuch as life can be considered perpetual. So I added two more signs to the map of my skin. I tattoed two letters on my wrists: an A, the first letter of the alphabet, the inicial of my name on the left, and the Z on the right. There are many reasons why I´ve chosen to have those letters, but the main one is that I didn´t want to forget what they meant to me. Letters are my great companions, my partners in creating words that put together give birth to paragraphs, and then to full texts. And I just realized now that our DNAs are represented as sequences of letters. So that´s it. What we are, what I am, at the end:  a sequences of letters.    

          

Playing dead vs Playing Death

I´ve been fighting against this post for days. I should have abandoned the whole idea, but, I don´t know why, I kept on insisting. Maybe I could get something out of this subject, or maybe not. Let´s see.

Playing Dead vs Playing Death 

I read an interview with an actor that usually plays the bad guy, and, as it happens often in movies, or at least in those ones I am thinking of, bad guys tend to die spectactacular deaths, and so he did. Over, and over. Danny (that´s his name: Danny Trejo)  believes no one else in Hollywood has died so many times (or killed so many times) as he did (see LINK). But there was a sentence, that hooked me immediately as I read, which was:  "not just anybody can play dead".

I first smiled a condescendent and superior smile,  thinking, oh, c´mon. But then I realized that he had one moment of enlightment few humans experience in a lifetime. That was a definite philosophical statement. Being dead is nothing, really. It´s a condition each one of us reaches someday. And, as other things we experience in life, there´s no rehearsal. Either you get it right from the begining or you blow it, period. I was thinking about that while I was reading Don Quixote. In one of his conversations with Sancho Panza, he says something about the perfect death, and that would be an unexpected one in the battlefield, of course. Well, dying during a battle does not exactly come as a surprise, but, again, and this is very human, even soldiers do not expect to die. In fact, death is always unexpected, right? There´s always hope even in the most desperate situations. We cling to life until we can´t anymore. The surprise comes with the realization that we cannot scape. And that reminded me of the best scene of the first movie based on Stieg Larsson trilogy, I think is the one called  Men who hate women. The hero got to solve the mistery and to know the identity of the serial killer. The only problem is that he is about to become a victim as well, too bad for him, but, before going on with the kill, the bad guy not only describes his modus operandi, but also his drives. What really turned him on was to recognize in the eyes of his victims the moment they understand they were doomed. The realization of the end of their lives by his hands. A mix of surprise, disbelief, anger, perhaps? The definite end, no second chances. And, on this case, the killer played death, the major role, leaving the victims to the secondary role of simply dying.  
That´s why I think Danny is a fortunate man. He´s been having the great chance to face different ends for his different lives. Maybe not that different, considering his roles do not vary much, but still. He´s in a clear advantage when compared to mortals like you and me. He plays dead all the time. He´s rehearsing for his ultimate act. And has he learned something from his experience? Of course he did.
What he learned seems kind of a cliché, but I guess all the great truths are like that, so obvious that can easily be misunderstood: "When it´s time, it´s time. When it comes, it comes, so don´t think about it too much. Don´t be afraid of death". 

Then I read another interview, that one with Woody Allen ( HERE), and I could find points in common in the two different reasonings, which is kind of comforting, I guess. I am not sure Woody has played dead very often, but he certainly played with death as a writer, and as a director. Bottom line, what they say is pretty much the same: life ´s short, we´re insignificant creatures, everything passes. Get used to that. Of course, it´s hard, especially for some who have big egos and want to leave a legacy for future generations. C´mon, guys. That doesn´t make any sense, because, as he points out,  the whole universe will be gone eventually.
So why do we do what we do? Why to bother getting up everyday? Oh, well, since we´re around, we must do something in order not to get terribly bored, depressed or both. In his words: "the key is distraction" .And: "The truth of the matter is that your life is pretty much out of your control". 
Then, the best thing you can do is to chill out, and find something you think will be a good distraction. Since we´re all doomed, we better have some fun before the very end.