fading smile

Can I pose questions without sounding accusatory?

It was a beautiful morning. We mourned her loss over coffee and a tango song that I interrupted because I didn’t want to make you cry.

It rained last night and my tiny body was tired and dry. I was hungry, but I was also tired of thinking. Reasoning seems such a foreign language to me.

Am I a whining baby? How do you see me? Drop me a line, I say casually, as if I could hide what my eyes say.

I nod. I tie knots with my long fingers. I paint the nonsense of my soul.

Master’s Degree of Fine Arts: Creative Writing. What kind of works? Does it pay well? Can we survive and capitalize on ideas, on feelings, on not belonging? How can you capitalize on being who you are and showing that urgency to the world? Why can’t I just be content being pragmatic, making ends meet? Why can’t I just be? I don’t want to be a number. Maybe because if I retell stories, they will sound appealing and people will feel something when they read what I’ve written.

There was this one time a man called me and left a message. His message was a poem taken from a book called “Against Forgetting”. The poem made me cry my eyes out. I remember the sounds of a piano in the background. That’s the reason I write. Not to make other people cry, but to help them feel. I’ve seen people who feel nothing and the numbness of the soul scares me. I fight against it every day. I rebel against it mentally. There was a time when I used to seek beauty, the beauty of experiencing reality. Perhaps I’ve been an erratic hedonist. Now I am just an erratic wannabe.

I heard someone saying the other day: I want someone who challenges me. What does that mean exactly? Who’s challenging? Who’s not? What does it mean to have a challenging conversation? When does boredom play a role in relationships?

This slice of Earth is visually appealing. The mornings are blue and thin and they're kind of liquid and distant. The air then becomes so thick that I almost feel its orange organo-genesis. Traffic reminds me that I am not that alone and that my fellow man is ready.

Songs. Songs. Songs. My apartment lives music.

My dad and I are hanging out. We’ve been talking and everything is different and everything is the same - at the same time. I recognize the part of myself that comes from him and the part that's evolving in a different direction. I can’t take him to a milonga. He doesn’t seem to listen to tango anymore the way he used to. To me, tango is a link that I preserve with my mom, to him, tango is a fresh wound. My mom used to sing tango beautifully. I played him one of the songs and he got emotional. Nostalgia has always been one of our family’s characteristics.

One of my co-workers told me that my pictures with long hair look so different. She sees the one I used to be. I think she sees that soul that had Los Angeles inside and out. The smile I used to have because I was content. The city was brand new to me and life in America was such a fascinating novelty. Each and every custom that I abandoned and had to learn was seen with a very authentic enthusiasm and burden. Every truth has two poles. Life seems to be a complex entangling binary hole.

I have pictures from a town. Porto Alegre: a foreign land in which I was born. I have my new pictures. But today I will post one of your photos of me. That smile is gone. You now see a more cautious version of me.

Give me the techniques to be a good writer. Nurture my creativity. Is my soul still expandable?

“vamos fazer esse trato meu amor. Planejar os danos, antecipar o meu engano, vou me previnir do teu adeus e me despedir em cada beijo teu”

Photo: Keiko at the Japanese Garden by DS.