Have you forgotten, my friend, when you visited me in a midsummer night, asking me to light your cigarette and to fix your drink? You were too keen on making me count the footsteps that went up and down the stairs outside my apartment. You asked me about who invented the stairways, and you said that if it were up to you, you would make slides everywhere, I didn’t ask why. I remember when you told me how eager you were to see the stars from the rooftop and to wave at Venus, your mother, “for good luck and good company,” you said. Remember? I was listening to you while looking for a song to play; I know what music meant to you, you went babbling about music with everyone you met, everywhere, all the time. “Some Billie Holiday, maybe?” you implored, with a foolish smile. We were too old-fashioned, don’t you think? You were standing next to the window in your black, see-through dress, and I was barefoot, in a pink T-shirt, and black, baggy pants, leaning across my wooden table. It strikes me now that there was the moon shining next to you, from the window pane; I saw its reflection in a glimpse of an eye on my glass of wine. Too bad, I never noticed it. YOU prevented me from noticing it. In a room where I spend most of my afternoons and nights, you were a stranger, a beautifully prevaricating item that moved smoothly and slowly to the jazzy rhythm coming out of the old Holiday tape. You laid your hair down; I was too involved to say anything that may interrupt the symphony of your body. But in a moment of ambivalence, I told you to stop. Were your surprised? I am sorry, but you were taking my heart away. Alone, you, and no one but me, a poor, wretched woman, living on the third floor of an archaic building. You were everything I have never imagined; you were much better, and much more disappointing. You were looking at me, with your usual, clumsy grin, asking me to dance. Is it a right or a fornication to look inside your eyes and picture myself losing a war? Do I owe you something that makes you stand at my door, knocking three times, unexpectedly? I gave up, I let go of my fix and my dim cloak that covered my soul for all those years, and decided to dance with you. I took one step toward you, but forgive me, friend, for taking it back. As I told you before, I was confused, and you didn’t know. You might ask yourself whether this recollection is a making of the mind, or an invention of a vulnerable intuition. It is, as a matter of fact, a dream that I have every time I lay my head on a pillow and imagine the scent of your perfume and the heat of your breath. It haunted me like a lung spot; it controlled my breathing, my sleep, and my wakefulness. It is a vision of endless circles that tie me to a blasphemous fate: You.
Why was it me? Why wasn’t it a neatly tied up male, in his early thirties, looking at you from a dark corner in one of those bars on the seventy-fourth avenue in Langston Street? I only saw you once, remember? You thought I was going to be one of you Tempus Fugit experiences. Is it because I looked at you like no one else did? I mean, did I? You thought I was going to be a fool, and follow you around like a desperate lover? That I would come to you at night through your bedroom window to smell the warmth of your breast and kiss your tender lips, then disappear feeling victorious? Oh, no, FRIEND!! Do you remember, in the apartment? I asked you to leave, I did! But instead, you chose to put salt into my open wounds, and touch my hand, with your fingers. Then, I lost track of reality, you aimed for the most precious thing in me. You cut deep into my flesh and went straight to my soul. I am body and soul, Remember? And I look upon the first with much gratitude, and on the second with dread and fear. You, my child, sharpened my senses, and destroyed my shield. “You are a terribly right thing, in a terribly wrong world”, you whispered. Again, I never expected you to know right from wrong, but this combination aroused my interest. You were approaching, closer and closer, refusing to let go of my hand, and drawing pictures with your, dark eyes, all over my face. I had no more tricks, you used them all against me, “please, stop”, my voice was creaking, weak and breathless. Yours was straight, confident, and edgy. “No”.
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