Xibalba

[Mittwoch]

Well, I've finally decided to reveal this piece I'm working on, which was initially entitled "I dream of clowns and weeping willows", since obviously is a mix of reality with some of my dreams. My question for you is:
Can you tell what is real?

Finish it...

I can still sketch the first of your words to have entered my poetic memory at that time when I felt as light as the air I was breathing, and even now as I’m strapped down with an ardor that weighs more than my soul, I can still hear that laughter in the crisp cold of winter and see my hand help you get up from that gray tinted snow. That portal you mentioned was never created, but the link had been that night, gripping now to the beginning of the nod of links that create my very own existence. A charming, irritating, blissful vertigo blooming vertically into a tree of life as beautiful as the world underneath us and its entrance, the passage in Orion’s belt.
How everything came to be is a fuzzy process that grew unintentionally, but was still well cared for by the hands of two people that wished for it. Like letting your mind be joined at your feet and travel inside to conquer everything about yourself as himself, by the theory that Platon once formulated involving one itself as a whole.
Looking back at it feels like peeking from behind a door at a mammoth sized maze that seems to have started growing in lives before. Time passes quickly, but even quicker things happen that change everything forever. I would like to believe that there are no such things as coincidences but in the same time I don’t want to let pass such an idea that my choices have been made by something or somebody else, even worse that they are somehow genetically inscribed.
I believe words limit and don’t do justice in a way to certain feelings like love, joy or sadness, especially when they’re not even uttered but thought, in spite of the overwhelming desire to have them shouted out loud.
My world is a topsy-turvy image of what it used to be without you, sitting on a hill joined by that sweet company wouldn’t feel boring anymore, but peaceful in a complicated hybrid emotion like sleeping with one’s dream.

I have had my hand at solving Rubik's cube, but that stream of patience never settled its float inside of me for so long as to actually give me enough time to crack the dragon's skull; that until one day. I was walking down one night on cardiac serpentines, minding my own thoughts as I kept them locked in colorfully patterned balloons, holding them by their bright red string. Spheres of light were scattered decoratively along the various pathways that spread to the hills, their orange glow warming the ground above which they floated. My barefoot feet were delighted by that flavor, gnawed at by the cold and embraced by the tingling sensation of pure light. The cherry trees were swaying in the chilly wind, and as I approached the mirror of water that led to it, their petals were blown away by a powerful gust, now settling softly around its heavily armored trunk. I noticed you kneeling next to the Ceiba tree, gazing at Xibalba, but I did not rush to embrace you, no, I fell in fascination in the blanket of petals, my hair coming down my shoulders as I closed my eyes. I kept staring at you like at a ghost of lives past, looking in those reptilian eyes I could’ve recognized in the beginning of time. That’s when Rubik’s cube opened itself to me, a small piece of universe encased in a space loop ever moving, ever shifting in its stillness. The invisible bars of confinement, the memory of its imagination.

And as I turned that way I moved logic in all my dreams, that sometimes did shift to nightmares even in full development of hanging gardens in the desert or lakes bordered by medieval walls. Around them sidewalks, on which ladies in umbrella dresses often enjoyed taking strolls, had been paved with golden bricks. Their plastic smiles stung me through my humble drop waist dress as I walked past them, advancing counterclockwise to the rest of the world. I pretended not to care how their slender bodies managed to summon the waters by performing gracious movements I was not able of and wandered through the forest, where my faithful pond awaited. I stumbled onto the root of a severed tree trunk and fell flat on my face, close enough to the margin of the water to feel the dents created by the shield. For millennia I have touched the shell of a transparent egg that hosted a translucent liquid similar to water, there was something in it that called for my recollection of its existence, of a future in the past. My fingers lightly stroked the surface and then I lay in shock. What happened that made it different this time…? For a mere few seconds the jellyfish-like exterior reacted to my fingers by creating ripples, starting from my index as the epicenter and spreading evenly in circles. It was almost as if breathing, a thin layer of muscle moving rhythmically to intake life, to experience being me in that odd moment like exchanging bodies within a single touch. I lit up a hookah and through that eerie blue smoke I stared back at the now motionless nucleus, fascinated by the prospect of what genesis would arise from that silent spinning cauldron. It grew within me, from the center in between my stomach and my liver, like an up lifting cello concerto in E minor, steadily, building up then exploding with such shear intensity that I started crying. I realized in that moment that I watched my own birth, the journey that started at the root of the tree of life. I was me, and you and all of us, and I was seeing through the eyes of millions and had a million pair of hands to grasp reality in a million breaths.

I lay next to you on our bed, half covered by the white sheets, and I stroked your cheek lightly, you opened your eyes and I gazed inside for that full blown second to look for the mechanism that made you tick. All I could see was blue smoke… The lights went out.

[Mittwoch]

Stay with me

I was staring at the alarm clock that sat on my night stand as if at six o’clock sharp it would spring legs, arms and a tiny little head and start to dance while singing. I put my hand on the stop button before it could become the reason for the usual morning havoc. The sheets were ruffled after not so much of a good night sleep and so was my hair considering the reflection on my reading glasses. But after all, how accurate could that be, it was always all over the place. I smiled and with a good reason, my mind still drifting off at the thought of your touch on my skin… I bit my lower lip and looked to see if you were still asleep, and so you were. After nudging away the temptation of mercilessly changing that with a well positioned pillow, I changed strategies and decided it’s best you got a good rest. So I kissed the back of your neck as softly as I could, an action that triggered the butterfly effect, and walked away into the balcony hoping for a invigorating breath of cool air. It was raining but I didn’t back away, I let the lashes strip me down to my soul.

Once I compared you to a good book, one you wouldn't want to take your hands and eyes off, but on that day I realized that was because you were a never-ending story, one in which I played a big part.

I was dripping wet as I emerged from the shower and went straight for the kitchen where I grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper before I sat at the table. The message was finished shortly after that, and my plan could finally start to unravel, at least I hoped everything would go accordingly. Half an hour later and I closed the door smoothly behind me, taking with me only the umbrella.

While I was still full of wanderlust, I was no longer restful. There would be anywhere, and anywhere would be there, as long as my heart was with me.

The gallery was full of strangers lurking about, people of high interest with a pure passion of being seen rather than see. I was wearing a long, black dress for the occasion and tried to avoid having to shake hands with everybody, or explain what concepts were behind my photographs, by hiding in the dark room. It was my special place where I could be alone only with my work, and still never feel lonely, I had all their stories to get submerged into. Some of them I never exposed, my selfishness showing through that; I wouldn’t want them to be spoiled by being looked at and analyzed with unworthy eyes. I had fresh prints put up to dry, a new black and white collection, scenes representative for the human concept of trial and error. I have seen a place where death and forgetfulness thrived, but even under those ruins a spark of life was gleaming where man had abandoned all hope and left. Clothes left to dry in the timeless wind hanged onto wires in front of opened windows. The air had no taste or odor, the city’s eyelids were closed and it was weeping silently. The silence was almost deafening, a mute echo of a communist spring. Those images said more than all the words could say, it was almost unbearable to be human and part of the mistake.