I dedicate to you
Dedicated to you.
English grammar says the sentence above has the wrong structure, but a fragment of a song never contains the wrong words.
In a writer’s life, there isn’t much to hide. I can keep my private life private on social media, but here, all the protection, the layers, the filters fall away.
Here, I can undress whoever I want, kiss the lips I desire, be overwhelmingly passionate or miserably sad, but who reads me? (laughs). Perhaps that is an undertaking for the future. All my life, I have been doing this work, little by little, like an ant.
Maturing through my own experiences, recording all my feelings along a kaleidoscope of time.
Some kinds of texts can only be conceived in the presence of the image of a female muse, because a muse can be anything the author is drawn to. But some things can only be dedicated to a woman.
Certain kinds of sentimentality, certain descriptions belong only on a woman’s neck. If you can even grasp the idea, invisible reader.
Perhaps I have a muse, someone to whom I explicitly deny all my secret desires. It has felt rather confusing to put sentences together about this lately, perhaps because I had invented for myself a certain eternal scenario in someone else’s life, one that suddenly fell apart.
Sometimes I seem so indecisive.
That is where my restlessness began. Things carefully tucked away, turning over, whispering. A kind of Teenager Fever; perhaps the younger reader will be familiar with the concept. The fact is: for many years, I have been swimming desperately away from this kind of encounter, but who can avoid what is already destined to happen? Even if we fail to notice, or choose not to notice, the cards have already been marked, and I don’t know how to play cards; the outcome always seems hidden from me.
“Whoever fights with an animal loses.” I am an animal fighting against myself when I should be encouraging my own daydreams. On a few rare occasions, the right thing to do is take a step much bigger than your own stride. Without risk, without the extraordinary, without your heart pounding out of your chest, without sweaty palms, without sudden nausea, without a chill running down your spine, there is no truly lived life.
Certain kinds of desire make us step outside our own bodies, a genuine state of suspension. Thought becomes a kind of ritual, wandering through a body bathed in coloured light, a crowded dance floor where everyone is meticulously drenched in sweat.
Every desire is a house built upon a rock; it cannot remain hidden for very long.
Everything that is held back will, sooner or later, demand its moment at the surface.
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What is the real point of denying your own feelings? Masochism or cowardice? You can solve that riddle, anxious reader.
Many fragments are scattered, wandering through my body like a projectile that shattered and now travels freely through my bloodstream. If I let my guard down, my thoughts drift towards someone I look at, someone I have never seen very closely, and within a few seconds I can feel my ears growing warm and turning red. That is how my body initially responds to desire. Yes, I am rather peculiar in the way I exist in the world, and that is one of the best things anyone could know about me.
I live in my rawest form, a kind of uncut diamond, a heart as fierce as a waterfall.
I dedicate to you; this is all I do.
Even when I don’t realise it, my unconscious works in perfect alignment against everything I choose to keep hidden. Where I try to be indifferent, it reveals longing; where I remain calm, it speeds up. An orchestra of instruments playing in different keys, yet producing perfect synchrony.
Sometimes I see the world in slow motion, the way fine, tousled, freshly washed hair dries in the wind at a bar table. I see fragments, like close-up shots in a film of time, something only those who pay attention and are in no hurry can understand.
To absent yourself from desire is to say no to life.
I think about you all the time.
A line of dialogue in a TV series, the title of a song, my thoughts wandering around a screening room where I refuse to take a seat.
The film is a dangerous premiere and, despite appearances, I didn’t buy a ticket. Life was the one that offered me this combo with a Coke Zero and sweet popcorn. Sitting in a screening room makes the whole world fall silent, and that is why, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the sound of your own heart pounding.
Like Amélie, I enjoy watching people’s expressions as they find themselves suspended, free from their own restraints.
The opening credits have already begun; we’ve made it past the trailers. At this point, it is still possible to get up and leave, but if the desire is to watch the film, what would be the point of standing up and disturbing the eager audience already seated with their soda and popcorn? On certain occasions, I don’t think it is appropriate to disturb anyone.
I stay.
Without thinking about the moment the screening ends, giving in to desire is a crucial part of being alive, and I am alive in Latin America.
Here, feelings speak as loudly as the sound of a trio elétrico in the middle of the Barra-Ondina parade route in Salvador.
Sweat, goosebumps, a sudden kiss on the lips, the perfect setting in which life strikes and, despite seeming out of sync, follows the perfect harmony of something that knows exactly what to orchestrate, bringing hunger and the desire to eat together at just the right moment, with the unprecedented taste of a bitten fruit.
