ahlamarea

[ahlamarea]

#15 – A letter to J.

J.

I wasn’t sure whether to respond to your messages or not—partly because it felt unnecessary, and partly because I questioned whether the effort was worth it. We barely know each other—we don’t even know each other’s names. My name is not Julian, by the way. It felt a bit strange to read a message directed to someone whose name isn’t mine. But you’re not to blame for assuming my name was Julian; it was that moment that made me realize the estrangement of our relationship—whatever this acquaintance may be.

I think we’ve had a great time together. I find you really hot, and I think that’s why I kept seeing you over all this time. You’ve been extremely kind, respectful, and caring when we’ve met, and I’m grateful for that.

On the other hand, it isn’t fair for me to be available only when it suits you—when you feel brave enough, or when you can sneak away. I don’t know why, but I resented the fact that after sending me a message saying you didn’t want to see me, you sent another the next week, completely disregarding the first and assuming I’d just go back to meeting with you—without offering an apology or an explanation. It felt undignifying, but it was also another moment of clarity.

I can’t resent you for putting your needs before mine, or for not being able to see from my perspective. In a way, I admire you for being able to advocate for your desire with such determination—and such callousness. At the end of the day, isn’t that what people are supposed to do? We’re just creatures living in survival mode.

As for me, fascination blinds me and pulls me out of that survival instinct. I don’t want to keep fantasizing about something that doesn’t exist. The truth is, there’s nothing here that can sustain this acquaintance we’ve built. I want to reclaim some dignity by letting go of this—to move on in hopes of a better, more balanced way of living. A more dignified one, at least.

Thank you, and goodbye.

Prístino

[ahlamarea]

#14 – I love you

If I tell you I love you today, it is no more than a corny way of showing my desire to be with you.

If Reinaldo Arenas were to read these lines, he’d probably think it’s nothing but a faggot trying to transcend the “faggot” label. Perhaps an illusory attempt to reach greatness, a moment of acknowledgment for once; a secret feeling urging me to seek to be heard.

If Reinaldo Arenas were to read this, he’d probably ask me to not fool myself. But I write because I am free to do it, and even if my work is not worthy of the heavens where those who have shaped the literary world reside, I write from the desire to express an idea and to make it big, immense—because this is my only true stage.

If today I tell you I love you, it is because I was able to spend a wonderful time with two friends by the sea. Just like the sea, they made me feel part of something. Here it is, this desire to be grateful and to express emotion with my cheap language skills. I want to magnify every second so I can keep it with me for a while to enjoy it to the maximum.

I am here to tell you I love you with elation for the moment lived and spent with my friends. They made me belong; they heard my words, and they inspire me to write them.

[ahlamarea]

#13 - Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned.

M,

I’m writing to tell you I am surrendering to you and to your bigness, as vast as Ashbery’s gigantic plateau. When I got the news I felt like collapsing into an open sea–a creature so close to me that I could reach it within minutes. I felt like Ramona going to Bob to cry about misery and clouded thoughts that aren't real, but are the product of the imagery that reigns my vision of the world.

Oh, to be in the highlands of your mind. Oh, to be in the highlands of your locus amoenus.

I'm going down when you're going up. I am going deep into the waters of learning and understanding a reality that concerns me, because I am part of it. My being in it has resulted in a mindset that struggles to grasp the meaning of my place in this little box I live in. Unlike you, I am Ashbery's thought of being barely tolerated, having to be rescued on the brink of destruction with nary an Orlando to find me.

This story was written centuries ago: I am Orlando Furioso, and you are Angelica. You're at the part where you found Medoro, I am at the point of going furioso; yet we both live under the same flickering bulbs that hover up in the sky, and it is true that the being of my sentences, fostered in the climate I've conjured by the idea of you, is not yours to own, like Medoro, but to be without–alone and desperate.

"‘My thoughts’ he cried, ‘that freeze and burn my heart, and cause this pain that gnaws at me alway, what shall I do, who, at the very start, appeared too late, while others won the day?"

This is a tale that purports no epic battles, for I am a simple man with nothing but a lonely heart in search of love. This is a tale that seeks to be an oblation to your power, for some of us were born to be Orlandos, and some, like you, are destined to be Angelicas. This is an offering to your beauty, to your faulty candor, to your mesmerizing voice, to your hypnotizing gaze. May this be an altar for the spirits to let me sleep, free at last, so minuscule in your gigantic plateau; for this too has been my ambition: to be small and clear and free.

These have been the hazards of the tempest: you are the player and I, who has struggled at the game, was simply a spectator. So I think it is time for me to start my journey to the moon, for I am in need of my Elijah and his miracle elixir that can extract the stone of madness.

When did these misfortunes begin? Not that I want to know. All I want is silence, for myself and for the selves I used to be, a silence like the magical cottage in the forest that lost children find in fairy tales. What am I supposed to know of what is to become of me, in the absence of rhyme or reason?

"And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing: the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago."

[ahlamarea]

#12 - This is the day and the time.

This is the day and the time. This is the day I decided to sit in front of my computer screen to write again. This is the time when I am not sure what the purpose of writing is. As I think of all the possible combinations of words I could write down, I recall the times I believed I saw your face. I am never sure if it is you whom I see. As years go by, I understand that my mind is not reliable at all. It forgets things. It refuses to learn what really matters, like learning how to play the harp, or how to DJ, or how to speak Portuguese fluently. Perhaps what I really want is to make the most of myself by abandoning the possessorship and achievement of things so that I could own myself, develop my own elements, and grow in my own form. To make my own music and hear it myself. Instead, my mind gets stuck on the idea of you, a fictional character who is not even close to what you really are but one that seems convenient to justify my existence in suffering. This is the time when tears impair my vision, distorting the frustrating reality of being one of the common people who look for reasons to live, as if life alone didn’t justify itself. This is the day when I forgive myself for being mixed up inside, unable to understand whether my apprehensiveness is genuine desire for you or simply inability to cope with your rejection. These are the times when I fear madness, when I feel ill, far from the ideal creature with easy and comfortable reasoning—far from the human being you’d give your love to. Far from the man you idealize and I’ll never become, whom I scorn with the arrogance that only those who suffer have. On days like these I seek help from the kind of men you’re into and I envy: beautiful and perfect—full of heroic simplicity.

The memory of your face is engraved into my psyche to the point of delusion. In the sleepless hours of the night, when I struggled to piece together your image in my mind, wearied by the futility of my efforts, you appeared to me as an elusive shadow—grand and shifting, both menacing and remote. Like a storm that stirs the ocean’s depths to reveal the hidden secrets beneath its surface, I could only ever summon you by unraveling myself, returning to the self I once was when I first saw you and constructed you in my mind. I subjected myself to endless self-reproach, loathed my own reflection, and, wounded and heartbroken, enshrined you with vivid intensity within the depths of my psyche.

This is the day and the time I’ve come to grasp a truth about those who chase intense sensations to confirm their own existence. I, too, embarked on this perilous journey, so meager against the vastness of our deepest fears, and nearly always disappointing. I learned to set my soul aflame, only to discover that, in the quiet depths of my being, I can remain ever vigilant and cool, merely a spectator to the grand spectacle I have conjured: you.

"I've cried a thousand storms, / I've blown away the clouds. / The heartbeat of the sun is racing mine, / and listen how my heart is waiting." I don’t know anything about love. This is the day and the time when I simply remember that I fear and seek you.

[ahlamarea]

#11 - Eu tenho minha casa pra olhar

Can I tell you something? I saw someone yesterday at the bar next door to the one you and I met. I did not pick the place, it was him who did it. The parking spot I found when I got there, I'd say, was the same or close to the spot I parked at on the very and only day you and I hung out together.

It was around the same time of the day of our encounter. As I arrived half an hour early I decided to take a walk around the block so I could calm my nerves; being back to that same spot triggers melancholy thoughts. I went up the street, I walked past the the first bar we met at that evening in May. I didn't get as sad I as thought I would, I just saw myself by the bar waiting patiently for you, being anxious to see you in person. Those memories came to me along with the one of my asking you to go to another place because I was overwhelmed by the crowd that surrounded us. Then I fast-forwarded to the now. Nothing I dreamt of that day came true. I'm back at the same location and you're still not mine, still a person I don't know.

I put on my headphones so as to trick my mind with music. I don't think it was a successful attempt but music helped my thoughts to diversify, to veer into other directions. I don't want to think about you anymore. I look back at that only moment we had in person and I can't believe it still resonates with me. I don't want you to think I still want you, I don't believe I do; or at least I've come to terms with my delusional mind that refuses to give up on the idea of you to understand there is nothing that could happen between us.

I am here writing just to tell you that I've learned that language is transgressive. Words that didn't have any meaning before you they come to me now with a vengeance as if it was yesterday. The words acquire a voice that materializes in my brain. It is the compounds of letters that become shapes, it is a performance that calls for feelings, emotions I would prefer not to experience. The letters that form your name are now a weapon, the names of the places I've been with you are now charged with memories reluctant to ghost me like you did me. Those words I associate with you are not longer just words, but exact moments in the history of my time here on earth.

I think of another language we never got to use, the language of touch. How I exist in this not so new territory unable to find those genuine hugs, spur-of-the-moment taps on the shoulder. As I sat across from you on the day we met all I wanted to do was to touch you. To feel the warmth of your body; to place my hand on your knee for a while, to raise it to your face to feel your stubble or simply get close enough so I could feel another body next to mine. I think that the vast distances between me and people have left invisible wounds on my skin. Can I tell you that I believe touch is so vital, that I see it as the primordial ooze?

We no longer ‘keep in touch’, which means I am no longer touched by your kind gesture of getting to know me. So I met someone else who does want to be in touch with me, someone who touched me with his smile because it reminded me of yours. I want to change the meaning of the language I have regarding you. All I want is to be able to say: "Não posso ficar nem mais um minuto com você / sinto muito, amor, mas não pode ser... / Eu tenho minha casa pra olhar."

[ahlamarea]

#10 - I’ve been dormant for a while.

I have been absent for some time. I’ve been absent minded. I’ve purposely driven my mind to not think, to fall into a languid stage to suppress thoughts and feelings that never find absolution. What if the point is to just feel them with all their intricacies. With their pungent throbbing. I am in the air on a plane that is taking me “home”. I don’t know what home is really. I just learned to call it that way. My body is allegedly a shelter for me to rest in, to find solace and respite. As years go by my body does nothing but to act the more strangely. It doesn’t seem to be aligned with my brain. I call it out as the morning begins, I try to hug it as the stars begin to appear in the endless firmament of nothingness. It seems to run away from me, it rejects my need to hold it tight to mend the scars it shows to me daily.

I have given it a dose numbness. I think it wants a break from the tumultuous time it is living. “A rejected body and losing it it’s constant, but such a lonely place.” At times I think I love it when other people praise its left over youth. It doesn’t happen frequently, I’ve learned. I put picture of it on the internet for it to be available to other men to see. There are so many bodies, they look at mine and there’s something about it they just do not find attractive. So I spend my days dictated by the logic of a virtual power that profits from my desire, my lack of confidence, my lack of love for myself. Some say the secret lies in the willingness to make believe. I don’t know if that’s true. I find snakes to be despiteful and ugly, but I understand that judgement comes from a belief that was given to me by my ancestors. At some point the great snake adored by the Aztecs fell from grace and so my father started killing it anytime he saw one. He learned how to draw the machete from its sheath, and strike on the snake with the dull side of the blade rather than the sharp one. He told me a snake could sill bite even if its body has been chopped in two. “You have to outsmart nature, son!” he said one day when he took me to woods to collect fire wood. I also find bats to be repulsive, and I wonder who can tell me why I dislike such beautiful creatures.

I fathom, I am maybe a snake. No matter how beautiful my skin is, they still hunt me to be made into something to be carried on, dead. No matter how willed my purpose is to make friends with men, they’ll always find me an annoyance in their path, a threat. Who will be the one who will take me home free of prejudice? Who will make a terrarium for me to inhabit so my peculiar existence will provide endless entertainment? I want to love, there’s so much love under a skin that sheds often because the laws of nature made it so that it won’t adjust to the growing of my body. So I need to shed it, I need to seem like I can’t hold something eternally. Love is there. Underneath this flexible spine with muscles attached to my rib bones there’s a heart that pumps blood through all my slithery body. So if there’s blood, there’s desire. Who on earth to match it?

[ahlamarea]

#9 - I don't know about you but I'll take love songs.

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey” Ocean Vuong

I am told there's a space for me to flourish – like a flower in the beginning of spring. I told M. my favorite season is spring, that my favorite color is green. I said I like seeing things being reborn, how strange & beautiful is to die to be born again, to be beaten down by the environment that surrounds you to the bare minimum –a root. To be there, pure fiber underground, waiting to for the right moment to spring out with the agency to to do it all over again. M. said he likes winter because the cold makes him feel alive, that there's a kind of pain that pierces through you to inform you about physics & chemistry all at once. I didn't know what to say, I smiled at him & told him he was crazy. M. just laughed with some kind of satisfaction, as if having a different preference from mine made him win.

I am told there a place for me to be free, & I sometimes wonder where it all begins as well as where it all ends. M. said he likes having the freedom to choose whatever he wants to do. He likes being busy in his freedom. I told him there's a feeling like freedom when I am underneath a body that wants me to be a deposit for desire. I told him, for me, it's all about holding & being held. Don't think I am that smart, everything I say belongs to someone else. These words have already been written. These thoughts have been expressed before in a better manner with better words that convey freedom in arrogance. Think of me as a robber, an embezzler, that is what my condition affords me. My privilege extends as far as my proficiency of a language that is not mine allows me. There are invisible walls I just can't take down, there are things I want to express that simply remain untold. I am being held by the invisible powers of your mother tongue, not my mother's tongue. I am free to indulge in the economy of words.

I couldn't bring myself to tell M. about my ventures into submission in the privacy of closed doors. I feared he wouldn't grasp the idea of the abandonment of my body for others to use. I didn't have the words to explain what I've learned in the secrecy of my room, that there is freedom in the violence of being held by them to suffice a dormant desire that asks for fulfillment. I wanted to say he didn't need to feel pity for me, because in this abandonment I have a say in the way they use the orifices of my body – I can decide on the level of pain it is inflicted while they enter me. My lacking of words didn't grant me the liberty to say that sometimes I think it is me who has the power, that even when it doesn't seem to be true, I have the power to control the beast with the softness of my lips, the warmth of my mouth. I wanted to tell him that it is in my room where my operating as a thief becomes clearer because I steal those bodies from their households they belong to, if only for a moment in time. I don't know if he would believe I've driven men to madness with the things I've trained my body to do out of need, out of desire, out of fear of not having them again. My room is a rink where cyclops meet to battle. It is a fight from which both of them exit as winners so long they both shed a white tear – that may be the place I flourish like a rose.

M. told me he likes it when I give him papers with information on them even though I already gave him those same papers before. He likes to learn things I am told. That is his prerogative, to ask & to be given. "Just look, even their romance / made us masters & slaves / & now things keep getting worse / while staying so eerily the same.

"Come build your burial grounds on our burial grounds / but you won't kill death that way. I don't know 'bout you, but I'll take the love songs / & give you the future in exchange."

[ahlamarea]

#8 - The chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve.

“The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world where there is so little happiness. Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word.” Clarice Lispector

And so I walk these streets I've walked countless times before. This is Portland, a town I've been learning to love –I've foolishly been trying to make this city mine. I walk aimlessly trying to recreate what I once did when I once was fifteen years of age in a different country, in a different city five thousand miles south from here. My feet are tired now, the beauty of this coastal town is not enough to get lost in it. As I try to recapture the same spirit I got while I walked that big city, something feels inadequate, unfamiliar, cold.

I look at the edifices around and their cold beauty speaks to me about a time that is gone now, a colonial time when glass became more common so windows could have individual panes. It is the windows that give way to symmetry and repetition. Some other buildings reveal to me an old urge for revival with their street facing gables that function as pediments. How to ignore the arrogance they give from standing erect supported by big, tall columns? How about those estructures with pointed arched windows, steep roofs, and ornate chimneys? They face me all decorated as if they were trying to separate themselves from the traditional proportion and symmetry of the conglomerate of buildings they are amongst. What can I say about the houses that inform me about a time when the middle class could afford some luxury? It's all in the details and the material. I can sense the need for an upturn.

This is the feeling I get as I walked this land of the free: a pressure to better myself. I relate to these inanimate structures as a moving entity who needs a revival, a rebirth of sorts. I get to think that maybe I am not so distant from the reflection these shop windows provide as I turned to them to see who is the one in the other dimension. I can say I adore the brownness that translates into nothingness for I feel no sense of belonging. I can make out the words of the man reflecting on the glass as his lips move to say, "I am alone in the world and I don't believe in anyone." Revelations like this only come to me when I am alone. I lack the ability to communicate in sentences for I am a man of no words. I make believe that there was a time while being in the big city when I was not so conscious of myself and made no demands on anyone – a time where I did not think about myself for I lacked self-awareness.

Lately I need several hours of solitude every day. I am only true when I'm alone. "Life is, it's never what you think it's for / and I can't seem to set it off. / And lately I've been insecure / the chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve." As a boy, I was always afraid of falling into a bottomless pit at any moment. Clarice once said, "why do the clouds keep afloat when everything else drops to the ground? The explanation is simple: the gravity is less than the force of air that sustains the clouds. Clever, don't you think? Yes, but sooner or later they fall in the form of rain." I am walking down these cobblestone streets surrounded by beautiful brick walls, time and time again.

[ahlamarea]

#7 - Anthropomorphizing.

I sit here on a January morning writing to the unknown. Rays of sun fall upon my face to give it some glow, one that is not visible unless there's light to enhance it. As for the skin this light falls upon, mine is a mixture of colors: red, yellow, and blue – as of dark wood or rich soil. That’s what the dictionary says.

I am here, sunbathed, looking at a familiar space filled with edifices placed consecutively one after another. It's as though they were too cold, so in an attempt to keep some warmth among the inanimateness of the space that separates them, they stand close. I'm here anthropomorphizing as the usual action of the day. Is it the lack of human connection that awakes in me the need to seek life out of dullness? The romanization of an environment that doesn't care about the sentimentality of the human mind. There's a synergy that lies untouched underneath the ground I've been told. There's communication happening at a different speed. Naked trees have lost their fur due to the laws of nature —the changing of seasons have marked the passing of time. All the while, a road remains hostile to the snow left from the last storm. The white takes over the shoulders as you move along the road. It has been displaced to the sides where it lies inert, not really a bother to disturb the daily business that takes place here on this coastal land: a ghost town near the water. Throughout a long narrow street stand lodging businesses of all kinds. The architecture is similar although the buildings keep a particular quaintness to them that makes them unique in their appearance —at least that was the impression this town gives me. These buildings have reclaimed the silence that inhabits them before the summer time kicks in.

I write from the hollowness of this land I now call home. I write from the emptiness of this body that I call mine. I write from the vacant space I call mind. I envy the hand that moves nimbly to describe all things accurately. All I see is "the big white, / and there ain't no day / and there ain't no night. / Into the white" that's where I am. Haven't you heard? White is clean, white is simple, white is purity, white is innocence, white is cleanliness, white is new possibilities. As for now, white is the color that makes my brown to stand out. White is the the canvas I get lost in. White is your skin I crave that can't be mine. White is unreachable to me — a space so unknown as your body is to me, a blank canvas I am unable to fill in. So I am here without your body, without words or language to convey meaning. Wouldn't you say I am white, wouldn't you say I am an empty canvas for you to work on. Come write on me, tell my story with your own language – one I can't speak nor write in, a language so white as the luminous “big quasar.”

[ahlamarea]

#6 - Researching Oblivion

I've thought a lot about you since that time I saw you online again. The more I've thought, the more I've come to be overtaken by a sense of loneliness. I have struggled to deal with the concepts of happiness and beauty. Are you happy? Do you cry as much as I do? Do you see beauty in me? I have led myself around in circles and hurt myself deeply while fruitlessly pondering what I represent to you. I say this not as an excuse for you to pity me –although at times while suffering from your rejection I thought that if you saw me that way, you would have mercy on me –but because it is true.

I never meant to be in this position. I can't do what you can do: I can't slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass. "You seem to live with fingertips / wrapped around your face. / Does it keep the dark away? / Talk to me and tell me that all of them are wrong / and all my dreams will come in time." I often envy that in you. I am not completely certain you are that way, but on the odd occasion I get that impression from the little pieces of information I've collected here and there over these few months since the day I met you to they day I expressed my feelings for you. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of courtship and romance—to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. But you never gave that to me. You didn't say anything at all. You slighted me.

In any case, I myself feel detached from what is happening outside me. I have sat on my couch for hours staring at a wall, a quiet world cut off from the paranoia that consumes us all. How lucky I am to be able to write something, to feel like putting my thoughts down here to a person, to put my thoughts into words like this is a privilege. Of course, once I do put them into words I can only say trifles of what's on my mind —if only the blank space could be filled accurately with the thousand ideas that flutter around in my brain. I’m happy just to be able to feel I want to write, that's the gift you inadvertently have given to me. And so I am writing to you. You who will not read.

This could be a case of my not being able adapt to my deformities. I say deformities because I think of myself as a whole perfect round shape that over the years has been smashed with hammers to the point of shapelessness. I find it hard to find room inside me for the pain and suffering that these deformities bring, so I am here now to fight them with words. This is the humblest way I've learned to get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because I know that I am “deformed.” That’s what distinguishes me from the outside world: most people go about their lives there unconscious of their deformities, while in this little world of mine the deformities are a precondition that I wear in the open. Just like I wear my heart on my sleeve. I am here in the unknown place. I live here quietly so as not to hurt anyone. My words are guns, but what are they without eyes to find them? They won't do harm with no hands to shoot the target.

[ahlamarea]

#5 I Thought You Should Know

In the middle of the day, I stop to think of all the things I should tell you. They all amount to the same idea: I disliked the way life has developed for me. I tend to ask myself what it would be like to have you here with me. Is it just a whim of mine to not accept things as they are? I sometimes think something went wrong, or maybe –to be more accurate– that I am responsible for how the story unfolded.

Darkness has fallen over here. I once read something you shared, it was about how we can create mind. I think I grasped that idea wrongly. My understanding of it was between the lines of being able to detach yourself from the current ideology, and having the power to create your narrative. Does it happen to you that sometimes we don't try to understand things, but rather we associate the words we see with an idea that is already familiar to us? This is what happened to me when I read a caption you used to accompany a poem by an ancient Eastern thinker –I am not sure about the accuracy of this. I thought of what I've read about the idea of “me” as a fictional concept – what in Buddhism is called anatta: the “no self”. The idea is foreign to me since I've been raised within Western traditions. From what I remember, in Eastern philosophy the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind; that is the process of thinking that creates the self, rather than there being a self having any independent existence separate from thought. Without thought, the self does not exist.

The hardest thing for me is to understand how mistakenly I've come to see the process of thinking, as one that is orthodox. My fictional self narrates the world, determines my beliefs, replays my memories, identifies with my physical body, creates projections of what might happen in the future, and constructs judgments about the past. It is the past that gets in the way of creating a mind that is detached from all the trauma I've experienced –If you could only lean over to see the darkness that inhabits the bottomless pit that is my brain. I felt envious to think that you've arrived at this moment of consciousness, that stage where you can differentiate the story of who you think you are from who you truly are.

I stay here in the common place, wishing you could be mine and suffering from your rejection. Is this the reason for my unhappiness, my inability to change the narrative of this story? What if I delusionally keep wishing you'll someday come to me to match my love for you? Is this what I feel for you genuine? Can you give me an answer? "In a fable that's like a dream / of another man / or another you / your eyes are stones. It's too many ways / what arе you trying to say?" The impenetrable YOU. The unlivable ME.

[ahlamarea]

#4 A face of marble

His is a world of walls. His is the world of the orthodox mind. His is the world of ajar doors, ajar windows. His is a world of lust that’s rigid. In the coldness of a room he lies down on the floor. He lies naked as if to be open to the environment around, although he is in a room guarded by walls and maybe a few windows that don’t open all the way. There he lies open to the secluded space with a face of marble. Jenny has asked this before: "How do you kiss, how do you kiss / a piece of marble / or a piece of gold?" His is a face of marble, stiff, serious as if not wanting to give way to emotions. I'm asking you –whoever you are– who have been granted access to undo the metamorphism of the limestone his face is made of? Maybe you can be kind to me, perhaps through you I'll get to know him. His a world of limiting understanding for the other. He has a rigid way of mind just as he thinks of himself as open to the views of the world. He has traveled around to have a vision for things foreign. He has found knowledge through the music he’s heard, he's listened to. All the things he’s seen with those eyes of indigo. He's a blue unicorn, and just like in the song I played not long ago, he'll run away. So there you have him open to the world, lying on the floor holding a phone to capture the essence of what he is. A face looking at the unknown. One could say he’s looking at the prospects who will come to him to ask to be let in. I sense he has a specific idea of what he expects from them, and it is in this specificity that the doors he’s opened close in. Here and there he lies, without clothes to swathe a body that is pale. "The shape around the others / in a silent pageant / away from emotion."

[ahlamarea]

#3 I’ll never be happy again

I am giving up on this idea of you M. I am unraveling to the point of disintegration. This says more about my trauma than it does about you. There is something so simple and so painful: you don’t want me to take part of your life. This unraveling has become an obsession that asks for it to end. It needs a moment of respite. Why do I want you? Why do I still think that you will reach out to me? This writing lacks coherence, common sense. It misses a beginning & an end. I wonder why you didn’t acknowledge my feelings for you. Was it too much to ask for a response? Aren’t I worth the penning of some lines to kill me completely with words that say you don’t want me? How long can a boy be affected by you? Who is the one who has access to you? What did I miss? Why did you have to be so dismissive about my feelings for you? I have so many questions for you M. You have nothing for me. You’ll be at the place we met someday, at some point we'll get introduced by someone who doesn't know we already know each other, you'll lock eyes with mine, then you will look away. I want to go there to crush your body until it begs for forgiveness. It is not easy to sever. Fly away meek bird! Fly away feeble bones! Grind the wood beautiful teeth! I miss you!

[ahlamarea]

#2 Is it a crime?

I still miss you M. I still keep the photo of you that I got from the hookup app you're on – the only one I could find since you don't share your face on your social media accounts. From the one time I had you close, I still miss the slenderness of your body. The grey close-fitting jeans you wore that night and the way they outlined your legs. I can't remember the shoes you had on. I wonder why I din't pay attention to that, maybe because I was so focused on your face. It is your face the most beautiful thing I've seen, one with a look of desolation. And perhaps I was just projecting onto you but at that very moment, as I sipped from my beer, I wanted to reach for your face to touch the longing. I wanted to sit next to you silently, no words, no sound, just our bodies imbued with elan.

I sat across from you imagining your naked body with its alabaster skin, so pure to my eyes. I imagined one day you would let me lie down next to you as if on a dais, to prove your existence to me, to let me feel the youth emanating from it. I pictured myself taking my hands all over you so as to keep memory of the contours of your frame. But that day never came M. The softness of your movements, the passivity in your voice, the gentleness of your mouth, that when smiling, it revealed imperfect teeth that were beautiful to me. I wanted to be smiled at more than the times you did at me that evening. I wanted it for as many times I could have it. I would never get tired of it, I thought sitting at the bench enduring the cold winds that went through my ribs making them tense to the point of exhaustion. M. if I were talented enough I'd be able to tell you how I feel with the same words my favorite writer put together: "I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump... I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body."

[ahlamarea]

#1 I want you

I really want to be in a different state of mind. I keep on going to the same thoughts and behaviors. I do not know why I feel the need of romance, of affection from someone else's body. I want M. by my side but since I can't have him, since he rejected the possibility of any type of relationship with me, what can I do? I can't see clearly. At times during the day I am so hopeless –I look around and I wonder what the purpose of my existence is. I look at the city with its old buildings, businesses that come and go, trees that try to stand tall among this concrete landscape and I don't feel any sense of belonging. I'm out of place. I'm lost. I'm stuck here in the city of men who are and look so much different from me. I'm suspended in a fraction of time while time keeps moving forward. What if M. came to rescue me from my decaying existence? They tell me I should not expect for someone to to justify my worthiness – I do understand it; however, my mind refuses to do any reasoning. I can't see well. My range of view has shrunk by what the thought of M. allows me to see. I'm getting smaller inside, withering as more rejection comes my way. They also say I will find someone. She says I'm straight passing. I say I am too effeminate, and that is the reason why M. walked away from me. I am here all downcast, all dejected and in need of M. "As for now, I go on. Alone now, forever alone."