If I were a flower, I would be a wallflower, not because I am a climber, but because of my permanent adherence to the margins.
Be wary of the body when you approach windows, thinking that it might suddenly jump despite your efforts.
And then you fall
And you slip away
Like a cloud
Like a tear
At the first rain
Alberto
There was a misunderstanding from the outset, an inconsistency between him and his name.
I like you, I told him, but it's a shame your name is Alberto. Because when you're so handsome, you can't be called Alberto.
It's as if his name worked against him. Alberto, he said, and his beauty became commonplace, ordinary and shared by all.
After that, I didn't know who I was talking to anymore.
Andrés
I walked alone to find him in the first bar where I cured my gait, that gait of a bird and a broken compass. I also told him he was handsome, but that it was a shame his name was Andrés for the same reason that I would never call myself Andrea.
I had gone out in search of a whiskey or some redeemer to dirty my memory or, with luck, my skirt.
Andrea or the other one
If you were a flower, you would be a marigold. Not because you're skinny, daisy. But because you bet all your petals even though you don't believe in love.
I can approach the truth from a broken, aching, fragmented body. And there I arrive with a broken heart. Completely broken.
You
My hand was never really my hand. And today, when I touch myself in writing—so precise in your words—I finally touch my mouth, kissing yours.
[Preamble to a love diary or a filmed melodrama]
Víctor
Yes: he left me for someone else. Who should I kill? I knew it with canine intuition, with the sense of smell of a street animal. I always mourn my losses weeks before I lose them.
My journey is one of unfinished attempts. But something—invariably—comes to an end.
I wandered through bars, months, loneliness searching. I was looking for a love like that of Bandeira and Teresa, told backwards and without haste. In any case, not love at first sight, but rather at third or fourth encounter.
There was a time... remember?
A slow process of falling in love. And boy, was it slow!
It seems that I believe in a strategy of exchanging all unintended effects for a desired effect. Choosing you, yes, and abandoning the drift of waiting.
I have come here to give an account of the place where yesterday I touched your face. I need to find us far away.
From the first glance
There he was: languid and with a lost smile on the sidewalk of the boardwalk. The heat's torpor mingled with the smell of stale cake that the gusts of wind from the cars brought back to him in hot gusts of chewed deprivation, or in other words: hope.
With his sleeves rolled up, he crossed copiously a Topoyiyo from across the avenue. The pious buttons on his shirt resisted the consequences of the three little basket shots from the smoking break to discover vertical smiles from a full belly and who knows what else in the heart.
He—as was possible from any other point in the city—once again devoted rush hour to resting his impertinence on Earth above the rush of the drivers' desire, which, although it slowed down at the traffic lights, promised a speedy arrival home.
Impatient and from a bench, a Vilma —not so much because of the tight skirt around her neck that served as her waist, but because of that fringe that openly covered the furrowed brow of a frustrated dream— she waited for a caffeine-free love, her gaze restrained by the glass bottle that reflected back to her a world upside down from her longing.
To your routine landscape,
And at his boss's last shout.
Like every day, another day had passed, and at six in the evening, I needed to know the departure time of the hamsters salary and office, when suddenly calves clad in cotton floral fabric strips lit up like a lamp. art decó— his gaunt jaw with a faint glow that blended with the restless rays of the setting sun.
And he became restless.
He approached despite the mistreatment of his will; despite the hand that held the girl high like a dove to send a message that was neither one of peace nor of him.
From a taxi, surely.
I could almost taste the promise that, from those calves to the tip of her tongue, generated the birth of galaxies—like bridges or magnetic destinations—on the dark map of her street universe.
And why not maybe a star or two?
Before stepping off the sidewalk, she quickly turned her torso to secure her purse, and in her eyes she saw his eyes, and in his eyes she saw his cookie-shaped emptiness.
on course,
of the planet,
caress and walk,
future,
rib-eye,
name or scent,
home: meaning, as the absence of the absence of orientation.
Her body felt warmth, felt friction, felt completion.
In the afternoon, asphalt and place.
The redundant grime from some rims made its way behind the curb, beyond her calves and their cotton straps. The floral dress disappeared after closing the taxi door. He continued staring into the eyes peering over the edge of the half-open window, trying to hold, as best he could, that spatial system that held him to her—a magnet or the sun—but that invariably announced its end. The Big Bang. Or perhaps a beginning.
The universe trembled: old Tsuru shivered at the initial change in speed. Without taking her eyes off him, she muttered half a moon under her breath, and suddenly, without realizing it, he felt the night in the middle of the afternoon. The taxi accelerated and disappeared into the stream of cars heading toward the same traffic light. His life depended entirely on her response. The night grew darker. A bark exploded over the fleeing car, dimming the sun. Yet in the darkness, he still wagged his tail.