Mija, I want to write him.
I want to write him so bad.
So, I’ll write you instead.
I won’t give in. Not now. 

I’m trying to stay sober.
Trying to work my shift sober.
No weed either.
Just me.
And it’s so hard.

And he made it harder. He’s not even on the internet. He’s completely ignoring me.
Letting me see he’s on and not saying hello. No, not even that.
Just not there. Like he went and got married or something.
I dunno.

I’m a lousy friend. Not a good friend to him. Not like you and me.
I don’t pry. I don’t call him on his shit. I just look up when he drives up and stop my world for him.
And I pray he doesn’t notice but you know he does. You know he does.

I give him the freedom of not being the annoying girlfriend that must know where he is at all times.
In return I get a grateful man who forgets that there is a woman out there that swore up and down she would not let him get under her skin again.
I look down at my skin and I can see him swimming below the surface. My familiar alien.

I drive out to Calvary Cemetery and hang out with the dead silent movie stars.
There are homeboys in hairnets etched into the granite. How do they decide which photo to put on them?
Why don’t the mothers choose the photos of their babies as angels? 

It takes too much energy to disguise being hurt.
I should go for a normal guy, mija.
Remember that May when Omar was after me?
I kept letting him give me rides to El Camino and playing dumb like some virgin, so he wouldn’t think he could get anywhere. 

He proposed even! Can you picture schoolgirl me, married to Omar, raising Rottweiler pups in the backyard?
But you don’t know how much I think of Omar. How I think that Gee!, I’d be living in a house with a fenced in yard.
Well, I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to but the dogs. And he talked to them in Spanish, so I guess I’d have learned Spanish by now. 

But that’s not the type we go for; is it, mija?
We like the brown boys that are obviously brown but go to college to not be brown.
We want the ones that wouldn’t go with us to the M.E.Ch.A meetings, because they didn’t want to be too political. The ones who stay single way into their thirties, whose parents and families think must be gay because they’ve never fathered a kid, joined a gang, or eaten at their mother’s without clearing the table.

We fuck the boys who majored in art, not business.
We want those boys. We want those boys who one day, in a room full of white people after a conference or a meeting, will realize they aren’t white, after all.

I’m waiting for him, mi’ja.
He’ll be late. And it won’t be because he’s working on his truck or in the arms of another woman—although there is probably plenty of that too.

He won’t be Omar, dear, dear Omar. Whose call I never returned after that third time he said he’d never met a girl like me before. That he wanted to wake up with me years from now, his vieja.

The Omars would take our mothers in.
We need the Omars, mija.
Now, that we are getting too old already, we need them.

Story by Margaret Elysia Garcia.

Photo by Marco Patino.

Nicole really dug me. She dug me because I understood her.
“You’re the only one who understands me,” she’d say. “You’re the only one.”
But to understand her was easy. Anyone could have done it. What I think she meant was that I took the time to listen to her.

She came to LA at a very important time in her life, a defining moment, something I didn’t truly understand, didn’t know the complete story.
She had left the place of her birth, a “cursed” town near San Bernardino, from where she had desperately wanted to get away for years, ever since she was a little girl, and leave her “crazy family” behind.
“They’re all alkies,” she told me. Including two brothers and a sister. And then there was her uncle Will who had had his eyes on her, “ever since I was ten.”

And then she confided that she had come to Los Angeles because she had to get away and, also, because she wanted to be an actress, “you know, in the movies.” She said this with more shyness than usual.
And, since I wanted to be a writer – not a Hollywood writer, just a writer – we made a sort of pact: she would continue working as a checker in the Malph’s Supermarket down the block and I’d stay in the apartment writing a best seller and then she’d be in the movie based on the novel.

But it was terrible. Not the novel. I never wrote the novel.
My heart ached throughout the six or seven months I stayed with her. And after a while the guilt became unbearable.
I had bought a second hand typewriter from a pawn shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, near Western, not far from the apartment, and every day I’d sit in front of it but hardly ever typed anything.

What I did mostly was read. I was a college dropout and I realized the hard way that you couldn’t be a real writer without knowing what the good writers before you had thought and said about life, humanity, and the world. If you don’t quote these writers no one will believe you are serious about writing.
One has to watch out, though. For a while I was quoting famous writers all the time. Then I became conscious that I was becoming a show-off.

“So, where are you now?” Nicole would ask when she got home from her job and saw me sitting in the living room in front of the typewriter.
One time I said, “Remember that time when your uncle Will grabbed you in the backyard and tore your dress off….”
She rushed toward me. “What?! You’re writing that?!”
I had to say I was kidding, and had to reassure her that I would not write that.
“Okay,” she said. “Just say that he was always after me but never caught me.”

My heart was breaking into little pieces. I knew I had to go.
Nicole was very pretty; if I was to say she was “Hollywood pretty” you’d know just what I’d mean. She had sunshine-blond tinted hair and light blue eyes. I had seen the real color of her hair in some pictures when she was a cheerleader in high school, it was light brown, and I had said to her, “Natural could be cool,” and she responded, “No way!”

She had grown up watching glamorous women in the movies and on television and always wanted to be one.
I never really believed she wanted to be an actress. I knew she liked the idea of being one; the idea of being famous, being privileged; a celebrity, a movie star. TV was really important to her. The I Love Lucy reruns were her favorite.

“Don’t you think she’s funny?”
Lucy was a sort of crazy saint. Someone whom she worshipped.
“All my life I’ve watched her,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder.

You could see in her eyes a sort of religious devotion to Lucille Ball, or Lucy, the TV character.
But, unlike Lucy, Nicole was never screwy or funny and never tried to be. She was shy and sentimental.
She was always looking out the living room window. I sat near it in an old chair, behind the typewriter which sat on a tray with four legs. It was the first thing she did when she entered the apartment when she got home from work. She did the same thing in the bedroom. It was a sad ritual and I had to witness it daily.
The apartment was on the second floor, facing the back, and there was nothing out there but a few trees and a tall fence that separated our building from the other. But she stood there for a while looking out, staring, waiting, and, I guess, hoping. Also, whenever I’d start a conversation that was not about celebrities (all the conversations she’d initiate had celebrities as the main topic) she’d go to the window and stick her head out while I spoke.

I knew she was waiting for something that was never going to arrive.
No one ever wrote to her. Her friends took advantage of her, especially Annie, her ex-roommate, who walked out on her and had left without paying her share of the rent.
And she had had two abortions, two successive boyfriends who had walked out on her.
She was twenty years old.

In the evening, after I did my reading for the day, we’d smoke weed and talk about trivial things until we went to bed and made love.
And on those evenings when there were no drugs and no friends around, the sadness I felt for her and for myself was sometimes extreme. Those were nights of tears, in her eyes and mine.

I Love Lucy was on at around dinner time and I had to watch it with her while we ate our burritos, or tacos, or chili burgers.
I never liked the show but that meant nothing to her. “How can you not like it? It’s so funny. Lucy is so funny! Lucy is so great!”

At times she would compare me to Ricky.
“Sometimes you talk just like him,” she’d say. “See? That’s how you say it. Just like that. You’re the Mexican Ricky Ricardo.” She knew Ricky Ricardo was Cuban, of course. And she was supposed to know I was not Mexican. But, television can turn a Dominican into anything it wants.

Apparently her family didn’t like Mexicans.
Once I heard her on the phone telling her sister, “… but he’s not Mexican… Right, Jesse, you’re not Mexican?”
I continued to read and paid scant attention to her. “He’s from New York, you know…”

One time, for I don’t know what reason, we were supposed to go to that town she was from, over there by San Bernardino.
I didn’t really want to go but when she told me her mother and siblings lived in a trailer I thought that it would be interesting. And it was something I wanted to see, in case I decided to write that best seller.
But we never did go, I forget why.

Nicole had gone to the LA West: School for Actors. She took night courses. But never graduated. She dropped out because after two quarters she could not afford a third quarter.
The higher the quarter, the higher the price for the course. The higher the course completed, the higher the chances of her instructor getting her a job with “one of the big Hollywood studios.”

It was easy to see that she, and that small group of fellow would-be actors that sat on kiddy chairs listening to their instructor, were being suckered.
“Get used to yourselves being someone else,” he used to tell them.

I met her just before she dropped out. I had just gotten a job at the school as a janitor; the janitor’s assistant, to be precise.
In the daytime the place was actually an experimental school for privileged kids from Beverly Hills.
I started work at three in the afternoon when the kids were let out. On Tuesdays and Thursdays this guy named Fred Cohen, the instructor, rented a classroom and “taught” ingénues (ingénuas) like Nicole how to be actresses (there were some ingénuos, too). He was a con-man.

I told her that “LA West” implied there was a “New York East: School for Actors.” She didn’t get it.
If you saw Cohen’s ad in the paper (or at the door of the room where I had been instructed to tape it – a cardboard sign – every day as soon as I got to the school) you’d get it. It said:

BROADWAY

New York

HOLLYWOOD

LA West: School for Actors
A group of white American Buddhists also rented a classroom in the evenings.
The people behind the experimental school were making money from the elite and from those at the margins, too.

I knew Nicole was not serious about an acting career because not once did she bother to read a manual, or look for an acting job herself, or talked about one. I guess she wanted to be “discovered.”

I didn’t expect to be “discovered” but I was in the same boat.
I didn’t know how to write and had no idea how books were published. But unlike her who at least, with her failed courses, tried to get close to something along the path of an “idealized” career, the last thing I wanted was to go back to school, a career, or to get a job.
Yet, the pile of books I kept on the floor, under the tray with the four legs, and the fact that I read them, were a source of wonder to Nicole.
I think she admired and respected me. Unlike my family, she never questioned what I was doing with my leisure. Nicole really believed I was writing a novel.

It broke my heart, but I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t.

***

In LA I hardly ever walked anywhere. The only time Nicole and I ever took a walk together was when we went down Hollywood Boulevard one afternoon. I mean we literally walked down the sidewalk after I had parked the car on Las Palmas Avenue.
We walked down the north and south side of the Hollywood Walk of Fame while a continuous stream of cars swooshed down the Boulevard. I think we were the only people walking.

I never dared tell Nicole how I really felt about Hollywood, how phony the whole thing was. It would have broken her heart. But here and there I’d throw a hint or two.
“Look! Even the tourists don’t walk here. They get off the bus and into wherever they’re going. In New York they’re always walking around midtown and downtown. People walk in New York.”

She kept looking down at the stars that were embedded on the sidewalk.
“Haven’t you been here before?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said. “I used to come here all the time. And every time I do I have to look at the stars.”

She didn’t know Rin Tin Tin but she knew Lassie.
She didn’t know who Sabu was. “Who’s that?” she said.
I told her he was an old Dominican actor from the ’40s, and she accepted it. I could have told her anything and she’d believe it.

We came upon Fatty Arbuckle’s star and I pointed him out and said, “I didn’t know he had been given one.”
“Who was he?” she said.
“He was a silent star who had wild crazy parties and one time a woman was killed in his mansion. A terrible scandal ensued. Fucked up his career.”
“Wow,” she said. “That was in the silent days?”
“Yeah. When actors didn’t speak.”

We were coming near the entrance to the Hollywood Wax Museum when we decided to look for some place to eat. I was tired of walking under the hot afternoon sun.
Nicole looked at every star before we stepped over them. And I looked at our shadows and felt lonely while that endless stream of automobiles just kept on swooshing by us on the street.

I was hungry and sweating and needed something to drink but, because I was addicted to tobacco, I lit a cigarette.
“Look!” said Nicole.
In front of the Wax Museum there was a mime. He was dressed in a tuxedo and top hat and he walked towards us in his mime robotic way and he mimed to me that he desired to smoke a cigarette and “asked” me for one and I gave him one from my pack.

I pulled out the book of matches I had in my pocket and, as I stretched my arm to pass it to him, he tore the cigarette in half and smiled a mischievous mime smile, as the two halves of the cigarette dropped to the concrete.
It was probably a “trick” he performed with anyone passing by with a lighted cigarette (not that many people “passed by”; most people just entered the place).

Nicole thought it was hilarious. I thought it was disrespectful on his part and wanted to tell him so but who’s going to argue with a mime.
We began to walk again and when the light changed I pulled Nicole across the street and then we stopped at a taco stand and we ate burritos. She and I loved burritos.

That incident with the mime stayed with me because of his insolence. What he did was disrespectful. He thought he had a right to do anything because he was a mime.
Mimes are not real people, in a way they are just marionettes without strings. But it bothered me, maybe because cigarettes meant so much to me then.

When I decided to leave Nicole and LA, I said to her that I was going to New York but that I’d be back in a month or two.
And something, I can’t remember what exactly, something about my New York address, gave her the idea that I wasn’t coming back. And so the morning of my trip she took all my belongings out of the suitcase, my clothes mainly but also some books and records, and threw them out into the hallway while I showered.

I had left her in the bedroom crying. After I had picked up all my stuff off the hallway floor and managed to convince her that for sure I was coming back because I loved her and because I was coming back to finish the best seller, she helped me pack my bag again, gave me back the wallet I had left on top of the dresser (minus my address book) and agreed to give me a ride to the airport.

Story by Miguel Gardel.

Originally published in Brick Rhetoric Magazine.

Mi casa es tu casa brought him here.

Three o’clock in the morning.
His face pale and lips dried. He is hungry and thirsty. His long hair uncombed.
In his right hand the black case with his axe and an expensive leather bag over his shoulder.
 
Damiron. He named the band that.
Damiron. He doesn’t remember that the last syllable of his name is accentuated.
He came to this country before the triumph of the revolution. He had just turned five. So he was too young to have ever known it. I am wrong. He never learned to use it. Here his parents never taught him. The schools never would. I knew it was supposed to carry one but only by intuition.

Now he’s here at my door.
Mi casa es tu casa.
Yeah, man, but that was a formality. Like “I hope you’re doing well” and “Have a wonderful Christmas.”

His disappointed face. But, I am the powerless one.
His long artistic fingers are searching the pockets of his blue “work shirt.”
Nervous. A cigarette and a lighter.
He offers me one and we smoke.

He has traveled long hours. “It had to be now,” he tells me.
It was the quickest flight he could get. The plane had made a stop in Chicago and a stop in Albuquerque and he had to wait hours sitting in those boring airports.

But, I am the powerless one. And it’s three o’clock in the morning and it’s my brother-in-law’s apartment.

“I sleep on the couch right here in the living room. There’s absolutely no space for you.”

I own nothing. I have no property. Only labor power which I’m selling real cheap now to UCLA Hospital.

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

I would have said the same thing. But Damiron is not desperate. He is shocked. That is all.

“No, man, things don’t work that way.”

Many times back in New York he had made me feel inferior. No pleasure now telling him the truth of my situation. Now I live a “conventional” life with my wife and our baby.

“I’m working as a janitor at UCLA Hospital.”

He looks at me like I have lost my mind. Like I have given up. Like I’m now part of the system.

I ask him to sit on the couch.
There are apples and water in the refrigerator.
“But, I have to go to work in a few hours, by 7 a.m.” I tell him. “I take the bus and it’s a long ride to the hospital.”

He sets his expensive guitar on his lap, devours the apple and drum rolls with his long fingers on the case. And suddenly he seems happy.
The guitar is a Gibson which he got from his parents as a graduation gift. In New York he was in an elite school.

“I need a place to stay.” He’s not worried. He lights another cigarette but I refuse one.

“Let’s go out for a walk,” he says.

I knew I’d have no time to feel guilty. All he needed was just a little time to think.

*

The cool California night.

“L.A. smells nice,” he says.

He’s right. It does smell different than New York.

“Kerouac said something about this smell in On the Road, I think. I forget exactly what.”

He doesn’t respond.
When we met years ago he was already a reader. I was just beginning.
Jewish Juliet introduced us; she was his girlfriend and then mine. She was a “Beat poet.”
And Damiron talked of cross-country travel for kicks. San Fran. LA. Places that would welcome guys like us.
What kind of guy was I? A poor half-ass musician? And what about him? He was middle class. But he meant romantic, sensitive, bohemian, intelligent, hip. Simply, “Rockers.”

Now I see what I have changed back into. Things he cannot see. But senses.

“From the cab I saw a motel and I think it’s over there. There it is.” He looks at the signs as we walk. Just as I did a while ago when I arrived. “Let’s go back and get my stuff.”

*

“Have you been to the Whiskey yet?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I’m thinking of going there tomorrow. Shit, I mean tonight. You want to come?”

“I don’t own a guitar anymore.” He doesn’t say anything to this.

We walk in and he throws himself on the bed and his slim body bounces.
He unpacks nothing. From the window I can see the pool and the reflection of the red and blue lights on the water.

“I have to work,” I tell him. “Besides, we don’t have a car. This isn’t New York.”

“That’s the first thing I’m going to do. Buy a car.”

He paid the motel clerk with travelers checks.
His father, president of a bank in Midtown Manhattan. What was he in Cuba? Damiron never knew.
His mother was beautiful. A Hollywood actress named Eleanor Parker – that is who she looks like.
The father handsome also. Soft-spoken.
A funereal feeling in their apartment in Queens. Long dark hallway. Damiron’s black cat “Devil.”

He takes off his shoes, lays back and falls asleep. As if I am not here.
I would never do that. I’d be self-conscious. I would think “My friend is in the room and I’ve just waken him up at three in the morning.”

*

But, Damiron is different.
The L.A. air does seem different.

It was rhetorical.
It was formality.
He took it literally.
Mi casa es tu casa.

Story by Miguel Gardel.

Roxanne
you don’t have to put on the red light
those days are over
you don’t have to sell your body to the night.
[…] Roxanne
you don’t care if it’s wrong or if it’s right.
Roxanne, The Police

 Scene 3 – At  Sor Tino Restaurant, Brentwood.

I dodge his kiss and crush against the glass fence of the patio. The heads of the other diners turn in unison toward our table. To mask the embarrassment I throw my hands up in the air, look down at his little candle and wear the biggest smile for the shakiest Happy Birffday Roxi!!!

Some of the restaurant’s guests lazily mumble along and then go back to their dinner. So do I and look at him with the most heartfelt what the fuck?! in my eyes:

– “Excuse me?!?” –

– …so you think I’m a faggot.

– Well… either way is a no way, my dear Roxi.

– I’m looking for a girl, Linda.

– Oh… so you are a girl…

– I said I want to date a girl. Why you don’t understand a fucking word in English? Jeeez, how long have you been here in LA?!

– I don’t see why we should speak English in the first place, since we are both Italian….

– I even wrote that on my facebook page yesterday… didn’t you see it?

– I apologize but I have no time to check the daily updates on your sexual orientation… you know, I run a pretty huge business…

– …so you are divorced but not single….

– Again, that wouldn’t make any difference. This is not about me, Roxi.

– Who’s this about then?

– It’s about you; you should know. You asked for help and here I am. That’s it – that’s all.

Scene 2 – At the rooftop bar of the Huntley Hotel, Santa Monica.

– How much did you give him last night?

– Two thousand.

– Ok so, that means that my one thousand paid for half of his services.

– Linda, I didn’t pay him to…

– Yes you did, Mr. Gioia of my ass.

– He came to my bed… I had prepared the couch for him.

– I had just booked him a room at the Venice On The Beach Hotel. Why should have he been sleeping on your couch, for God’s sake?

– I had just taken him out to the Lakers and Jack Nicholson got us drunk and I didn’t want him to drive back to the hotel alone.

– Did you say drive?! Babe, that guy doesn’t even have a driving license. And your new front beach loft is two lanes from his hotel, remember?!?

– Linda, he said he’ll find a job this week… I told him he has to because we cannot help him forever…

– Well, so far we didn’t start yet…. Merd, I don’t even know who he is and why I am doing this.

– Because I’m still your business and you need to protect me, my lovely ex-ex wife.

– Or, because you promised someone a gig we couldn’t give him in change of a blow job, my dear ex-ex-ex hubby.

Scene 1 – At Gioia Productions, Venice Beach.

– Hello?!?

– Hi, it’s Roxi….

– Again?!?

– I’m sorry Mrs. Gioia, but I wanted to know if Mr. Gioia is back.

– Mr. Gioia, as you call him, is now on set and he won’t be back until next weekend, at least. And, for the record, I’m not Mrs. Gioia. Not anymore.

– I know… I’m sorry, Mrs. Linda…

– Oh, don’t be sorry – believe me, I am not! Just call me Linda… but, stop calling this office please. We’re trying to work.

– But, Mr. Gioia told me that maybe there was something for me, on that set….

– Something like what?!?

– Like a small part. You know, I studied acting in London for four years and I was on X Factor for fifteen minutes and the casting director of Glue told me that he would have taken me in zero time, if only I had the working permits for this country…

– So go get them. Good luck.

– But, how do I get them, Mrs. Linda?

– I have no idea. I got mine through Mr. Gioia a long time ago. I was seventeen, my dear.

– I’m seventeen too! So, do you think he can help me with my career as well?

– If you need help ask God, not Mr. Gioia.

– But, he is such a famous producer….

– That’s why.

Story by Liliana Isella.

Once I thought I saw you
in a crowded hazy bar
dancing in the light
from star to star.
*Neil Young, Like a Hurricane

Slowly your hands slide down on the wet garden of her cheery perversion and, one by one, each scarlet letter in our bouquet of secrets recline its head.

Today I did nothing but die on your screen, dream in your pics, live for your stage.

The show burns on and I tail your glory from under your knees, through the loud lights of your million star guitar, beyond the poisoned curtains of this starlet illusion.

Under the eyes of everybody is your hunger for her cheap tattoos and her underage half-naked heels.
Under the eyes of everybody, splashed on that filthy smile of yours, is your appetite for her rotten liveliness.
On that filthy smile of yours all my needly needs dangle from, under the eyes of everybody.

You are
like an hurricane
there’s calm
in your eye.*

The show burns off through the dust left over in the air and I gather my last flaked diamonds to follow you in the wings.

I follow you as I followed you then – from moon to moon, inside the net of your first words, around the flatter of your funny offenses, between the thrill of your dark jokes.
I follow you as I followed you then – an unfertile, ruffled wig, beaten dream Alice in the blue wonderland of wrong notes your hands have fun to play for.

I am just a dreamer
but you are just a dream
You could have been
anyone to me.*

I walk into the backstage alone but, you’re not.
She’s in. Same tattoos, same cranky heels, same black tale smile.

As I get closer, you softly offer a glass of pink velvet to me and my hand to her.
You gently sit my nervousness next to her thighs and whisper a warm laugh into my ears.
Then, you start telling the story of our lust, to push my hesitation toward the double suite for three you already booked our red night ink in.

But, before we get into the taxi, you look at her for one second, and she is not the second anymore.
She looks at me, and I remember that spring when, my second, was your wife.
I look at you and, for the first time, I can see neither of them has ever been your second but one: me.

Story by Liliana Isella.

Paris, nuit du mois d’aout, plein été. Te voilà toi, ton t-shirt blanc froissé, ton pantalon beige et tes vieilles baskets, ta silhouette qui reprend place dans mon espace exigu. Tard dans la nuit, encore une fois, comme si les moments que nous vivons ne pouvaient exister que dans ces heures où le monde s’arrête, une parenthèse dans nos deux vies si différentes, une sorte de songe que le matin dissipe.

Ton flot de paroles, pour raconter, pour dire, la guitare maintenant, ta sœur que tu défends comme un chevalier des temps modernes, le travail et l’envie de bien faire avec des rêves en ligne de mire, ne jamais oublier les rêves, accroche toi, c’est bien comme ca, vas-y. Et des questions toutes nouvelles, aussi, que tu m’adresses comme si tu me voyais pour la première fois. « On dirait que tu as dix-sept ans », murmures-tu. Nos corps sont alors des carapaces inutiles car l’âge, comme l’enfer, c’est les autres qui le déterminent.

Allongés sur le lit, fenêtre ouverte, le cri des mouettes égarées dans la ville vient percer un silence noir, un peu de mer à Paris. Te caresser dans ce noir, juste tes mains avec mes mains et nos jambes entrelacées comme jamais. Ton corps qui me cherche, qui en redemande, tes doigts agrippés à mes cheveux, oui prends moi comme ça, caresse mes fesses, tiens moi par les hanches, oblige moi à te prendre aussi et jusqu’au bout. Et, plus tard seulement, nos bouches qui s’effleurent. Jamais baiser n’aura été plus tendre, plus intense que celui-là.

Tu dis que j’ai un grain, que tu ne m’aimes pas pour ça, mon grain de peau oui tu l’aimes et ma bouche surtout, c’est elle qui t’amène là, rien qu’elle, les mois, les années passent, je te cherche et tu me chasses et puis tu reviens quand l’été fait le vide autour de toi. Petite injection de toi, une petite dose, rien de mortel, quantité infime et bien plus perverse car elle empêche le sevrage. Tu l’as dit d’ailleurs, que tu allais « achever la bête » par tes silences, et tu sais qu’en revenant tu décides de lui infliger un nouveau supplice. « Je profite de toi », dis-tu, comme si j’étais un être à ta merci. C’est ce que tu n’as pas compris, je ne suis pas une victime, je ne subis rien, tout ce que l’on vit je le veux et c’est parce que je le veux que tu échoues dans mes bras. Tu ne me prives de rien, tu ne me fais pas de mal, tu réponds au besoin que j’ai de toi et je fais de même, d’une autre façon, on se trouve et le hasard n’y est pour rien. 

Voilà une autre nuit volée au temps qui passe, celui de tes vingt ans, celui de mes trente, oh temps suspends ton putain de vol, je m’arrête là et toi tu accélères, on se retrouve à deux dans la trentaine heureuse, on se marie et on fait des enfants qui ne nous ressemblent pas, sauf pour ta fougue et pour ma détermination.

Ce qui est atroce, après, et que je ne mesure jamais assez au moment où nous nous vivons dans la nuit, c’est le manque qui va s’ensuivre. Elle est là, la vraie blessure, dans ces heures qui viennent lorsque tu n’es plus là, alors que tu as rempli mes veines ma peau mon ventre mes yeux de toi. Elle me déchire les entrailles, elle gicle sous mes paupières, elle griffe tout ce que j’ai de plus beau, tout ce qui m’est cher, elle l’annihile. Je suis une ombre dans la lumière crue du jour, je marche, respire, bouge, parle, enveloppe vidée qui voit ta silhouette partout dans la ville, dans chaque rue que j’aborde, dans les cafés où je me pose, les cinémas où je suis censée me distraire ; la table où j’ai déjeuné, tu étais là, à mes côtés, avec ton t-shirt froissé, ton pantalon beige et ton sourire carnassier. Le manque pourrait alors me faire hurler.

Viendra le moment où cela cessera, ce n’est qu’une question de temps, encore une fois.  Toutes les fleurs, même les plus coriaces, finissent par faner. Peut-être parviendras-tu enfin, d’un simple geste, d’un seul silence, à couper les racines de cet amour tordu. En attendant ce moment-là, je veux voler à ce temps qui ne fait que passer toutes les nuits à venir, avec les jours qui restent.