Written By P.N.
I do not even care about my foot hanging off the bed anymore, come get me demons. Bring me home.
Silva and the kids’ voices woke me up very early again. Ten of them now that little Estephan is born. We are packed in a two-room house and sometimes it is hard to breathe over everyone else’s breaths. The news on the radio talks about sharing. Not only look outside our own window but take a look at the ones next to us. We don’t even have a window. Not that I could use it, anyway. I just wish I could see more of the sky through the hole in the ceiling.
Raindrops are fine but they rarely wash away anything at all. I wonder how the sun feels. Some days it brightens my world, some days I had to be him to bring the light in. I still wonder about its shape. It cannot be any good or remarkable one since every night it dies to let the moon live. Maybe they did not get the instructions on how to do this thing called living right. Make it a never-ending August and, I swear, I’ll live it all to the fullest.
I get out on the street again. I had to sell my map to buy bread and milk. The kids ate all of it in a day so I had to pretend I was full to avoid making them feel sad. They still do not know that feeling hungry is just another form of feeling empty and I have been a master of voids, ever since the day I was banished. I had notes on this map on how to get to the borders and then walk a few more miles until her village. But I had to give it up.
I am weird, I know. I cannot afford her. I am the black sheep, the odd duck, the reject, the lost and forgotten. I am me and this is hard on its own, but whatever the hell peace was, she was it. She did not do anything the right way. It was not her code. She read books on the rooftop, drank wine alone from the bottle, and talked to the homeless like potential writers of her memoirs. She has mapped out how to conquer the universe together, one glass of wine at a time, one chapter at a time.
We were never squandering time, we were constantly inventing it from the start.
This civilization has failed me and my filthy shoes many times before. That is why I am counting on creatures outside of it to get me where I belong once again. I love them differently even more than the capacity of my blanket-bed on the floor allows me to place them. I love them that way because I do not want to lose them like I lost her wondering which was the right time to be myself. That is why I ended up to something I cannot wake up anymore. To something, I cannot live with.
No, it is not the hunger, the lack of money, the demoralization of feeling even more impoverished while trying to make some, sometimes it was not even the effect of longing for home had on me. It was always her. Those hazel eyes. I was always colorblind and my existence was described only by fabricated small talk on the lips of people who never saw anything more than a failed attempt to stop loving what I loved alone.
I stole Ricardo’s bed tonight. He is out with some girl. He sprayed the flowers from the garden with cologne to impress her. The flowers were plastic, in a pot that used to be an ashtray. As I saw him walking out the door, I only hoped that the girl he was meeting knew the power of fake flowers and disguised pots. They can make a man stand straight and march confidently to what his heart commands.
Before blowing out my candle, the one I use to see the device I am making, I will try to comfort the moon with the thought that it will return to each place tomorrow again. My device is a doorbell in the making. I just have to place the battery right and it’s ready. People will start asking why when it rings it sounds like a female human voice.
How much more will it take for this civilization to learn that home is a person?
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