I wait patiently for the gleam, that ownerless animal that sometimes crosses the room like a fish of light without leaving a trace, only a suspicion in the air; I wait for it without hurry, with the patience I learned from the fact that time does not heal, it merely sorts things out, hiding the dust under the rug. Outside, the rain has finished its work and has left a new skin on the streets, a broken mirror in puddles, and in each puddle the sky trembles as if it did not know what century it lives in; it does not know, and neither do I, because my days blend into memory and memory blends into your name, which at times is a bell and at times a knife kept in the sock drawer.
Who will rise from the abyss, my love? I ask without melodrama; I have seen how the abyss disguises itself, sometimes it arrives as a brief message, a blurred photograph, a voice that resembles yours and yet is not; and other times it arrives wearing the clean face of technology, a new religion of glass, promising quick resurrections “play”, “remember”, “restore”, as if the heart were a file, as if your heartbeat could fit inside a cloud. I have tried to hear you in there, in the phone’s hum when it trembles on the table, in the notification that lights up the night, a domesticated lightning bolt, but nothing, there is no pulse in the metal, only the echo of my desire striking the walls. I told you, one day our sins will come looking for us, what we said in those days, one day it will pursue us.
Even so, I keep waiting for that gleam of unknown origin, not the vulgar shine of screens, but another, one that comes from behind the world, from where things that have no explanation are kept, the keys to a house already demolished; and I think that perhaps someone will come out of the abyss with your borrowed hands, with your exact way of tilting your head when you listen, and then, for an instant, will make me hear what I lost, the beat of your heart, like a discreet drum that marked the rhythm of my days… God, what a strange economy love has, when it is here it seems infinite, when it leaves it has us counting crumbs. After the rain comes the storm, they say, and they say it as if the order of the sky could explain everything, but I have discovered a less kindly secret… After calm comes another kind of distortion, finer and crueler, the kind in which things settle into place without consulting their owner; and after the shouting come the goodbyes, yes, but they do not always arrive with slammed doors; sometimes they enter like a letter with no return address, an empty chair no one removes from the table out of superstition, the habit of setting out two cups of coffee and remembering too late that there are no longer two mouths for that steam. There are goodbyes that simply arrive and move in, and then they work, patiently, like this winter that has hardened the fruit on that tree outside.
There are harms that cannot be forgotten, not because one does not want to, but because the body has its own archive and keeps it in certain places, in the shoulder that tightens when a certain song plays, in the throat that closes when you smell the same cologne in an elevator, in the sleep that repeats scenes like a stubborn theater. They say forgetting is a form of forgiveness; I believe forgetting, when it happens, is an accident, memory, on the other hand, is a vocation, a fidelity to what hurt, and yet I have also learned, by falling again and again, that memory can become a tyrant, because it demands daily tribute, charges us for breathing, forbids us the future with beautiful and impeccable arguments.
Immutable feelings, I say, a sentence, but for me it is a geography because what is immutable is not the grief, no, not at all, that changes masks, but the way your absence arranges my space. You are not here and, and yet you are, you do not speak and, and yet you answer; love, when it is left without a body, becomes a strange trade, one keeps building a house for someone who will not come, varnishes the same boards, fixes the window, turns on the lamp, and does all of it without claiming anything, because true love is not boasted about and not advertised, it works in silence, the way old craftsmen did who measured twice before cutting the wood. How conservative my hope is, my love! it clings to the idea that what is valuable is not replaced and that what was once our pact does not dissolve with a system update.
And even so, with the storm circling, with the goodbyes piled up like those unsent letters, I will always love you, not as a slogan, but as a way of seeing; even the world, when it offers itself to me in beauty, hurts a little because you are not here to see it, and I will love you with a love without miracles, that long ago stopped negotiating with the sky, and no longer humiliates itself before chance; a love that, if the gleam arrives, will accept it the way I once accepted the nocturnal visitor, with my heart in my hand and a low voice, without asking too much where it comes from, so as not to frighten it away. Because perhaps the abyss will return no one, perhaps it will only return something harder, a minimal light, enough to cross the room without stumbling over the furniture of the past.
Tonight, when I turn off every light in my house, I will leave the window barely open so the smell of wet earth can come in, so the murmur of the world can come in… yes, let it come in, if it wants to, that unknown gleam; and if it does not come in, it does not matter, I will have held the waiting, a candle in the open air, making sure the flame does not turn into a fire, making sure love, my love, does not become resentment, that waste. Outside, the storm begins to arrange its drums, inside, in the silence, I listen to the only thing that stays alive, my own pulse, stubborn, humble, learning to resemble yours without forgetting you.
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