Besides... you have never been good at living. stupid.
the mosquito nets encrusted with the heat in the small house of that German painter. who had no talent at all. In summer, we used to water her plants for a bed.
we were the depressed of the neighbourhood, do you remember? some days I even had to tie your shoes, for you missed your arms that much. and your hands.
fighting. fucking. no speaking. fucking. drawing. making love. walking. fucking. awfully. staying awake to watch the iridescent condensation on the white air-conditioning. for hours. silent and still... we were a three-thousand-megapixel picture.
You were lucky enough to feel worse than me. Enough to make me become the one who was somewhat in peace, somewhat civilized. I was your house call therapist. fuck off. just because I didn’t throw up after each meal and I could watch an entire movie by tarkovskij without crying.
it was just like having a picnic on the roadside. with you. our plastic children and meat silverware. on our xanax-coloured picnic rug. daparox paper towels and paroxetine cups. the cars passing by without running over us. let’s admit it, they were almost respectful. daunted. polite. sometimes they stopped for me. sometimes for you. we took turns in getting on the cars, letting them take us far for a while. letting them spoil us for a while. idiots.
People could understand us, taken individually, don’t you think? well, yes. I think so. we had our... well, you know what I mean. but not together. all that respect... that distance, they saw us like the tramps sleeping on the station’s steps. almost a social nuisance. I don’t know...
you slammed on the brake an inch from the crash rail, laughing, tipsy, on that small mountain road. frozen. laughing like crazy. like crazy: “I never learnt how to drive!”. you’ve never been good at anything.
I’m telling you: you were wrong from head to feet. beautiful head. beautiful feet. true. very beautiful. but inside, underneath your thin, transparent skin smelling like cinnamon... I could see it. yeah, I could see it... you were made of colourful, half-dried out markers. 30 sets of markers scattered inside your 170 centimetres. broken, bitten... their caps lost, who knows where. colourful... so much they put an endless melancholy between the bones. my bones.
a pill when we woke up and a pill before sleeping. embraced, in those dark, during lonely hours. having breakfast while watching the news in Japanese. you used to say that screen radiations... they made some facts more believable.
Me, playing the part of the half-aware. you playing in that former hospital with that theatre company of God-fearing people. Do you remember them? Yes, I know, they are smart. but they had always seemed God-fearing to me, I can’t help it, did I say yet that I was as sick as you? almost as you. well, that’s how I saw them. intellectuals waiting for a punishment. but I was happy when you were with them, really. because in those afternoons I could stay home and cry while watching a tarkovskij movie without being seen by you. without making you think you were alone in the world, without my half-bravery and my half-strength. my unconditional support. my volunteer-tutor attentions. at least, you know it now. I was pretending. of course you know it.
and each time you came back home, at night, tired and without appetite, I used to mend that burn on the calf I don’t remember how you ever did. you used to smile. I didn’t tell you, but that burn hurt me more than you. for sure.
you were the best half-wasted-markers-set-woman I had ever met.
but really, I think your calf hurt me more than you. than you.