WHAT I DO

When I have negative emotions I start painting or I go to the gym where I swim. Or I’ll put on some music and dance or go out walking with my dog. Sometimes they are very strong and don’t pass right away. But somehow I try to get them out of me and turn them into something beautiful. I have read many books by Osho about tantra and meditation but unfortunately there are no meditation courses in my area, even if I have practiced Tai Chi, which is called “meditation in motion”. In the past I have attended a Hare Krishna temple in London and have had more comfort from singing and dancing with them but also from the silence and peace in the temple. I have also had the opportunity to hear the Ohh sung by the Dalai Lama himself, in a church in London, but all of these things have not solved my history of abuse as a child. Unfortunately, however much I can avoid thinking about it, certain traumas remain in the mind and body

How many sensations do you have? How many demolitions do you do? Heart to heart lined up for a second. If you want a thousand monsters who whisper loves to you. You peel off sheets and be alone. A drop of life instilled in the chest. You want illusory loves. You let yourself be captivated by stupid sirens. I’m not like you. I don’t need illusions to live. I look at the flowers. I look at the trees. I watch my dogs. I need these things. People only know how to deceive and ask for money.

So I stay here, trapped in a life I don’t understand, thinking that those who call me ungrateful are right, yet without the strength to change. It is an illusion to think that memories cannot have form, concreteness. We believe we can bury them in the dark ravines of a cellar where we will never enter, like a clouding of conscience, which makes us continue our miserable lives. Then, one day, without warning, we bump into the analysts of a past so vivid that we can touch it. I found the ticket to Paris in my jacket pocket, exactly what we looked for everywhere, two years ago, on returning home, because you said you wanted to keep everything from that trip, about us, from those days away from the world, where it seemed we could be anything we wanted. I believed it, with every atom. It was a hope, a prayer. I don’t believe in anything, I would have liked there to be a God in my head too. I would not have asked for anything else in life. Your gaze was enough, because it contained everything. And I have seen everything in our days together, in that determined impulse departure. You convinced me with a smile. You were half a woman and half a child, stripped of heels, makeup, clothes that were always so elegant for work days. The world had Geneva in career. I, only me, kept my private Geneva, the one that took off the mask and let its frailties and tenderness caress. I saw you sleep, every night, from the first times you were still on yours, to those when you instinctively looked for my arms, even in sleep, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I heard you sing in the morning, to the rhythm of songs that only you knew, while I, as soon as I woke up, only knew how to spy on you in my silence. I watched you provoke me, without even having to take off your clothes. You had the right words, slow movements like a distant call. I imagined you naked and you felt it, you smiled. You got me drunk

Yet I don’t think about your body as I turn this note around and around in my hands. Something I loved even more is hammering in my head, that is, that strange empathy that allowed you to understand everything I felt. You knew how to read me. Would you ever have thought that one of your greatest qualities would push me away? It is not your fault, of course. I did it all in this strange game of destruction. I was afraid. It seems the classic excuse that we men invent, against which many of you slam, convinced that it is enough to take care of our weaknesses to have a fairytale ending. The truth is that everyone has to fight his demons alone. You knew it when you let me go. You seemed to have always expected this, as if you were born to let me leave you. You said nothing other than tears and I didn’t expect silence to have sharp weapons. You couldn’t know that I was already dead, years before, in front of those who said the same words to me that I repeated to you. When she left me, I convinced myself that I was like her, that I didn’t know how to love. I witnessed the waltz of strangers who approached my life without ever really being part of it. “I don’t feel”, I said. At first they didn’t understand, then over time they gave up and I saw them disappear from my life. I found a thousand excuses, a thousand faults. It was easy to dismiss. The closer I got to someone, the greater was the heat with which I ran away. You really touched me, without my realizing it. You slipped into my head, into my limbs, and when I realized it, it was too late to send you away. I loved, and I couldn’t explain why. But I assure you, for someone like me it burned, like a stake that consumes you. I didn’t want to depend on someone who could potentially deprive me of myself. I made you witness the waltz of ambivalence, split between the desire to keep you and the urge to send you away, to protect me from those ghosts that perhaps were only in my head. The danger I felt and attributed to your presence was the echo of a distant wound, which I was afraid could reopen, with your simple touch, with your presence. I fought with the invisible enemies in my head and gave them your appearance, to the point of giving you this huge emptiness, where before there were a thousand words. But the sin of one’s own silences is paid for with loneliness. I know very well now that in this empty house I no longer hear your laughter and I have no arms to touch me at night. I thought I was defending myself and instead fear exposed me, it shattered everything.

Perhaps it was not yet the time, our time. I didn’t know how to love you without shields. But now that there are no trenches, no curtains, I don’t need weapons … If I wanted to walk in this life with you, would you come? They say that those who love you will not leave you. I say instead, that sometimes we run away thinking that a place is hurting us, but then we understand that no other place is home. So, once again, in this letter, I give you words. However, now, they no longer serve to protect me, but only to love you. I ask you forever: Do you want to be my home?