supongo que mentía.
como todos.

cierro el corazón hasta nuevo aviso.
o para siempre.
aún no lo sé.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

“You Should Date An Illiterate Girl,” by Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

A veces te tropiezas con tu lado bueno, con esos polvos mágicos que lanza la Campanilla que de vez en cuando te ronda el hombro derecho. A veces, sí, a veces conectas con el lado tierno. Como ahora, con la ventana abierta, la oscuridad trepando, la noche sevillana haciéndome soñar, esa melodía sonando flojito, y yo dando vueltas en medio del salón. Qué paranoia tan bonita. Hoy he vuelto a salir con la cámara a inmortalizar pedazos de esta gitana que me tiene enamorá y se me ha agarrao a las entrañas. Y es que cuando empieza la cuenta atrás te das cuenta de que de repente tienes prisa, de que estás en medio de una rayuela saltando de número en número intentando no caer, mientras dibujas con tiza esa línea prohibida que rozas de nuevo. Me perdí en tus calles y me encontré con una parte de mí que intuía que existía, pero que nunca me atreví a intentar tocar. Todavía no sé cómo contárselo a mi padre. El reflejo de Triana, y mi corazón acelarándose. La vida a veces es sólo bailar.

Hay colores que no se olvidan, miradas que queman el alma, canciones que son cometas y paisajes que curan hasta las heridas más incautas. Créeme, siempre hay un lugar para cambiar de piel.

Cuando me vaya echaré de menos las naranjas.
Y a ti,
a ti te voy a querer siempre.

'Y tal vez, no te marches nunca más.'

El mundo se caía y yo veía ojos negros por doquier. La vida estaba de luto. Hubo guerras sangrientas en tiempos pasados, lágrimas que cayeron al polvo dejando rastros de luz, miradas inertes que no consiguieron salvarse, corazones latiendo en medio del desastre. Sentí cada puñal atrevesándome la vida. Como si ya no quedara nada más de mí, como si ya no fuera nada. Intenté respirar ese aire viciado, intenté redimirme de mis pecados. Dejé mi sangre como prenda e intenté salir corriendo, a ninguna parte, a ningún mañana. Sobreviví a huracanes, a arenas movedizas, a camas vacías que no olían a nadie. Me enfrenté a dragones, a domingos sin llamadas, a miradas sin amor que intentaban acabar conmigo. Me di de bruces contra mil muros, contra mil bocas que sólo escupían mentiras, contra mil amaneceres sin nombre, contra corazones pintados de negro incapaces de querer, incapaces de quererme. Y nada, absolutamente nada de eso fue peor que tu sonrisa. Te vi sonreír y el mundo se paró, las estrellas se apagaron y ya no hubo esperanza. Ese día supe que tú ibas a matarme. Ese día supe cómo iba a morir.