The february

That night, I was shaken as if struck by lightning. A cutting gust of wind passed through, found its way to me, and whispered its own riddle into my ear.

For some reason, I was the one chosen for this encounter, to meet the deadly cold never-ending shallow emptiness gaping open in the abyss, without an equal.

Because I could not find an ending to that pit that stared right at me, I screamed, and my scream echoed and echoed. I couldn't hide my fear.

And when that emptiness touches a person, and has touched them, one has no choice but to try to fill it, so as not to feel oneself disappearing, sinking into the darkness, with no idea how to find a way to return, because rarely no one ever does 

We treat emptiness like balloons, searching for a pump to fill them, even though we know that little by little, with a soft hiss, they will empty again, and sometimes burst with all their force, frightening the person beside them who is blowing balloons up with them, startling them into seeing what we are really doing, it's all a waste.

You are the first person in my life who decided to give up on this process of filling the emptiness and you jumped into it and I could not jump after you, even though sometimes I thought I wanted to (not enough, though, not truly enough)

The events of your life were like a scene from a airplane falling down, where you, among all the others, were the only one who refused to put on the oxygen mask that had fallen in front of you.

You knew destruction was coming, and you did not want to continue the descent. If only someone like you could be protected—and there was a possibility that, perhaps, yes, but then again, no—you wanted to fly, even though you did not want the flying to happen inside an airplane but there was no other choice.

Was that the heart of it? The problem: once again, those boundaries, once again, the directions and runways along which a human life travels, and once again that part of us that wishes we had wings like birds.

Oh, how I too sometimes wish I could fly away, but here I still need a parachute...

But if I were a bird—I allow myself, for a moment, to imagine it—how I would wake with wings on my back, and no one would stop me from flying away, far from the surface of the earth, watching everything become distant points that I could no longer quite make anything out of. Maybe then it would not hurt. Maybe it would not mean quite so much as it does down here, where everything is intertwined with everything else in a way that cannot be undone.

We cannot separate ourselves from one another. We share the same cells. We touch each other, even if we never touch even once.

And someone considers the beginning of romance to be an exchange of saliva through twisting tongues. I would argue otherwise. I would argue that it begins long way before that.

We have left our marks, before we even realize it, and when we do realize it, we try to conceal the evidence behind us, but we can't. It all shines from our faces, everything we try to hide. Everything that has meant, and still means something is there in plain sight, so bare and naked that sometimes I just want to scream: there it is, that exposed place everyone can see, but no one points out, because they are afraid and because I am afraid, and I tremble when I face it, while at the same time feeling relieved that we are not alone in this interaction even though we lie as if we could not see anything. But we can, we just don't want to. Opening your eyes to what is happening can make one jump into the abyss if it's just... too much and there is no one left to hold onto.