When Caroline is laying, perusing her lovers' back in her mind and wondering why today, of all days, is he blocking her out. Every single day they fall on each others arms, their last sight
always the other's face. It's an habit made out of a need to feel safe and make others safe. She sleeps like that because she wants to show her true self, unmasked, unaware self,
hoping the other person will love her back just as much as she does and, like him, will offer her most honest and vulnerable self, doesn't matter if they snore or sleep with their mouth
open, it's a simple act that symbolizes their mutual desire to reveal all whithin yourself to another. But today hasn't happened so, and instead she lays before a secret, a wall. She knows
that means something stands between them, something yet unspoken and as two beings who share all, that's the scariest "if" she could carry on her shoulders. What happened? What is her? Was
it them? Was it him? What was it? She taught me there's something subtle and symbolic about love and affection, something sublime but can be tainted by the smallest drop of blood.
Because that's what it is, even if seems like other colours and materials and origins, it was blood. Like the tiny droplet that starts raising like dough on your finger after you prick
it with a needle. Needles are harmless, and so is the droplet, but somehow, someday, that tip of your finger turned putrid. You woke up one day and instead of pink, warm flesh you're
greeted with a sour-looking stump, in colours it should never bare yet you can see them all there just the same. It seems stupid that something so harmless could so much damage, but you
can't deny what's in your sight or the fetid smell oozing from such a tiny wound. It seemed like nothing at the time but now, when your finger is all wrapped up in bandages and the doctor
urges you to rip it off before it crawls up your arm, blacken your head, your heart, you wonder "what happened? Was it me? Was it us? Was it him?" and in return you get nothing. No answear,
if you don't know where to look, if you don't learn to be aware that a needle sting sometimes carries more weight and more danger within itself than you could've ever anticipated, like a
turned back is a stupid little detail and also a symptomatic response to a deeper and scarier thing that should be checked before it's too late.
Of Meaning.
The twins probably impacted me the most. There's something very powerful about words, either an extraordinary or terrifying thing. There isn't such a thing as meaningless, even if
you really want there to be, even if you try your best to erase and to unhear, spoken words don't go back, unlike an arrow because arrows can or not hit you. Words are a day at the beach.
You bask yourself in the sun and it is fun. You are dying to enter the sea in this hot, scalding day, so you approach the shore running, clothes falling on a trail behind your steps,
first a shirt, shorts, one flip flop then another, finally the hat goes flying in the air and your feet touch cold and muddy sand, white foam delicately licking in-between your toes. The
first time you plummet your head and hair below the waves, there's a chill that runs through your spine as if taking all the heat and sweat away and once the chill is gone, you can feel
yourself merging, melting in the water, not knowing where you end and it begins. You float away, letting the current drag you away, as far as you can, as far as you feel safe, feeling
weightless, like you're part of something much, much bigger and that feels good. There's only you and there's only nothing and that feels good, it feels meant to be. When you leave the
sand and the boardwalk you can almost touch that serenity like an aura, it's addicting and you can't wait for the next day at the beach. You waited anxiously, and you did all the
preparations and you can see yourself disappearing in the water again, except today you came to the beach and not a tweet could be heard. There's a sea of faces and the crowd bothers you
as you walk past them apologizing for throwing sand in their bodies but you finally find a place to put down your baggage and you imediatelly make a line for the shore. You run, you leave
your things behind, just like before, but the sea keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and by the time you reach shore you realize that was a mistake and there's no saving yourself
now. You try to run, you may even try to help the others who trapped their foot in the sand but there was just nothing you could do. A tsunami is a powerful force of nature; not deadly,
just untameable. You can feel your feet being cut open by shards of glass other people dropped trying to escape, but it doesn't hurt, same for the bruises you'll later find out all around
your arms and legs. It doesn't hurt because you can't think about anything else but the giant wave devouring everything and everyone who dared to stop and think. You are exhausted, hurt
and afraid when the wave finally catches up to you and it engulfes everything you are. Your body, spinning underwater, you try to keep your mouth shut so you can save some breath but that
is a lost hope after so many things underwater have hit your stomach, your back, your lungs, until there's not a single bubble coming out of your lips anymore and your eyes stop spinning
for just a second, right before you loose conscience. You see, a tsunami is a powerful force of nature, but it leaves survivors. Damaged, broken and forever changed survivors, who have
lost many things and many people, but somehow are able to carry on, and you know so will you, but your heart still aches, much more than your body, while you drift away in a hospital bed,
crying for all the things you yourself lost. "Maybe If i had checked the forecast", you lament. Maybe if I had stayed further away, or in a hotel. While you ponder, a little whisper stays
trapped in that knot on your throat you keep trying to ignore, repeating over and over "the tsunami was going to happen anyway, no precaution could've avoided it" to which you ask what if
you never went to the beach in the first place? If you forgot all about the pleasures of the sea and found other places to go, maybe, just maybe, you could've kept yourself safe, but the
whisper is relentless as it warns you that's not true. There's landslides in the mountains, there's avalanches in the alps, thirst in the desert, carnivores in the savannah and so on.
Of Connection.
This is a doubled-edged sword. How much to give and how much to take, is always a struggling dance. On one hand, I see Nana singing in the dining room for the first time, moonlight before
her and the reassuring and intoxicating certainty that you're being allowed a sight so true, like a private garden, meticulously groomed over the years where only few were invited to visit.
On the other I see their bedroom door's closed and locked, to a point where they can't even figure out if there's is somebody there or not and you can feel a thick, steel wall, like a safe,
one not even the best cat could crack. At every struggle they bang louder and louder at each other's walls but somewhat aware in the back of their minds that the hardest they pound, the
much thicker their own wall becomes, because every pound that goes unasweared cuts like little blades being thrown where your own skin is its most vulnerable. They try so desperately to
reverse time back to that same first night with just the two of them, the moonlight and the music but with each step they think they're taking backwards, they're just going further away
from each other. It dawned on me there is no way forward if you don't change the path itself, there's only effort, never-ending effort. But you see, I have a thing with effort, and I never
know how much is too little and when is it too much. Of all the facets, this might be the furthest from my element. I wasn't born for balance, I'm prone to impulses and slave of my beliefs.
When have I gone too far? When have I let myself be taken apart too much? I stand still and confused just like them, uncertain and afraid of whatever their next step will be towards. I keep
trying when I should see I'm in way too deep and because of that I retreat so easily in front of something so fixable. I keep scratching at my own walls, breaking all my fingernails and
spilling all my blood inside these walls where nobody can see me cry, craving to get out and pound and pound and pound at somebodys bedroom door but after all is said and done, after i
break all my bones jumping out from the fence I put up myself, when I'm limping to your door, I realise I have no strengh left, got nothing more to offer so you'll come out your room and
talk to me, so I just silently turn away, shamefully jump back to the inside of my fortress, while I pour more steel, locking myself in a ever tighter space, praying that you'll come
knocking even if I have no idea wether there's a door I can open or not. When I'm locked inside, I dream about moonlight, only to wake up crying.
There are others, but the more I write the more I realize all wine can become vinegar and I ask myself what even is the point of bothering ourselves.
