Compared to the sun, all the fires here
are short-lived, amateurish—
they end when the leaves are gone.
Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.
But the death is real.
Louise Glück
ASHES
Dear JM, I want to write to you about the things that remain with the fire. While I prepare myself I turn on the radio. I don't listen to it. I turn on the television. The images are projected to nobody. I start the computer. I sit down. I breathe. I put on music that suggests Youtube. I review financial statements. I start Facebook. I check a page with the news of the day. In another window I watch porn. While I move the mouse I think about the clitoris. My clitoris. A hint of oblivion is outlined on the tip of my finger. I go back to the press. From this place I see how the world is falling apart. I am a kind of astronaut who, indolent, orbiting, looks at the planet Earth. In the absence of pain, I try to absorb my own pain by not being the one suffering elsewhere, in some press report. However, I find no comfort, do I?
I look in Google ash. Wikipedia definition. Then Volcanic Ash and Fly Ash. Another option is funny to me. Castro and Putin: Where there was fire, ashes remain. Now I look in Google human ash. More interesting. According to what I am looking for. Wikipedia defines cremation for me. Another link proposes me to turn human ashes into diamonds. Imagining it as a business makes me nauseous. Another suggestion recommends the need (maybe physical, maybe spiritual) to scatter the ashes; it offers instructions, addresses legal aspects, companies that do it for one, because if I decide to scatter them in the sea, I must do it five kilometers away from the mainland. I feel the need to scatter them. Maybe I should plant a tree to imagine that there you are reborn. But can a few ashes be someone?
I talk to the vase. It is in front of me. I caress it even though it is not your skin. Nor your hair. I still want it. Is it you, are you there?
I decide to leave. I take a bus. I walk. I wander. I think I don't belong to this city. Nor to its crowd. I am definitely alien to all the ills of countless passers-by, drivers, shopkeepers, beggars, policemen, schoolchildren, prostitutes.
I get on another bus. I stay on a beach. I attend my last appointment with the abyss, do we go? This is one of those moments when souls come out alone and bodies walk as if lost in a space that does not exist.
I walk on the beach. I take off my shoes. I want to swim naked. I stop my impulse. I dive into the sea. I dress. Hidden. From here I see you on the beach. The sun hits you with its light. Your brightness distracts me. At the end of the sea, the faded mountains, and beyond the writing of a strange sky. The air perfumes my breath. It makes it almost material. The sky closes up. The clouds cover the sun but I feel that they blind me. All the cold of the sea air. All the fear. And then all the shame. They come together in the same unmovable point.
A bird sits close by. It gives me back your memory. It seems to return from I don't know what shadow. Cloudy day in the Caribbean. The December wind hits the last certainty of something that should already die. Life is swept away and the rain shuts down our steps. I don't even know who or why I was called to this invitation so many years later. I cry. This is not the place to spread out you. I float. The sea expels me in its waves. I look at the world. It irritates me that it keeps spinning as if it nothing.
I try to take a bus. I am not allowed to get on it soaking wet. I wait to dry off. I go back to the city. From the buses, people come out like vomited, taking steps outside. The sun emerges illuminated by clean, limpid beams. I walk. An unfathomable laziness deters me. I enter a park. I go through it. I scatter some of the ashes. Some of the dust adheres to my body. Are you coming back to me?
An area of the park looks like an old wasteland. The mango groves stand up immensely. Next to the thick grass and the rotund clarity of the afternoon, everything acquires the touch of a soft flag, an oasis. I see a couple holding hands. Kissing each other, they think they love each other and believe that it will be eternal. He says something in her ear. She caresses his hair. Their mouths become confused. They look like two idiots who exercise their desire with impunity in the light of day and in the sight of all. I feel envy. No, I rather feel pity. I look at them with scorn. I have returned from the catastrophe that they do not know is about to happen to them.
Without realizing it, I have thrown all the ashes away. It has remained almost in the same place. The afternoon, so thin, is a dizziness, a whirlwind where I feel walnut. The ashes leave a physical pain lodged in my vertebrae. The joy of Sunday is alien to me, but in the voices, in the bicycles, in the tireless swings, even in the people's clothes and in the sand, I seem to find meaning in the city. The bark on the tree trunks, ancestral, seems to be the unique testimony of time among so much eternal water and so many flowers that die beautifully.