The Write Thing

Two sister towers stand imposingly at the center of Kuala Lumpur’s downtown, on a hot and rainy afternoon. We made that trip together from Singapore, trying to absorb the contrasts of South East Asia in a symbolic nutshell. The flight was short, but the ride from the airport longer than we had considered. There was little time…there is always little time.

And we crossed the frontier with Malaysia, back into safe, police-controlled Singapore, to catch up on sleep while fully dressed before our early morning flight. And there was a last look at the hotel rooftop, where we had slept the night before under the stars. And I could tell you were already mellow with me, different, as if I had grown into you despite yourself, as if you were no longer fighting that inner battle between saying it or not saying it. And I could sense you drifting away into the land of your own demons.

We crossed a less marked frontier in that trip, and I still choose you. My racing heart betrayed me yesterday as we lay on the couch and you finally told me what your life is really about in that city on the West Coast where I have been banned to set foot, at least for now, the outcast of our love. I knew you were going to say something important, and I still don’t know what else I will be learning about your life before me. Yet, oddly enough, we keep blaming space and time for the complexities in our relationship.

Space and time we may not have, so perhaps it is best to go with what we do have. And that is love, unknown as experienced in this life, flaky and afraid, trying to withstand the fears of us. All we will ask of it is to surmount the great divide between our mirror images, so different in many ways, and see if it makes it through and it finally builds the bridge. For that, we only need to hold on to the walls of the Menara as we climb.

You hurt today, so much, and I love you.

I guess in our lifetime there will always be moments when we will be scared, moments when we will be happy, or anxious, or willing. When I am about to travel, the mix of feelings is quite unique. It was like that before you arrived. Now it is like that, but somewhat different. Regardless of the business I have somewhere else, there is you at some point…a reward to the many days we have spent apart since I last held you in my arms in a chilly night at the local airport.

The sound of your “I love you” almost got lost in the background noise, but you were still looking at me when you said it. I had to bring that moment back to my mind several times to stop the tears from flowing when I turned around to look at you and found you there, at the boarding gate, holding your hand up in the air in your farewell gesture.

The tears did not flow, because right before we parted you had said what I had hinted at the night before, when we played around the “sides of us” that are only percentages of us, and the word love was whispered as if we were speaking of others. I know we both knew it would not be long before we said it. There is a second when you become aware that you are starting to use substitutes. A second when you know that any other word you choose to replace the only one that fits would be a partial view of the compact reflection of you, now a vulnerable creature. And you have to be vulnerable, let your defenses fall, and simply love. Otherwise, it does not work.

I’m going on that plane now to do exactly that. In the course of the next days, I want to hear those words again and I want to say them, in silence, in darkness, while we simply indulge ourselves in the miracle of being.

If I could put words to my music, tonight would certainly involve Adriana Calcanhotto’s Mulher sem Razão. There is a lot of sense in that song, in many ways. My favorite lines are definitely the following:

Parta, pegue um avião, reparta
Sonhar só não tá com nada
É uma festa na prisão

Isn’t it the cruelest and truest of facts to actually accept that “dreaming alone does not mean anything, it is a party held in prison”? I guess it is, and that sometimes you do not know better than to have your party in prison. Why not? First of all, it is safer. Second…it still feels like a party.

Tonight, as I play the track from Maré in the background, I would say it is good to accept the fear, the risk of winning and losing (please let us face there are only very few win-win situations in life…somebody sooner or later pays for lunch). It is liberating in a way, it humanizes you. Admitting that fear is sometimes all you have is good enough to help you plod along and still cross the scary waters that separate you from your dream, whatever that is.

In this month of June, in a cold and H1N1-ridden Buenos Aires, only a few days after another commercial plane crashed with no real explanation, the uncomfortable question hangs in the air. We can have the party in prison and delude ourselves into thinking there will be a reason why we will not develop the fatal flu or our plane will not be buried in the cold waters of an unfathomable sea. We can have that limited range of security to build for ourselves…the cause why, regardless of how implausible it sounds. Yet, at the end of the day, we will still have a party in prison and there…we already know the guests.