The Story of Pilar

We are vagabonds, we travel without seatbelts on, we live this close to death.

The things we carry

I sometimes wish I was full of cliche yet inspirational quotes that would seem to make life more meaningful.

Anxiety

I'm not sleeping. Only yesterday did I realize how fast Time runs--he's an Olympic sprinter by profession. His long strides are galloping across the spread of seconds, minutes, hours, days, and I need him to slow down, I need to run faster than he does, however misguided or impossible that is.

My dreams laugh haughtily at me, a laugh from the belly that surges out of a fat and demented king: The day will come, and there is nothing you can say or do.

It's wrong to fear the passage of time, each day brings another sun, another breath, another opportunity. But I want to enjoy the Sun of May for a while longer.

Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata

Hoy le cuento al amargo
lo que es tener sentimiento,
que no importan las copas,
que eso son solo momentos,
lo que importa es la gente
y es lo mejor que tenemos
hoy te alentamos en la tierra,
pero tambien desde el cielo,
el basurero provoco hasta terremotos (LOOOOBBOOOOO).
A pesar de los descensos y los garrones (LOOOOBBOOOOO).
La locura, el descontrol y la alegria,
porque La Plata siempre fue tripa
y el sentimiento no se termina!

A simple desire

I want an eloquent garden in a nice Southern home where I can host summer garden parties, drink mint juleps and blueberry martinis, wear seersucker suits and socialize with my closest friends while picking at grapes and cheese slices under the hot sun.

No, this has nothing to do with Argentina.

Eduardo Galeano, pt. 1

Eduardo Galeano, part 1-- part 1 because I assume I will write about him again. He torments my soul, rattles my brains, makes me uncomfortable, yet embraces me all the same. I hate my relationship with this man, only because he makes me see what I did not want to see, feel what in myself had been numbed, hear the voices that have always been shouting but that the rest of the world have crowded out. He peers at me over the patio walls, follows me through the plaza, stares me straight in the face on the city bus. He transforms words into life and life into soul. And embrace after embrace after embrace, he fills my head with thoughts of learning, knowing, and yearning...

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Traditions of the Future

There is just one place where yesterday and today meet, recognize each other, and embrace, and that place is tomorrow.

Certain voices from the American past, long past, sound very futuristic. For example, the ancient voice that still tells us we are children of the earth and that our mother is not for sale or for hire. While dead birds rain on Mexico City and rivers are turned into sewers, oceans into dumps and forests into deserts, this voice, stubbornly refusing to die, heralds another world different from this one that poisons the water, soil, air and soul.

The ancient voice that speaks to us of community heralds another world as well. Community--the communal mode of production and life--is the oldest of American traditions, the most American of all. It belongs to the earliest days and the first people, but it also belongs to the times ahead and anticipates a new New World. For there is nothing less alien to these lands of ours than socialism. Capitalism, on the other hand, is foreign: like smallpox, like the flu, it came from abroad.

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Forgetting

Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world's tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.

Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes ever May 1st were hanged in 1886.

"It must be around here," they tell me. But nobody knows where.

No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.

May 1st is the only truly universal day of all humanity, the only day when all histories and all geographies, all languages and religions and cultures of the world coincide. But in the United States, May 1st is a day like any other. On that day, people work normally and no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ears of a goat or from the hand of God or the boss.

After my fruitless exploration of the Haymarket, my friends take me to the largest bookstore in the city. And there, poking around, just by accident, I discover an old poster that seems to be waiting for me, stuck among many movie and rock posters. The poster displays an African proverb: Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.

Two months in a cocoon

I'm peaking out my head, slowly prying away this shell, slowly revealing the moth that was always within, but still exhibiting the hardened larvae without. My wings twitch, unable to spread, my eyes hover, unable to see around the corner of my de facto home. I am restless, unaware of how to use this new body I inhabit.

Amanecer

The sun crawls slowly around the curtains of the room, giving just enough light to see the outline of her resting body. Her lips slightly parted, her mind fluttering behind her eyelids, she’s caught in a dream. And I sit up beside her and wonder where she is as she explores a world outside my own.

I place my fingertips on her arms, softly painting invisible lines on her skin. I breathe in the dry air, exhale it slowly just to match the movements of her chest, in and out, in and out. All the while, the seconds, minutes, hours crawl, but time doesn’t exist in this space where we meet, two abstracts, two worlds.

It continues, in and out, in and out, and the light pushes desperately against the curtain, and the curtain fights desperately to keep us safe. And I watch her as she watches the cinema in her head, eyes fluttering, lips parted.

Without the slightest indication, her eyes burst open with a shout of aqua, an exposition of the soul; my world becomes hers and hers mine as the room explodes with a light only we can create.