Abandonment is the largest betrayal,
right?
"I'm a single kid of split parents", I've popped this line here and there when making acquaintances this past year. I fantasized about being part of a single kids club--- are we irredeemably selfish? convinced of our own specialness? insensitive to needs beyond our own? single kid or not, I guess it depends on the economy of closeness and distance to love and loving that you go through.
Dear readers,
The love I've met growing up was wide and large, bordering on infinite, stretched with distance.
I'm sorry for being irresponsible with this newsletter, Vinícius. I'm sorry I dropped the ball. Another dance took me by its hand.
The love I've met is intermittent, too. It would come in more or less predictable flashes, until the spaces between lighting and thunder began to grow grow grow until the rolling humming thrumming menace hanging in the air was all I could taste. Tsc. Love instilled with anxious feelings.
I was irresponsible, I couldn't respond. I had answers, too many, the bottleneck was physical: my actual neck, fizzled desire, see? I would stand up and do, anything else. My dad once told me something like "once the time comes I'll do something about it", speaking of his back pain. The man couldn't raise his butt off the couch without a whimper, but hey, time hadn't come, not yet.
Time had come and left.
Time was disgusted with what it saw.
Time didn't care. Time was still here.
Time was a butterfly, we just didn't see it.
A glasswing butterfly, I'll attach a picture, look.
Further down, go look,
I'll wait. Please come back.
I will wait.
After the second year of waiting, I will wait.
Don't worry, I will be here
savoring a love thick made so thin
Writing doesn't make sense when it's not tasting, tsc, touchinghearing, it doesn’t make sense when it is not sensing, when it looses body and the words don't make move. If anything, it should make me move towards the phone to tippity tap tap type this, here. But there were so many shiny things calling: people, first and always, and luggage to be made and plans to be drafted, and daydreams to be hallucinated and let’s be honest, the samosa from the kiosk down the corner was probably more important for me too, than squiggly lines on a keyboard, and then phone calls and silly dances and disappointing friends and getting away with it all messed up, I went to Malmö and to France and there's been so much grief. Nah, I didn't burn out.
But so many stars in the sky did.
Some crazy romantic poetic cliché shtick like:
"we are made of the dust of stars"
he said, my dad, earnestly. dead stardust, dad, we're made of dead stardust.
We can't tell the difference looking at the stars, which are dead or alive. That's the problem of a poetics and a love and a physics that includes
distance,
distance multiplied.
My father didn't abandon me, and I didn't abandon this newsletter, but we've been taking our time twirling around the world (the selfish, socially inept world of ourselves) to come back and give some kind of contour to this infinite love.
Thing is, the more spacious and boundless (I just wanted to use the word boundless), the hardest to wield: imagine Atlas holding up a planet that grows grows and grows. Imagine hugging with only your two arms 2 billion people, 9 billion. Imagine the muscles stretching. How the fuck did Jesus do this shit.
I mean, I love the idea of inclusion
so I can include myself.
Of including distances,
so I can still name love the dance I dance with my dad,
but this is stretching and testing the limits of love, and hopefully of writing too.
Thank you for hosting me, Vini.
I will pop back again here and there, whenever it feels like my words are ripe with fresh juice in need of a good squeeze.
Adam, if you are reading this, I’m still so curious if my writing still registers a “highschool manner” (no offense taken! I’m still amused by the remark, aha).
I hope my ghostly manners infuse this space
with wild abandon,
Marina D.
ps.
I will continue my tacky proposal of recommending stuff in the end of this newsletter to recommend back something Vini recommended me: a book called Pure Colour. It is a book about the creation of the universe, and about love, but mostly it is a book about me and my dad. Thank you for reading!
[Written at 2 a.m. under the influence of 200g of chocolate.]
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