“Where do bad folks go when they die?
They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly
They go to a lake of fire and fry
Won’t see ‘em again ‘till the 4th of July”
“Lake of Fire” by the Meat Puppets

I slept one day inside the hospital I was born in, with the useless dance as a short pilgrimage to the be and through the was. As I moved my bones, they were soft and quiet, waiting for the winds of a summer I would not see. I layed my head in my white pillow, to be one with the feathers. I was a person, but not quite. I was a long word, but not a phrase. I don’t think I’m eternal in the blood I spill with sincerity. My exclusive gift to the world is sold in sales across the whole country. But less talk about you, let’s talk about you. You are here with me now, through a tiny and gigantic cable going under the ocean where our lips move. You are words, but not quite. You move in a salient breeze, casting shadows on the eversun of many a man. But through this dying land, we’re still miles away from water and little ants can be seen cowering at the Sun’s life. You are not a rose, for roses are not eternal. You pick the trash to comb its hair in your useless dance that will soon end. You say you’re happy, which is the word you commonly use to describe yourself when you’re pathetically lonely. And rain comes from under the pillow and you die and that was the last hand you held. Rain dies and you die and love was all that. You were awake through it all, but you’re dead now and you ask “where have i been all this time, to let this person live inside me?” You see infinity and think it’s where you’re going. But love is not infinity, love is time, even if a lot of us have a lot of time and the love doesn’t seem to grow. It’s just that time is the main ingredient and the unit of measurement of all things in life. You are bathed in a sunlight that is bigger than any feeling that’s painted inside the stars of your universe, and that sunlight too will end when the Sun dies. The little ants don’t know that, but you do. You will die and then the universe will die and that was love for you. The roses left on the ground, the great lockets inside each conversation. I reflected that on the deathbed but, of course, I am not me. But it made me interested on a different type of introspection: the rat one’s type.

To the rat, you see, this is a common appearance. On the land of the devils, you are one in a million and the rat can only find you through the smell of someone being pathetically needy, since without that no one would feed the rat. For the rat, you don’t have it all. That is why the rat is always close to a black hole in your shared universe; all that rats need are black holes on the wall and they live inside your house for their forever. He saw a new you on a magazine yesterday. There was a new you on instagram and he saw it. He has a new you on his job. As a doctor, he found a new you in a patient. Rain will fry you from out of his black hole and you will die one day and this was love to you. You are someone in someone’s life and that is love for you.

But to this text, you shall not leave. To this text, you have it all and you are eternal. So you are not love, but still it is. Still you are. You’re a boy on his hospital bed, dreaming about ouroboros and dying like in a movie. You can be loved, too. But you have to understand that love is not only time, as you saw that time can build a very useless dance once you’re in hands that cannot hold a fork to eat a soup. Love needs not kindness, only. Not time, only. Love is the movement of a hand waving goodbye. And you are a thief; you had your fun, you don’t get well no more. Love is the main ingredient of your watered down drink you spill in the freezing Cocytus.

“People cry and people moan
And look for a dry place to call their home
And try to find some place to rest their bones
Before the angels and the devils try to make ‘em their own”
“Lake of Fire” by the Meat Puppets

About this text: It’s about love and it’s about dying, two things I seemed to have a lot of time to think about recently. It’s inspired in — and it’s almost verbatim — a conversation I had with a friend I’m starting to think doesn’t really like me anymore, who defended his claims that “love can’t be time because there are some people that I spend a lot of time with but I don’t like being in their presence”.