This excerpt has the words of the song “Carry Me Ohio” by Sun Kil Moon on the little headers I made, so it is recommended for this reading.

All entries are from August 30, after midnight, waltzing to August 31.

00:18 – Today I remembered something about myself. When I was a kid, I used to make up my mind about some things based on affection, based on my experiences of being alone. I remember that when you are a kid one of the most important questions that you need to have an answer to is “What is your favorite color?” I remember that every single kid around me chose either blue (if they were a boy) or pink (if they were a girl). I chose green at that time, and it wasn’t because I had a desire to feel special or anything like that. It was because — and I do remember this — I thought to myself “all those boys are choosing blue! what about green? he will feel so alone if no one chooses him. I will choose green. He won’t be alone with me.”

I guess, if I was my own psychologist, I would say I thought this way because I was a very lonely child. I felt like an alien at a very early age, so I knew how it was to feel alone because nobody chose me. This type of thought would end up influencing other choices. Kid’s choices, like Bulbasaur (and grass starters in general) being my favorite Kanto starter. Everyone loved Charmander and Squirtle back then!!

I get reminded of these things and I suddenly feel like there may be a time where I was a kind person. How far along must I go so that I have a heart?

00:48 – I remembered something else. My first love. I wrote about her before. It’s funny because even then there was a process of deification of the woman, I guess it probably started somewhere before her in a moment I wouldn’t possibly be able to know. But she was kind, distant. My type, it seems.

I was too shy to ever try anything. In fact, I don’t even know what I could do there. We met at the start of the school year and just like that she was gone for the next year. Most of my crushes from school did the same; one year in my heart, the other in memory. I don’t remember much of her personality, but I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re a child. All that happens is some girl is nice to you and you’re in love. Yes, only when you’re a kid. Yes.

Still, there was always a self deprecating feeling when I liked someone as a kid. There was this cloud above us all back then, black as black is when you’re too young to live in the shade, and the sunlight was a spring we had to make trips to get it on our buckets and back to our village. I felt like I spoke a different language than those children, most of the time, but I tried to be happy even when I hated myself. And it was easy to hate yourself back then; it was like I had an angry side like a wild bear and a kind side like the bear’s cubs, and there was no space for being kind there on the jungle of the planets I inhabited. The brute was attractive, but to be honest, maybe I was a coward, too. I had not the strenght of the bear, just its anger. I was stuck in a matter of taste and touch, bewildered by the dispoilment of my heart, insensitive toward the victims of my hands, numb from the fall from my spaceship, and to the pain of many a finger.

Where are those children now? Has any of them died? Do they ever think of the past and wish they could’ve done something different? Or they’re cluelessly living life the way a postman delivers mail, affecting the world’s breath but not breathing, loving only the sunlight but not the Sun, ever-carrying the pain of fitting perfectly in a phrase, but having much, much more to say? How do they love? Are they also scared of texting that one girl they love from their past? Or are they together now, each deciding secretly to playfully refuse the partner’s chosen name for their baby, and seeing the date of their marriage as an opportunity of not missing one’s own birth? What do they think when they kiss? Is there love there or has it abandoned them like a cold is faded to do? Would they play with me now? Would I be able to join them and be happy with them and our toys, talking about cartoons once again? Who am I waiting on the other side of the joke of my past, if not a laugh from a future point of view? Who is there to keep me company on my memory other than the wild bear, clawing through my ribcage searching for its cub?

03:11 – I remember that I also tried to write a song about her. The first girl. It didn’t go so well because it was all too fake; I simply could not remember a single thing about her. What I needed to do was to write a love song about an idea, which I should have been used to by now, but she was an idea I feel I never had; she was as mine as words from my past, dead and orphaned to the beat of these new days. And then, she stubbornly wouldn’t house herself on any melody. She was picky on her home, as a muse should be, I guess. She needs a mansion, but I don’t feel like building mansions for her now. She will have to settle to the cabin I keep these memories that feel like they’re from another life, until I gather up the strength to pretend I care about what I felt seventeen years ago.

I prefer not to tell about what I feel now in my heart, even in these pages that no one will see. Sadly, I’m easy to read. But what do I really feel, someone may ask? What is really on my mind? Does it matter? What ails me is immovable in the same capacity that it revolves me, this pain is the moon I simply can’t shake away. And I feel feverish each day I’m away, asking myself to be forgotten. Asking myself to move as the seasons, to move as a conversation moves when you want your words to dance. And I feel inclined to say I won’t move for a long time, even though life has its turns and the world keeps getting dizzy in the orbit of the Sun. The nails keeping me in place are stronger than the carpenter who put them there.

I feel like I could still talk for hours and not get anywhere. I wish I was talking about love, but what am I even talking about anymore? I do not know. But I know winds of love when they pass me by, and those many years ago were not as easy. They were simple, so they weren’t love. But they were easy. Did I move as the seasons, then? Can you do it when you’re in love? Did I wait for her, too, in a day without her? It’s impossibly cruel the strenght of the winds of love; but how beautiful it is to be in the middle of this hurricane. Kill me dead, I don’t want to die in the arms of this day. Make me fly, lift me up to sleep in clouds of rain. But let me dream. Never stop me from dreaming a little longer each night, and praying to a cloud above my head so that the cloud can travel the world and reach her, as my own hand. That is this love; colorless light of lightning, bright as the reflection of the tears in your eyes.

About the text: I wrote something very beautiful at the end, imo, but I had to take it off, so I rewrote the end. Maybe when I die, if they find the journals on my computer, you can read what I said. Now, I prefer to put up a mist to cover myself than to be naked. I feel so silly, sometimes. In a wrong feeling. In a lonely, lonely feeling of love. But let me love a shadow before a ghost.

Credits for the headers:
1. Flight, 1957, Wellington, by E Mervyn Taylor.
2. Birds and Flowers, Freer Gallery of Art (really don’t know who painted it)
3. Cat with Kittens, Henriëtte Ronner, 1844
4. Eugène Boudin, Bathing Time at Deauville, 1865

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