‘Paloma de Lorca y Tomy’

January 18th 2021. Around 18:30

I was wandering purposefully in the city. First stop, as usual, my favourite park. It is still covered in snow, or rather ice now, but still white and beautiful, reflecting the uniquely stunning atardeceres of Madrid; purple and creamy, rich and dreamy. Found a perfect bar and sat to have some wine. Just for an hour, I think… Maybe I’ll write something.

‘Naked I go under layers of wool,
naked I go under layers of you…
Skin exposed to the cruelty of your shocking indifference.’

‘What’s your story?’, I write.
‘Who are you, really???’, I repeat in my mind.
Everything I know about you is contradictory…

—

This is ludicrously perfect. A crispy evening, vintage decor, jazzy tunes, big windows…

It’s just me here, a couple with their baby and a lonesome man in front of the framed sunset as it dissolves into twilight behind the naked winter trees, and then turns into the night.

An old man just came in, carrying his own wooden chair.
A couple enters now, knocking over the vintage lamp at the entrance. Everybody keeps hitting it upon entry, it was expected. Instead of a bell at the door to announce the new customers-usually regulars-there’s that lamp that everyone almost knocks over. This place requires a certain delicate touch. The regulars know, so they enter with reverence. That’s how you can tell who has been here before.

This is not the 1940s, this is not a movie, this is not a novel, I know. I don’t want to be writing as if I live in another era, honestly I don’t, but I just keep finding these places that just fit. I am an absolute cliché sitting here, sipping red wine, writing in my notebook, next to a red vespa and a lady with her dog. But what can one do? We are who we are, we do what we do, and if that isn’t hurting anyone, then it’s kinda cute.

Ok, I just made acquaintance with the dog. His name is Tommy (of course). He is a good boy. The lady is in her 30s. She is knitting. This is a movie, after all.

Play that song, barman, that song about a girl in a bar observing someone outside who is checking her reflection, wondering if she can be seen-to be seen, to be seen-as she anticipates some sort of meet-cute with a let’s presume handsome stranger that will save her from her lonesome walk home and the cold. Or was it a diner? Yes! Play ‘Tom’s Diner’, barman! The swing version by ‘The Lost Fingers’.

Literally, there is a red vespa next to me, and my handwriting is becoming increasingly unintelligible… We are inside and it’s warm. 
The window frames the twilight over the city, the lit fairytale-like cathedral of Almudena and the homes beyond the noise in the valley, as seen from the corner of a park hanging from a cliff; an eagle’s-nest-view. 

I really wish I could bring you here. I wonder if you’d appreciate it or waste yet another beautiful thing I show you.

I am a sitting cliché in this joint, but come to think of it, so is everyone else in here, and I love them for it. Typecasted. We typecast this place.

Sometimes things just fit. And it is perfect. Wholesome. Sometimes something is amiss and it leaves you with a gaping void and acute cognitive dissonance, like the ‘you and me’ thing…

(You have become a pivot around which things turn and take shape, like a pottery wheel, the handsome man behind me guiding my hand, aptly a Ghost. Maybe this is your function and the only justification for your entry into my life…)

I used to think it’s a bit pompous writing about locations in stories, like ‘Hey, look! Im a sophisticated expatriate living in a gorgeous European city’. And yet I can’t resist the urge of telling you about how flippin beautiful this place is; ‘Los Jardines de las Vistillas’. Or should it remain unnamed, a mysterious location in a storybook? When you are a foreigner at a place and you chose it to make it your home, it acquires a certain magical quality. Your presence in it almost feels like an achievement that you want to claim and baptise, claim it as a part of you and yourself as a part of it. This is my name, and I’m here. This is the name of the place and I am here. As if you broke through the pages of a book and found yourself at a place of your own creation that feels like home and yet will never feel real. You live in it fearing that someone might take it away or you out of it, or wake you up from it, and that makes you love and defend it all the more. You want to renew your bond to it, weld your joints to it. That’s the beauty and peril of living on your own terms and having been fortunate enough (if excruciating personal suffering and sacrifice and making insane decisions can be considered fortunate) to choose your own home.

There’s Tommy, again… Tommy – the name of that character I wrote before I met you that looks and sounds so much like you. Is the presence of this dog trying to tell me something? As he comes looking at me through his mopey hairdo and adorable eyes, with his enthusiastic love and eagerness to play, is it the universe’s way of compensating me for you infuriating apathy? Focus on Tommy! He might have the key. O es algo mas sensillo… Una casualidad. Todo ha sido una casualidad que se disfrazó como algo con significado. O quizá aun no he visto o escrito el final… Y por eso la historia no tiene sentido, todavía… The clumsy Spanish is kicking in along with the second glass of wine.

I am just realising what every single writer has been saying all along; the stories hide amidst the bullshit you write intoxicated by alcohol or ambition or despair, in your free time. No one spews out masterships-I meant to write ‘masterpieces’ but I’ll keep the error, it might have purpose. It’s all a lot of blue vomit that you might shape into a blue something.

—-

Sorry, dear reader, I got distracted…

I ended up having champagne with the older man who brought his own chair, his name is Jose, a former diplomat who knows the history of my country, the knitting Lady who is called Paloma, ‘Paloma de Lorca’ I call her, to remember, her dog Tommy, the old pal, and the barman, Rashid…. I ended up having drinks with the characters from my story! Woody Allen can eat my dust. Fucking beautiful people. Hey, now I’m writing swearwords in my prose… does this make me an accomplished and cool modern writer? Or is that distinction reserved just for men (and Zadie Smith?). Is that outdated already in Year 2021, let’s call it ‘Jahr Null’?

I don’t know if I paid for my drinks but Rash is politely shooing us all out, before he closes up and joins us outside. It’s ‘late’, after all…22.00! The new curfew kicks in an hour from now. We better rush home or stroll in a small, insignificant act of defiance. Did someone pay for my drinks or am I a criminal now?
Let the record state, that with my remaining faculties, I did ask for the bill….

P.S. None of the above events has been greatly exaggerated. Except, maybe, the champagne. It was probably just a nice Brut…
P.S. 2 This is how I made friends who gave me their numbers, at the back of bills I didn’t pay…

Horse Manure

Where do you start with all this?

Let’s begin with a description.

It’s a cafe, of course, in Madrid. I’m writing on a long wooden table. I’m not sure what the source of it is, but it smells a bit like horse shit. It’s not fresh and I didn’t bring it with me. I know, because it’s been here for over a year. The ghostly whiff of horse manure, accompanies my attempted trip into the source of words in the dungeons of my brain, which has been out of touch and out of order for a few months, due to, well, everything…

-Don’t get distracted by trying to actually write, get back to the description-

Ok. Well, it’s all quite organic in here and that’s why I like it and I guess that’s why the horse manure is sort of apt and fitting to the horse shit that’s coming up through my keyboard. It’s a gestalt of creative ineptitude. It helps, though. Nothing better to get your writing going but the reminder of its futility / of one’s incompetence and failure / of the comedy of the endeavour. Continuing to bang on the keys, like a drunken piano player, is the cry of stubbornness and refusal to give up, because we all know, or have no choice but to hope that under the manure, there can be some golden nuggets, or at least, at worst, a swallowed lost ring or a whole cranberry from the bushes, excreted too soon before it’s digested, which might save you from hunger or despair. Anyway, back to the decor… The lights are soft and amber-coloured, dim enough to allow absolute engrossment into never-worlds. Plants, of course, which might be growing in horse manure… Bricks on the walls, nice little red bricks that look just like the cover of the book that’s under my hand; ‘The Collected Stories’ of Grace Paley, with a foreword by George Saunders. I should probably credit her for allowing even this nonsense to come out for a change. Above me hang multi-coloured, fancy modern-retro lamps in pastel-coloured glass casings; my favourite. The ones on the walls are guarded by magnifying glasses. I never noticed them before and they are really cool. I should put something like that together in my room, in case it wasn’t a fire hazard enough with all the fairy lights hanging around to provide the illusion of warmth and home and hope of filling that room up with people when things-if things-would things-will things- get better and magical again? I will hope. This year, I will hope because last year I just expected -the worst- and it was double the suffering. So next year, I will hope, like a dumb idiot who’s just been born, I will hope. There are some impressive rusted iron structures that look like wood. I kinda wanna kiss whoever designed this place. By now, since I started writing this, I’ve grown used to the horse manure smell and don’t notice it anymore. There is a metaphor here somewhere. Do we need to talk about it?

Oh, by the way it’s Christmas Eve Eve. There is no going home, not for me, not for most people this Christmas, but that’s ok. I’ll enjoy the novelty. One good thing I’ve done this year has been enjoying the novelty. It’s kinda nice to know that you’re in the same city. It makes it feel warmer. Even if I don’t get to see you for a while, even if you don’t even care to see me, even if you’ll spend these celebrations and drinking games with others, your existence in the same city as me, provides the illusion -just like Santa Claus- that something magical could still happen. That the return of a person can give so much joy. Even if, like Santa Claus, it’s all lies we buy ourselves as gifts.

You know, I was in this cafe that time, that day I saw you, the day before lockdown. I sat at the same table and wrote on paper all that you woke up in me and all that you’ve made me feel and then I convinced myself to let you go. It was impossible for anything to happen, it seemed. It was the wrong time. Then as I went on my walk to contently cement my resolutions, I see you, on the road, by chance again, an oddly frequent event, which keeps occurring at all the wrong (or right?) moments.  Pointless synchronicity? A universal glitch? (Will someone ever explain those, please?). And from there, where it should have ended, it all begun. We did it all wrong and the other way around. There were all these obstacles and reasons why it shouldn’t be pursued, except the element of both of us wanting each other and our curiosity to see where it goes. All the maddening horse shit that brought me here now. Now in reverse, now more mature but less comfortable with my solitude. Now maybe you are not as lost but you’ve lost your curiosity.There are bigger mysteries out there, you think, and you are starving for them. You find your magic in the dark. Which is kinda cool, I guess. We got acquainted through the prince of darkness after all and fell for the destructive romance of his tragic love songs.

If only we met years from now, when you were no longer starving. If only I had met you at a different stage of your personal development. There we go again, as soon as I start writing about you, I go dumb.

The Sea in the Middle

All the world existed
In the distance between you and me
Even if geographically, it was only just a sea
And if I think about it the case still persists.
Except it’s an ocean now,
And the ports have vanished
I don’t know,
I can’t see
From here

The Letter

Hey (you),

Let’s pretend we live in a novel, where old lovers reach out through the years and send letters seeking closure and that that’s totally normal. This is just an over-due reply to messages sent long ago. I hope it’s not incredibly intrusive but it is nothing more than that, just the end of a conversation. Closure. You were in a dream of mine last night, which brought you back to my mind as someone familiar and I suppose that is what gave me the courage to write this letter.

The problem is that you were in my dream last night. I feel like there is some unfinished business that has remained unresolved and suspended in time since the time we were familiar and that, like a ghost in the form of you, creeps back in to my subconscious through the cracks of broken memories and corrupt mental synapses and I wake up writhing in pain some mornings from time to time. I guess I am too sentimental. I guess the reason why this still hovers over my head and my life is because we never really had the chance to have a tête-à-tête to talk through it all after the end and that was a bit cruel because we or at least I never reached proper closure but circumstances had to have it that way. This letter seeks to close the gaps and seal them, to let things go and remove any possible trauma. It has been 6 whole years and this is my end to the conversation.

We were kids, I know… the pictures bare witness to that; our skin still soft, our faces still fresh and pure and smiling truthfully, our eyes still filled with sparks and wonderment. I was a year older; maybe that is why I suffered a bit more because even though you knew of life a lot more than I did, I guess you still had growing up to do and so did I. Perhaps it all meant more to me than it did to you but that’s OK, I have made peace with that possibility. Regardless of our age, what I felt then was the strongest I’ve ever felt about anything – perhaps because I cloaked myself in a veil of numbness after that, unable to bare something as painful and perhaps as beautiful a second time. Or perhaps, I just grew up.
There are other loves that come afterwards, and they are wonderful, but there is something different about that first time. Perhaps I have always been infatuated with the idea…

Everything that happened then, all that I experienced with you were pivotal moments in my life and an inseparable part of my being since they made me grow to who I am today, although certainly a lot less innocent, and dare I say wiser. Perhaps because it was such a big part of me is why it was hard to let go. Perhaps my memories of everything are distorted and I can’t remember the events objectively enough for what they really were. Maybe you remember things much differently and maybe I am over-sentimental, as I tend to be. I kept your letter, the one you gave me on my birthday. This is what I remember from you, I remember you truly loving me. I don’t know if that was child’s play but in any case it is in the past. I just want the story to be a good one and I want you to remember me as you saw me in that letter. That is all I ask, to be remembered well.

I went back to read the last of our conversation that we conducted through the messages in the Book of Faces to see what the last words we exchanged were. I was embarrassed to see how that girl spoke. I don’t exactly recognize her now but it made me realize a few things. That girl I was back then in the last days and a bit after that, was really insecure and spoke with a sense of ownership over you and assumed that you and she shared a single conscience. She was so scared of losing you, her first love, the love of her life at the time, that she went a bit mad, and in her fear and confusion she threw out all her wordy ropes trying to tie you down next to her like a wild animal that needed taming to make sure you wouldn’t go away from her. But that made you want to run more, understandably. I would like to apologize on her behalf and this is mostly an apology to myself, so I can forgive myself first and foremost. I am not that girl. However I do hope you understand why she spoke in that manner, she was so scared. She really loved you, you know. However, I don’t want anyone to remember me that way; it is as if a part of the world is misrepresenting me and I don’t want that. What else are we but the stories in the minds of the people whose lives we’ve crossed and sometimes touched? I hope you chose to remember what was good about her. If I can make any requests of you is just that: Please remember what was good about her. I shall do the same for you.

I chose not to reply to your last message back then because I was too hurt, angry and resentful and I guess nothing of what I wanted to hear was in that message, it wasn’t an apology as it claimed to be or at least not the one I needed but maybe you didn’t feel like you owed me one or maybe there were too many things written between the lines that I couldn’t possibly read since I lacked the objectivity. I can’t know, I can’t speak on your behalf; I can only speak of and clear my side.
And here is where I must briefly share my grievances. Yes, you did affect my life immensely and profoundly, equally in good as well as bad ways. I was deeply wounded and changed by it all, by your influence as well as your actions but, us humans, we do that to each other…You said you didn’t think or care enough about how I would feel and you may say it was your life and you did whatever you wanted with it and you should, but you forgot that I was still attached to you… it had only been a few days, so little time. I still carry all that with me. You disposed of me so ungracefully and I don’t think I deserved that…
The reason I didn’t reply was that I was confused, hurt, I felt humiliated; the world as I knew it had collapsed around me and I was still lost in the rubble and I had to rebuild everything, including myself. My reply would have been filled with bitterness which would show a vulnerability that I wouldn’t forgive myself for afterwards, vulnerability that I have regretted showing before, so I chose to say nothing at all. But somehow I needed to respond, there is much I needed to say and that’s what this letter is for. I finally have the words and composure to address the unsaid. I don’t wish to victimize myself, all I wanted was a conversation with an equal, as if I wasn’t a ‘stranger’ as you insinuated, insignificant and inconsequential. I wish I did have that conversation with you to put it all to rest, because it still haunts me even if it doesn’t haunt you.

We are a lot older now; 6 years have passed, we are working on our own paths in life. I don’t know how you chose to remember those times, I don’t know if and how they traumatized you, or if they are still a notable chapter in your life. It’s certainly a story worth telling for me. I don’t know how you chose to remember it or me or if you ever do. Maybe you chose to tear up all the pictures and burn up the memories and pretend that it never happened. Maybe you don’t remember why you loved me in the first place although I hope that’s not the case. Maybe I am a vague memory of your early youth. Maybe I never cross your mind…

I had to turn you into a ghost, like a work of fiction that didn’t really exist in order to be able to move on then. I guess we were lucky we were geographically so far apart. But as a result you turned into a mythical creature, a ghost that shows up every now and then without being there and it needs to go away so I’m trying to send it back to you reaching through time and space. I have moved on and I have loved again so I really have to let the ghost go, it is unfair to me and it is unfair to others.

I am still chasing my ‘dreams’, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed. I’ll only keep the stories of the past as inspiration. I hope you are still writing as I have admired the gift you have always had with words, that ‘which converted [me] to [you] so long ago’ even though it fooled me at times. I hope to read your stories some day, find them in quaint little bookstore. I hope you are well and I wish you luck with whatever you do. I hope 23 year-old you is reading this with a smile. I don’t really know who you are now so I guess I’m sending a letter to a 17 year-old boy back in time. In any case, I needed to write this to end the conversation, for me, and I don’t know, maybe for you too.

We were kids, its true but we were old enough to love truly or at least I was and I will not use ‘we were young’ as a mitigating factor because that would nullify everything. In any case, friend, this is a message I needed to send, in quest for peace. I don’t require any sort of response, perhaps it’s better that this letter is inconsequential. I’ll leave that to you… I don’t even know if this will get to you but I had to send this as a letter.

If this letter means nothing to you, then, dear friend, please have mercy, do not mock me; consider this fiction, some mediocre reading material that has wasted a bit of your time. ☺
If it does, well… perhaps it doesn’t matter and perhaps I will never know.

Just keep the good stuff, alright? Safeguard that summer/year somewhere; cherish them, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of romance.

That is all from me, do what you will with these pages. Just pretend we live in a novel in another era and this is a sweet albeit poignant gesture. These pages should be read lightly and it would be better to take them with a bit of humour, which is somewhat how I intended them. In any case, I hereby free you, in an attempt to free myself. Take care of yourself. Farewell, dear ghost, I truly wish you well.

With affection,
An old friend who has grown up/
Someone from another life and another time.

P.S. Always…

A Forgotten Rendez-Vous

Painting by Eugene J. Paprocki

It was ten years from then. It was a French café on a pebble-stone road with the tables set outside. Some late spring- early summer sunshine was peering through the overcast sky. You could see some patches of blue rebelling against the grey scale of the scenery. People were passing by; beautiful people dressed glamorously, but this was not their time. In this moment they merely existed as perfect shadows speeding by in the background as something else was taking place, the most glorious scene never to be played at this celebrated film festival. Yes, there was rain, you painted-in the rain. You always said you liked winter more.

This is the picture we set up, the perfect place where we would meet, ten years from then. There were you or I, sitting at the table outside unconcerned about the rain. The drops were glowing in blues and golds on the waves of your hair. There was a smile on your face and your eyes were wandering, scanning the shadows for a matching hue of blue-you knew it would be blue. A notepad under your nervous fingertips which were drumming to the beat that sounded through your chest, and a pencil between your teeth and the fingers of your right hand. You were chewing on it as if it was a piece of straw, like the Tom Sawyer that you were, a Tom Sawyer that grew up. You watched and you waited, immersed in the scenery, drenched under the showers. I could see you.

In one version of the story, the original one, I watch you, marvel at you. I relish the poetry of your image from afar for a few more moments and then I walk over to you. I am wearing a dress; it’s blue. You stand up and you gaze as I approach. You scan my silhouette, then you reach my eyes and your gaze reaches a standstill. You stare. You looked so deep inside, that it almost hurt. You were startled by your past image as it reflected into my eyes but you were mostly aching with nostalgia, as was I, seeing my younger self reflect in yours that same moment. You hugged me so tightly in an almost involuntary reaction and although guarded and hesitant at first, I let go and returned the embrace, so firmly, so softly and that moment lasted forever…

In another version, I don’t walk over. I stand there at the bridge by the river opposite the cafe observing you from afar, unwilling to instigate the action that would lead to our encounter. Maybe it’s better that way, more beautiful, more tragic, that we both remain as those antique images of separated lovers, ghostly figures with our future tied up to the faded past, both of us waifs of fiction. Maybe it is better if we don’t meet and we don’t know what happens. Because, there is this other version… in which we see each other but it hurts too much to talk, it hurts too much to make each other real again so we walk away once more in opposite directions, with someone’s tears meeting the rain.

And then there is this version… The one where one of us does not show up to this forgotten rendezvous arranged so long ago. The one where it is not you but I, who sits at that table in the rain, notepad under my finger tips, pencil between my teeth and my right thumb. I am painting the landscape with ghosts.