Lie With Me

For a long time, I tried to write down words about his disappearance. I found a lot. I even classified them in alphabetical order, if you want to know: “abandonment,” “absence,” “death,” “departure,” “dissolution,” “erasure,” “escape,” “extinction,” “flight,” “loss,” “retreat,” “vanishing,” “withdrawal,”—the other ones I forgot.

Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.

I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late.

This passion that can’t be talked about, that has to be concealed, gives way to the terrible question: if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists? One day, when it’s over, when it finally comes to an end, no one will be able to attest to what took place.

There is the insanity of not being able to be seen together. An insanity that is aggravated in this case by the unprecedented situation of finding ourselves in the middle of a crowd and having to act like strangers.

This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

He also likes his solitude. It’s obvious. He speaks little, smokes alone. He has this attitude, his back up against the wall, looking up toward the sun or down at his sneakers, this manner of not quite being there in the world.
I think I love him for this loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world.

regardless of his pleas and ploys

do you take after your mother

Lisbon and the sadness that’s inevitable before such faded splendor.