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The girl remembers! The child remembers! Trumpet the new morning the end of solitude! We remember we remember!
All light forever! End of darkness end of mankind!
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The girl sits back. She remembers. It ended like that. For a few hours her face turned against the wall. The man on the other side of the world drinking alone in front of the fire. All is still to be done. So much still. The cold of the universe picks up at her skin. Then the man comes back like he always does. Tonight something might change. We know otherwise. Time has proven a question of evolution not mere repetition. He brings back some warmth his whiskey breath sweet words. His body looks for hers we remember it. She will give in. There is no other way to survive the night. She’s still young here. She still remembers it fondly squeezes herself into the memory.
On the other side of the cosmos he lives his pain differently. For a few hours he abandons himself to the waves as if he didn’t think himself stronger. He is but she knows it’s pointless to remind him. The man must suffer also by his own hand to think himself a man. We have seen it over and over again. What matters tonight is that she’s there and he’s elsewhere. Running after her wouldn’t have changed much but something small the little part of that which can be remedied the daily residue. There will be no end to her suffering even if they will never tell each other. He’s forgotten that death is an option. He always does. She has chosen so hard to stay. It's so early in the history of mankind so much has to be prepared and be given life to but she knows already that something else is going to be born someday. But she doesn’t want to look at that the death and birth of the starts. She wants to remember.
After time she remembers. She remembers the first time she tried to kill herself. He doesn’t know he never will. It was one of the first nights of her seventeen years just before they stopped mattering. We remember the steps before. The total absence of thought the lightness of her steps. She could barely feel the body as it walked towards the bathroom but that was to be blamed on the drugs. We remember that incredible feeling in her limbs as if everything was still possible. For a couple hours it didn’t hurt. The most powerful memory is how clear and unreal her vision felt how well-cut and distant. The feeling that the air was blue and delicate. We remember when she started feeling the absence of oxygen. The wait. She never told him. The rope fell and she lived onwards. She just didn’t want to be alone in front of the dark. Two years afterwards at the end of an impossible bike ride he asked her to be with him. The life she knew the one she wanted to abandon was leading to that moment. Splendid the memory stays and she revels in it. How beautiful it is to see her swimming in memory.
Everything else lined up nicely afterwards. It all makes sense. The pain of the last years the feeling that her skeleton would jump out of her body when she wasn’t with him. The colour of the sand in the night the waves making a soft noise for once. She remembers this well. We remember the chain of situations that led to that night. We see it all we are past the point of forgetting. Her friends and his friends the parties poisoned by secret jealousy of rancour as potent as a drug then small dramas small kisses worthless. She remembers perceiving him come into the room like the sun comes in from the window. The ice cream falls down. The freshness of his skin as she grasped on him riding fast across the night. The first time he took our hand. Two kids that didn’t know anything. The years. His courage her fear our fear our courage. We conquered it all. She remembers the feeling of years lived in his absence his sun appearing for two months in the summer then living with the thought of him across winter like a second shadow covering everything until she stopped noticing. She was already more than one we were already hiding in that negative space. Love was the first exercise. She lingered far longer than usual but we gave us the greatest gift.
She remembers his great patience as he sat under a palm tree. As he looked away from her from us. She remembers how it felt to say yes. As if the darkness had cleared as if she had been choosing then and there to live. For the first time. We remember her asking ourselves if this was life making little compromises as you go along binding yourself to someone else to muster a feeling of responsibility something to ground ourselves or if she was still and always waiting for the next stumble the next fallout. He turned towards her and she thought him a god with the full beauty of this twenty-five years the one he didn’t know he had. His hair sun-combed the fear in his eyes.
All of this came back like waves throughout the years of her life. Sometimes he would go to her and she would be quiet. When he wasn’t around we felt the violence of the world so much more clearly and we didn’t have escape. He was a panacea flesh placebo. Whether or not he came would not matter. We always knew tomorrow would rise and we would be reborn renewed conjoined. Even if he didn’t take our hands we’d know he loved us. Tonight is like all nights. If she closes her eyes she can see herself walking towards that dark and scented garden where memories come back to her crawling from the sea and she welcomes them like old friends. It’s spasms of the soul she would tell herself contractions. The baby was not there but was being prepared in secret in the dark.
We remember the second time she tried killing herself. She comes back to this memory often. That evening she was at his place. Twenty years old. She hadn’t been there long and at night the house still rejected her with sharp angles creaks in the floor. They had just made love and she was lying next to him caressing her belly. She lingers on this feeling his naked skin on her shirt perceiving somehow that he must’ve been so incredibly fragile that if she’d turned around he would’ve been broken in a thousand pieces or be brought back into the dark. In sleep he whispered her name as if calling herself to him across the distance of sleep. She stoop up and left. We remember the sensation of the knife on our wrist then unsatisfied with the punctuation on the thigh. She understood soon that this time would be different. Maybe it was her blood maybe growing older truly had changed her from the inside out. Quickly she started feeling her life running outside of her with her blood it was a physical feeling a concrete one. We didn’t think about him for a minute. Then the blood staining the paper. The soft texture of the bathroom mat against her shoulders her back her arms as we stared into the ceiling and accepted vanishing away. We loved her we told her there’d be another time that it was okay to go. Breathing became more scarce her eyes grew softer. The dark beckoning. When she woke up some hours later she was startled into consciousness by the same anxiety she had felt sometimes as a child when she woke up in the night fearing to be late to school. That was the last time. She never thought of telling him. He had a role in all of this but it never became clear to her which one.
As she closed her eyes before waking up again she saw a flame inside a glass jar. The candle smelled of citrus sand wind. She could not see the flame directly as if she had been staring from a lower angle but she saw it reflected in the glass walls. Flickering playing. When she looked outwards the dark would scare her so she focused back on the candle. She felt staring at it for so long for entire lifetimes. Sometimes she wished she’d have the strength to put out the flame.
We managed to stop the bleeding before she passed out. We took care of her the only way we could. We met each other for the first time there. She thought we’d be a voice speaking in her head or physical hands pulling her up. But instead she found her body becoming boundless and inside of it countless others and some of those others she knew by name and some hadn’t been born yet or at all and together we gathered the blood running out of her back inside where it could sustain her.
That very night he went to find her. She opened the door and found him barefooted and sweaty. She was afraid that somewhere in the dark he had heard her. But he just noticed she left without saying goodbye. That’s what he said and they were both content with it. If she had pressed him any further if he had taken her sweater off they would have been confronted with the reality of things that they loved each other and truly and that hadn’t stopped her. In a way the child was made that evening when he went looking for her and he did and she let him find her. On many nights we laid awake and thought of his naked feet walking across the city. Something about the mystery of him walking towards the light belongs to her and we do not bother it with deciphering. If she decided to kill herself not to miss this time she wouldn’t have to leave a note. There would be no explaining to do. She promised herself she wouldn’t try anymore but it was a weak promise one she made just to herself.
She also remembers the way they looked at each other at parties when they were adults already. When they couldn’t wait to go home and made love there in front of everyone with their eyes. She remembers the feeling of leafing through his brain with her gaze taking his clothes off one after the other. He sat on the chair and breathed hard. Some things had not completely carried through have stayed behind. She also remembers how he humiliated her in front of everyone how he pretended to be just a little bit drunk and unkind as he walked a knife inside her chest. That was a secret too. His retaliations out of proportion for lack of attention of passion. She remembers how he smiled like a teenager everytime he hurt her. How his voice exploded sometimes then turned to embers. Stretching her hand backwards at night with the certainty of finding him there. We remember the man he became at sea his bravery the initiative that took over him that careless joy that sometimes scared him too. That time summering on that city on the coast when he pretended to be a german gentleman who wanted to get in her pants at all costs. That evening when he pretended to kidnap us and she looked at him like she wasn’t afraid. When he asked her to choke him. The clumsy sweetness of the first years too. That evening much later when after a fight he told us crying that he feared being some kind of serpentine creature and she told him that she didn’t think she had what makes a human. She remembers looking at him while they had sex his animal conviction his urgency his sweat on her skin. That party many years later when having drunk too much and humiliated her he puked on her skirt. She forgave him. We remember the appointments with the doctor long hours of waiting. His hand gliding on hers as if he didn’t want to bother us. When she started going alone and we couldn’t describe the feeling of being part of the cosmos of its vast and starry body. She remembers the way he said her name and how he said ours and the difference between. The scorn. How he looked at her when we walked just for him his hands in her hair his eyes full of sadness and loneliness. All the times she thought about killing him and making it look like an accident. The long days at work waiting to go home to find he had already cooked eating with him watching something together going to sleep. She remembers being too tired to do it masturbating each other quietly. When they still had sex regularly before resentment crept in between their bodies making nudity impossible. Certain nights when she felt the promise as she looked at him and he looked at her and she didn’t feel him to be a phantom limb anymore but part of herself of her history of her own mortality.
She is all memory now. We are all walk all time all light.
She remembers the feeling oxygen leaving her chest like bubbles. The emptiness and the incessant hum of blood in the ears becoming fainter and fainter. We told her multiple times across multiple years and with different faces to leave him. She confided angel-like that not just him but this life had become half of her world and that it broke her heart that he would have never known about it and she would have never known about the other side that belonged to him. She had condemned herself to this. She could’ve had anyone else one of us. But she wanted this last try at freedom in the timeline of the last attempt of her sun system. We allowed it like we allow everything because everything leads back and into us.
Her life never belonged to the child the girl the woman that lived it. We always knew it. He belongs to us too now. But he is far far away and he won’t sing with us. But he has to listen. Everyone listens. She used to tell him he was the other side of air that she would always remember how the world was before and after him. She was only partly giving into platitudes only partly indulging in this past. There is no other side now. Just now just light just us.
She remembers the feeling between memory and the desire to jump. Him waiting for her yes the dissonance with her legs. She remembers the clamour of the sea meters below and all of their friends around. All of them still so young. For the first time she thought clearly that death was not the absence or end of life but something else someplace she wouldn’t have to be alone anymore. She was trying to gather her courage she had no idea how true that would be and she spent all of her life fighting against this feeling and we are grateful that she did. She remembers the rare moments of being one with the commune. She had heard of Castalia and the Parallel Action but then and there we were kids of the prairies and the hills and we didn’t want to have a name. She remembers banal fears not finding a job having children waking up every morning with the same person. Slipping into a life not too terrible out habit rather than out of love. She was love all along. She remembers the shivers of her body his gaze full of affection. Then she wanted to see herself like he saw her. Once again with her hair down her shoulders skin polished by the water ice cream in hand. All before her still all possible. The wind rises up it is time to give this life a try. She goes down with him into the water.
All of this she called love and we call one life under the sun one of the many possible one that as every other was necessary for us.
As the sun rose she wanted to tell him that he was her other lung the one that wasn’t poisoned with blood. The box in which she kept the world. But it was too late for that. In the last morning of man she went to sleep afraid that the night ended a thousand years ago and she had missed it. She wakes up in the sun where everything that ever will be is imprinted with what it was and we all sing, my dearest, we all do.
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We have studied for centuries we have produced works of art and witnesses to our inquiries each of us died with a smile we didn’t believe in heavens anymore but in eternal song Some were earlier than others and produced great works that were passed on and confronted with the frailty of human life were of incredible worth Words were passed on then notes then just faith that it would all become soil for the next ones And it did
It took us two thousand galaxies
We had to start over so many times every time it begins like this:
Someone promises the end of grief and a place where no one has to leave and someone believes it Then someone wagers war and someone loses Someone leaves and someone stays in a broken house Sometimes it’s us sometimes it’s you We waited and waited floating across the centuries and laughed the crystalline laugh of stars We were patient We had all time In due time all the walls came down and we burst from every citadel All of us all of us We have seen history being made and being unmade and being written from the start again and we were always there
She didn’t know about any of this, She gave us the most beautiful of gifts a child pure possibility, Life unspoiled, All of children, It brought us considerably closer to the light, Another cycle began afterwards, Galaxies collapsed and we built instruments invented the wheel explored the stars again and the child was still with us the North Star we were its womb its beautiful amniotic home, The child never grows up, The child’s name is the thread of the universe and the name of the stars, Flesh can be branded too, Life that swims in the cosmos is more powerful than that, It saved us many centuries many civilizations, So we waited and waited and waited and then
We have become the night love If we want we can start it all over again One single eye opened upon all of time and all of the cosmos We do and mankind comes around and goes like a gust of cosmic wind and we are here again at the throne of the universe
We have conquered time and made stars our reign You can dream here She lives her days in the warm cradle we have made swimming from memory to memory We have completed the task fulfilled the promise We have reunited everyone with everything Father with son brother with brother mother with children unborn Ancestors with the last of the bloodline The children with the children Every little thing sings with each other We play the melody of the stars across all distances and all of time
You can be reborn if you wish You can walk among the fabric of creation immerse your hand in the foam of the constellations You can see it all again You can close your eyes and rest
We have created outposts in all of the universe to guard over our dream The dark doesn’t scare us anymore brother Dora sleeps here amongst the children Everything is imprinted with everything that was and will be There is no story no narrator only us only song only light