Without shore

To @wakeupkitty, @solperez.

Mr. President.

Everyone is going to drink alcohol. Even if the evening margaritas wither and tea time becomes a memory. I invite you to remember art and magnolias. It was late, you were at the window, and you were wearing a beautiful lace dress. In retrospect, I remember every detail, every smile, and every one of your paintings. It was solitude that kept the soul alive; the sky and the mirrors were turning black. It was hard to breathe and to walk miles just to survive. I remember you telling me about an old bicycle factory. We talked at length about bags of potatoes, we counted hundreds of pelicans. The dogs barked constantly at night, and you painted walls, green, wheat-colored. Wolves that refused to move away from the house because of the thaw; useless mills that, majestic, remained. The lake water was putrid, but it had frogs. We hated the frogs, just for a while. We walked through Van Gogh's works, his world of sunflowers, modern, hypertonic.

We looked through the photographs from the Lego collection and I said goodbye, while my sky was a pearly gray. The world contracted, the oil went away like a remora, in search of another fish to decompose. The streetlights went out, the news became echoes on old televisions, we never had advertisements on the fabric, they weren't necessary, the stores were only display windows and old dust. Mannequins that wore no clothes. Although it wasn't obscene, it was another sign of abandonment.

Everyone was leaving, emigrating, and death was drawn across the faces of both halves: those who left and those who remained anchored to the timber. They built rafts with jugs, with biodegradable plastic, and threw themselves into the sea. Promises were what kept them above the sand; the rustic boats came apart like a fragile sheet of origami.

Mr. President.

It looks like a marble statue; it is only the presence, the scaffolding of the ships we burned on the shore. The obituaries of the forgotten, stone, scrutiny, pieces of plastic and bones that the sea refuses to hide and spits out, slowly, exhausted. Wave after wave.

I return to the bottles, the hidden messages; we know the codes, the salt, the corals. We have laid out the same bodies, in different latitudes. Different spaces, we are dust of dust, I refuse the loss, the details are not easy to digest, the footprints in the sand become less visible every second. I survive on coconuts and branches. I pile up endless hills of limestone; they might serve to leave a message from the cosmos or to make something resembling a house.

You are still at the window, your paintings have reached me, you painted in the kitchen and did the hard work, the cold was unbearable, something in the basement smelled bad, but it was part of the codes, of the transgression, civilization without fire on the verge of exploding, and people coming out like volcanic lava with spoons and machetes to reclaim… history and the ether.

I remember when everything was different. Those who exist now do not have that right. No, they were born, and that was their disadvantage. My disadvantage was knowing colors and learning how to mix them. That leaves you with a chaotic atmosphere and an unpredictable melancholy.

Wait for my arrival. It may be a long way off, especially because I am going slowly along the road, over the asphalt, in an old truck I have just picked up. I have climbed into the back, and it is carrying rotten cabbages. The space is nauseating, but I can see the green fields. The sky has begun to unfold the colors of evening; then the sea will come. I close my eyes, I smell the stench of the cabbages, but I try to imagine your dress, still at the window, waiting for my arrival.

Image created by me, based on a prompt in chatGPT