SMALL TALK / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

REFLECTIONS, WAVES, INTERFACES

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Like at the border, in vintage films. The guard asks us for our documents as is routine and we follow the rules, but something doesn’t work. Everything confuses us, even the language. And we know it in advance. Instinct or intuition. We drown at the last minute. We leave the game. We drag the bottom. Inflexible, inexorably.

Friday mornings are like that. The damp humidity of the wood of the old house riddles our bones. It seems we are floating, but in reality it’s asphyxiating. The lump of water in the throat. The stabbing pain in the lungs. We are water. We are drowning. Even here.

Everyone, sooner or later, if we pay attention, we come to that soft limit, of velvety insomnia. That pearl of glazed madness that settles in the base of our brain shifting our center of gravity, making the mind more dense than our own body, submerging the fragile line of flotation between sanity and insanity. It happened to me. Not now. Many marvelous dawns ago, of damp Fridays like today.

To you too, I know. Floods surround you. But don’t lose heart. Kick, what a pedestrian word. Gasp. Play the float, like in movies of drownings, until the rope consumes you. Consumes you. Then we will see. Then we will live. Then we will placentally (from placenta) survive death in the dense limbo of the sea of oblivion. You don’t understand me. I don’t either.

Boneless octopi, anemic anemones. Dream dreams of water and the smell of water. It’s rain. Sweet water of nonexistent rivers in Havana. Cold water of strangers who touch through a liquid wall. Dream desires also of water. Everything oozes, flows at a voracity we never gave credence would happen to us in the flesh.

Enough. The night advances more agile than its images. If the sun rises now, I die. I don’t know if I miss you or the underwater world that never emerged in us. Floating is so ephemeral, such a fallacious film. I swallow in dreams. I choke, what an atrocious word. The water definitely knows you. Smells you. Hurts like you, the impossible you. Of the unrepeatable cosmogonic visions from childhood. Which swept me. I’m sorry. I never managed to be mad.

July 9 2011