I found your drawing saved in the wooden box I had made when I thought I was the female version of Picasso. The small-scale four-sided box, which stretched over my lap like a newborn child who refused to open his eyes, was covered with newspaper clippings and snapshots. I unlocked it and I found the elderly paper, curled up in itself as if it was faint-hearted to be exposed to the world. I unfolded the cutting edge version of a parchment and I laid my eyes on the self-portrait you offered me. The fallen angel, bearing on his knees, leaning towards the old sod that tasted like death. The right wing was whimpering over her fair shake of dying, while she was making her own bed of feathers. The falling off of the silvery quills felt like raindrops pouring from my eyes day by day, every time that I looked to the side and I did not find you on the scrawled table drawing castles in the air or pies in the sky.
I took a flip through my wristwatch. It is midnight. The dead of night. Three years. I try to bring to mind the small things, nonetheless, even your name is clouded in my mind. João. Your first name. And that is all my memory holds. Or it should be. However, I can still imagine your face as pallid as the wedding dress you will never see me wear. I can still feel your wintry skin as if I had touched a piece of a sculpture that never left me. I can still hear your last words in the lugubrious musicality of the winter’s gelid wind. The breeze that slips through all the leaves and petals, kisses and embraces them, like a praying mantis, just to pull them out and leave them to the wheel of fortune that only brings misfortune.
Despite not remembering it, I know there is a headstone with your full name engraved, with your entire life preserved on two dates inscribed in gold and with the words that someone decided to say when it was too late. The words that were only said when you were already out cold and that should have been verbalized even before you decided to fall asleep. This stone has never met you and it never will, nevertheless at this moment it knows more about you than I do. All I can call to mind is you grabbing my hand and saying, “I'm lost without you”, and that I established that as the one undeniable truth of my existence.
Notwithstanding you let go of my hand to tie a noose, put it around your neck and let me wander lonesome, only me and my shadow, as if I was just a dead body walking around. And I am, my love. And I am. I do not want to remember your name. I want to be able to look at this fallen angel without thinking that I could not elevate it high enough. I want to be capable to stare at this drawing, this slight piece of you, and not know who it belongs to. I do not want to reminisce who left me the enigma that life offers us - is it possible to fly with broken wings? What I have discovered so far is that the hardest part of living is not dying. You killed life and left me to live the death.
- 12:26:00
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