A.P’s heart thuds hard as a car scrapes past her. It had that tendency, her heart. Of trying to pop out of her mouth every time her eyes took too long to focus and life rushed past her, blowing bones blowing trunks blowing gups from inside her, so her feet commonly wobbled on her heels. Taking too long of a second to adjust to the balance they were supposed to perform.
She blinked and the world slowly came back into focus, sketching first the city and then the night, placing each of the characters beside her like puppets whose strings had been hopelessly crank open. The past few months had seemed like a dream peppered with nightmares, confined as they had been in their own homes, forced to carve a conversation against the walls of their own rib cages. Pretending that the world was a road and rationality a given plea in all its glorious deceit.
But all A.P. could do for all those months was to look at the world through the illuminated window of her cell phone, and realize that maybe all the pain was in fact real and there was no point in deceiving herself. But the headlight chooses this exact second to turn itself green, so she’s forced to cross the street as the masked crowd buzzes around her, only then realizing she’d been drowning all along. So she hurries past the streets, stumbling around corners around witchling around curbs trying to remember how to breathe. Then her heart stops. Looks up for a second. Snaps. Leaking glitter through burning hands, firecrackers from São João¹ stretching into lullabies, no longer attainable imitations from unrestling crimes. Like a dream, like houses climbing backwards into a cliff.
Talking about a famous Leonardo Da Vinci quote, Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet once said that “to understand is to forget to love.” A.P. had never known victory. But she was defeat. Had all the pain been a memory from a past live? That much only the quiet knows, still it roars. An imagine can not contain a sound, only mute you. Which is still a sentense lengh of meaning away from the true dodge. Why does it lie so much? Figures. It had learned a long time ago that one way to the truth was by adding two lies.
Then the dark alley falters.
A.P. finds herself crouching on the floor, looking for anything solid with her hands. Fingers desperately crawling along the asphalt until they bump into something they crush. Then she opens her eyes. Looks at her hands. A shredded lottery ticket, six crossed out numbers, whitishing to oblivion. Her body is shaking again, shaking something inside her as if trying to hold something very hot without burning its hands. A voice rings somewhere inside her, but she doesn’t know what to court.
“Are you okay?”
A.P. takes a deep breath. Shrugs.
“I don’t think so” Retorts “Not in a texture I understand”
“Trick or treat?” it blinks back. Almost unenchantingly.
So she lifts the corner of her lips, trembling slightly in resonance to the strangers voice.
“I don’t think we’ve met”
The woman in front of her prims up. Knees bent, wrapped by arms covered in sleeves that were too long.
“What are we doing here then?”
A.P. looks up at the street for a second, a car scrapes along the avenue, and the sound of tires screeching on the asphalt echoes in her mind for a few seconds. In the silence, the fluorescent lights passing through could be gunshots. Or the inside cracks of a wall.
“Waiting” — she tries to control the urge to shrug her shoulders at the answer, but all that her body manages to do is shrink further into itself. Maybe the universe was too big and so was she. Now none of them will ever need to know.
¹São João: traditional brazilian party that takes place in the month of June.
