stream of thoughts an allergic reader has in a dusty library.

Sitting down at the Girton library's upper floor, I wonder. I let my lazy mathematical mind attempt to calculate the number of words this room bears. I look at the shelves in front of me and there is not enough space to fit a pencil between those books, constantly applying strength on each other, cover to back, back to cover. The tension, oh the tension. My eyes travel fast and faster, the titles blur. It is obviously almost holiday season as the shelves are still full - that rare time of the year after books have been re-positioned and before students start hunting for them, with eagle eyes that travel like mine but with a purpose.

The library is heavy with infinite words. Those of the books, those of the thoughts, those of the whispers, past and present, memories and actions. I attempt to rewind a century and picture women at these desks, with uneven layers of paper spread on them, words in random angles - like the mind. I have a feeling I gave up on adding the number of words - I lost count and "stop. measuring." echoes in my head. However, is it not awe-inspiring to imagine that every word ever said or thought in this room fills an abstract space and adds some abstract weight to it? I can feel the heft of words in my breath. How much - it does not matter.

It is so dusty. It sparks a reaction in the senses that mirrors the weight it bears on the mind. It makes you sneeze and shakes the apparent stability of your knowledge. Your thought process disorders and pulses at the back of your nose. You doubt that something that itches can ever be comfortable. You accept that you will never know. The weight of these words is unbearable in the same way that it is for an allergic reader to sit here for hours. But we do.

17/10/2014 - stress universitário.

Não estou no meu quarto, não.

Saí.

Não aguento o sufoco das palavras que ficaram por escrever

Poluíram o ar. Petróleo que perdeu sentido

Por não proporcionar projeção.

Não.

Quero desmembrar o tempo,

Guardar os pedaços que deram alento

A esta ilusão de ser capaz.

Deitar fora o desperdício

De horas sem vida de jeito,

Fugaz.

Rute. 

Ocean?

Ocean?

I.

The ocean is but one. It is composed by the same water yet it reaches every shore. All of it a reflection of the sky. If you look down from space towards this spherical planet we insignificantly inhabit, the liquid blue mass embracing land and turning us into islands is but one. Yet it changes name as it touches land, becoming different oceans and adding up titles of different seas, gleaming in different shades of blue, touching our skin in different temperatures. It is even blamed as a singular, broken down entity for a specific disaster or miracle in a specific space and time. In 2004, in Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean is the only portion of water to account for the deadliest Tsunami to ever hit land. Is the rest of the water innocent?

I saw it changing colour through the plane window as I looked down. I felt myself changing colour as I touched land. Ears tighten inside. Gravity flows to the head. The man sitting next to me pierces the arms of the seat with his nails. Throat acidifies, heart races, wheels touch land and I return. Floating on air is no longer a real option to not getting immersed in the tide hitting home. It now lies within the mindset of a joint and a couple of spare hours that I will find hard to get – not to mention the effort of having to crawl back to old ‘friends’ who still make a living out of others’ escapism.  Never mind.

Mother was there despite me asking her not to be. As she is. Her skin seemed closer to her bones and her smile was tarnished by loss. Her tight hug watered my shoulder and my eyes followed.

‘She would’ve complained about your weight, dear’ she muttered in my ear. I felt her bones. ‘She would’ve complained about yours’.

We both walked out of the airport, dressed in black against the painful brightness of the sun. Funeral was today. Hate funerals. I’d rather be getting high. Never mind.

II.

When someone passes away you are always too late. Too late heading home to witness the last breath. Too late saying the words you have always kept in the deepest abyss of your chest ready to come out when time is up, but which never really get to the surface. Too late to live the moments you have not yet lived. Too late to ever accept it. Too late to be born. Too late to have more time awaiting someone’s death. Or your own. Always too late. Either that or death is always too early.

‘You were late, son.’

‘But I arrived’

Grandpa’s eyes staring at mine from across the table, now empty. The wrinkles around them in spreading flashes of worn-out faith. His age adding weight to his tone of voice. He said she asked about me, You should have rung her more. Guilt-stricken silence.

I keep forgetting to connect. I wake up searching for it, wondering what ‘it’ is, not recalling what there is and there was. Nan used to keep reminding me of things, not because I necessarily forgot them, but because I could forget them. And by things I mean she reminded me not to completely go away. I get myself on airplanes all the time. I like floating on air, where the imminent possibility of falling becomes literal. The materialisation of the metaphor of living. Since my late teens I was never physically here for more than a couple of weeks straight. I remember one summer when I stayed for more than a month and it felt like a soul paralysing year. Stuck to the same places, same people, same starving self. She had always reminded me to be here. Ring your dad. Your cousin wants you to write something for her birthday, do. Remember when you were about 10 and had that idea that you could build a boat by yourself and sail away, and it took you months to give it up? She used to watch over me. Watch over what I used to be when I had no sense of what home was, because I did not know anywhere else. She linked me back.

And I was late.

III.

Distance makes us question if we are ever really connected to others. As the body pulls away and makes it physically impossible to feel one another with any of our senses in the same exact time and space, we question. Is a telephone conversation enough of a connection when voices travel through technology before hitting your ear, and brain, and core? Do we ever really see someone through a computer screen, flat and two dimensional? A portrait is not the person. The experience of human connection is never completed without the full usage of the five senses. We are designed to feel. Yet, the question remains unanswered. Is there a sixth sense, one which crosses physical borders, to link us? To extend us from islands to water so we can stretch, and reach and wet, despite the distance from land? Is love the answer? This word ‘love’, victim of overuse and in lack of a clear definition, which we feel despite our senses? And is it in the genes to never detach from the ones who share a similar DNA?

‘Why can’t you stay forever? Why do you always have to leave?’

‘Because I have things to do, and I can’t do them here.’

 I didn’t see her face, as we sat on the sofa, the television entertaining our eyes, both her small hands clutching my long sleeve.  That was always my answer to the dreaded question. Vague, yet clear. General, yet truthful.

She was eleven now, 5 when I first left. Always my little sister. Most of the times mother or Nan called, I got a more or less detailed update on her life. There on most of her birthdays, absent throughout most of the year. We created a skype account and talked at least once a week, although often none of us knew what to say, and she ended up pulling faces at the camera. She went through the divorce without me, and although I saw it coming since I was 12, she was too young to ever do. She seems fine. Nan used to watch over her as she watched over me.

She speaks of friends, I’ve never seen their faces. She thinks I know everything, she couldn’t be more wrong. She lives in a tiny world, and I’m in it even when I’m not.

What now? Is there somebody who can watch you? I fear I am not capable of such task. Watching over my own self has proven to be most difficult, and I am myself. At least, that’s what they say. Yet, there is this magnetic force – call it genes, call it love - pulling me towards you; I know I cannot always watch you, but I sure will always want to see you.

‘I am never away forever.’

‘Nan is.’

IV.

Our memory of home contemplates a once-present; a present that is gone because we are, somewhat, gone. Other people are, perhaps, gone. If we have left once, we never fully come back. The person who usually walked those fields and held those people, sharing childhood, teenage hood, time and space, is somewhat gone. We move and we change. We ask questions and we battle, we strive and we lose, and we find answers which ask more questions. It is a personality shaping cycle that alters us. And all along the memory of home remains the same. The places and the people – our old selves included - are but a black and white film we replay and cannot change. By the end, we are dead. We go back home and all along we attempt to reinsert the person we are now into that old costume in that old film and it does not fit. It does not fit.

I remember this being a lot bigger than it looks now. Throwing pebbles at the sea. For the first time, I can see the end of the pier as I stroll down the hill. Riding my bike with no aim but that. The horizon stretches in a straight line touching the grey clouds - it’s been a while. Winter water immobilising my legs. Sunlight is spread behind the clouds, giving them that quality of brightness that hurts the eyes. Waves come and go in that endless cycle and I am alone.

I leave in a week and I haven’t managed to come back yet. How does the old dog still know who I am? Perhaps I smell the same. He follows me in a rhythmic hyperactive walk, stops when I stop, stares back and waves his tail. I never told him to come.

Black. Black. White rose. What I brought to the funeral.

I see faces of people that used to know me. Some of them break their routines to talk to the stranger they no longer know. Memory clicks, I feel like I used to know some of them. I adapt my speech to suit their needs. They express their condolences. We part. I imagine what it would be like to sit everyone at the same table to have dinner and build a conversation. I wonder if, as the years passed, they have remained the same. I wonder if, by the virtue of being together, we would momentarily return to what we used to be when we knew each other. I am still alone.

I return to the place I used to escape to, to be.

V.

The walls remain the same, except that the black and white pictures lost some of the colour contrast, and some of them are hanging, threatening to fall. The sea saturated them with dampness and salt. They are heavy. I am heavy. The place is abandoned. I find the remains of old yellow pages of old misused notebooks on the corners of the room, having spent the last couple of years dancing with the wind, beaten by the rain. No pencil, no pen, no words. The sofas were stolen, I sit on the floor, look down to find my footprints on the dust, look up to find a mirror. I remember never sitting directly in front of it, but in the right angle to see the entrance with no door, to guarantee no one was there to disrupt my loneliness. I see my reflection now, it is plane- never myself. I see a humidity stain darkening my left eye. I crawl and reach in an attempt to wipe it. Fruitless. I try harder. It swings, it falls, it breaks. Countless cracks carve my reflection, broken up in angles, cutting and accentuating different portions of me. That painful brightness comes through the glassless window and shines on them, like it shines on the surface of the sea on windy wavy days. I am the ocean. 

It happened on a Thursday

It happened on a Thursday. Just like any other weekday, the city was flooded with urban hikers without the sparkle in their eye. They did not hope to reach the destination with the breath-taking view. They crossed the same corners and dragged their bodies across the same pavements and sat on the same buses, while the pollution acidified their nostrils and traffic lights made them late. A city so dense as to give home to millions stops caring about familiarising them. Especially in the mornings, when the hour and the rush join forces to turn people into robots. Faces become a colourless blur, and unless you need to ask someone to move over, words, as colours, become equally unnecessary. It can become quite sad, really.

It happened on a Thursday. Music carried her through the hour and the rush.

I lay here and hug myself and there’s nothing. And in this empty vacuum, in the inexistence of something between my arm and my chest, I can fit the world and stretch out endless possibilities. Because there’s nothing. Empty. I hug nothing, I hold nothing. I do nothing yet there’s so much to do. Sleep, should be sleeping now. 6.30. Shit.

The remaining reflections of Wednesday night still shadowed her thoughts.

That guy climbing the stairs. Windy brown hair. Liking the bone structure. Wish I could start a conversation. His leather bag looks smart. Literature? Walks. Sits. Back’s turned on me. Buses are made for people to turn their backs on each other. Literally. Pairs of seats in a line, while you contemplate someone’s neck. That’s all I’m left with, this guy’s neck. And hair.

Different stimulus added to this early mental exercise. Yes, she could have had a few words, if only the bus was meant for people to exchange glances, talk. Perhaps care. If only the people who designed buses thought of that. But they thought of fitting the biggest number of people in a moving vehicle and about getting paid. And the people sit on those seats and cannot be bothered to ask if the book the person sitting next to them is reading is any good. Sit down obediently where the seat is. Yes, there, sit there. Get up promptly when you need to get off. Do not enjoy the journey with other people in the same space. Might be psychos. Who knows? Your arm is touching my arm. Can’t you mentally calculate where your privacy ends and mine begins? Rude. Wish there was more space. Ugh, buses.

Well, it did happen on a Thursday. Many things happened on a Thursday. She went to college after a reflection upon the uselessness of buses, besides to do what they were meant to do: take you somewhere. In space, in time, in thought. Alone though, always. 

Pathetic Non-Poem.

The sun begins to hide in a faint dark orange glow, 

as I lay here.

Thinking about poets and what it takes

To take words, 

to caress them in your mind,

to hold them, trembling,

in your hands, and lay them down,

as I lay here,

on the paper. 

The whole task seems too distant,

to exist only in those who are not me,

Poets who spontaneously tame words, 

and hold keys to the fields,

where they dance freely,

Towards their paper. 

As I lay here,

The sky darkens,

The birds tweet songs

And I,

I redeem myself

To the inexistent skill 

Of a poetic soul. 

Rute Costa

12/3/2014

Podemos empacotar a vida.

Podemos empacotar a vida. 

Os livros que nos construíram os sonhos, nos transportaram para fora de nós, nos marcaram um dia, um mês, um ano - empilham-se. Pesam nos sacos fortes, mas carregam-se. Virginia Woolf, a vida dela condensada em palavras, a minha sensação de impermanência e conceito de genialidade que delas brotaram - num saco. Charles Dickens e as suas palavras que, como padrões de papel de parede vitoriano, se entrelaçam e - tenho vergonha em dizê-lo - me cansam. Nunca fui grande fã de padrões multiplicados de cornucópias escarlate. Não importa, no mesmo saco. Saramago, tesouro literário do país, crítico aguçado do mesmo país, abrindo olhos a cidadãos desse mesmo país. Shakespeare que todos os dias descubro, e cada vez mais me apaixona, e me faz querer pisar palcos, roubar a homens papéis de mulher, ou gritar, validamente, "Estou a morrer!" quando de facto já devia estar silenciada de dor. Shakespeare faz isto possível. E tantos mais livros cujas palavras me definiram horas de vida - empilhados, transportados. 

O que trazemos a cobrir o corpo - reflexo da nossa identidade ou falta dela - dobra-se, torna-se pequenino. Inanimadas numa mala que as comprime, transportamos calças que andaram em Trafalgar Square e no Rossio, que sentaram em cadeiras felpudas de teatros e frias de salas de aula. Camisolas que viram o avião levantar voo vezes que já não consigo contar; casacos que a mãe abraçou em jeito de despedida contrariada, mas que "tem-que-ser"; cachecóis que aconchegaram o peito da corrente fria de saudade. Saias que se vestiram para o Natal, o aniversário do avô, ou os dias em que a disposição foi solarenga. Cabe tudo em malas rígidas que as comprimem e lhes sugam o ar.

As malas que carregam documentos de identidade que tão pouco dizem sobre nós. Que são nomes, que são números? Que são? Que somos? A mochila da escola que aos ombros leva conhecimento. O saco de pano que iniciou uma conversa, e amizade - espero eu - para vida. Os quadros de fotografias que materializam memórias e carregam "play" em histórias de um passado que se reproduz até se enevoar em esquecimento. Cabe tudo. Até a música que nos serve de banda sonora, se compacta virtualmente e se carrega num rectângulo incompreensível de tecnologia. Cabe tudo. 

Se a vida se compacta, se divide, se carrega vida fora, muda de espaço, de tempo, permanece, se esquece,... Que somos nós se não a sua sombra? Que somos nós se não o seu condutor? Ambos? Nenhum? Coleccionamos objectos, em tentativas que eles nos digam quem somos. Não somos os objectos, somos o que eles nos dizem. 

Rute

15/2/2014