Thirty One 03.15.10

A month has passed already like smoke curling through my spindly fingers. I am washing away the scent of fear from my body as my head bends back into the spray of my shower. The beads reign down against my head and I think of you, the way you used to run your nails across my scalp and make me shiver. One hundred and twelve pages I have poured out of my heart for you in the last thirty days, spending these words carelessly around in every direction. I am pitching them like knives at a curved mirror. They could cut me, they could be the thing that fells me in the end. These emotions, these words I attempt to convey, they could be my undoing I suppose. But I prefer to think of it more like this.

You are the streets of Argentina. I roamed you once and fell madly in love with you. You have never left my dreams or my thoughts even after I left your soil. I cannot dislodge any part of you from my mind, my spirit, my body; Not your tangled tango limbs, or your laughter bearing the braying of accordion music , or your swagger carrying street graffiti and the smell of piss. I could never forget you, the same way I could never forget Argentina. Its misty cobbled streets haunt my dreams the same way your dark tendril trusses do. Its small sweet stands and glittering chocolates dance in the corners of my memory never far from reach, just as the deep flavor of your kiss beckons my lips each night. Even though it has been some 3 years since I set foot on that corner of the globe, I know, I will return to this place.

It is certain, for I can see it, stretched out over many years of my life, I will return to that place of magic and wonder. So it is with you, I know I will always return to you. Even if I wander, even if life carries us away from each other, I will always return to your side. Argentina is in my heart, and always just a dream away. You are no different from that place, you are filled with the familiar and the exotic. You hold the promise of welcome and the excitement of the foreign. I will never conquer you, I will never try, I will only explore you as often as you allow. I will give you my heart this way, because it was tied to you this way the moment I met you.

I do not wonder if I should see you again, for you have told me I will always have a place in your life. I only wonder what time alone will reveal to me, will I always have a place in your heart? The answer of course, does not matter now. And so it should not be looked after, but only noted so that you might remember this: Your place in my heart is the whole of it. I will go on loving others my friends, my family, my fellow humankind. I will spread joy and peace to every corner of the globe. Such is my mission in this cycle, I have come to accept that now. But my heart, will always be possessed by you. That is why I ask you to grant me this mercy, should you ever decide you no longer wish to have my heart to yourself. Please keep it, for I have no use for it. Do not return it to me, for it will be a useless scrap of muscle and tissue. Rather, you should keep it as a trophy, to know all that you are capable of achieving.

Keep it as a souvenir so that it is a lasting reminder that somewhere the world over, there is someone who will always love you. And you can look at it as often as you like, and see how its every stitch of flesh is made up in your image. How it survives to love you in spite of whatever resistance it may encounter. No, you may keep it, please do not give it back. But you may send word, that you have mounted it and how it gleams upon your mantle piece, now only an ornament to a dead love. You can send me funny stories about how it is the showcase piece in your taxidermy collection. How it is the cornerstone of your living room, a real "conversation piece" amongst friends. And I will smile, knowing that it is being put to good use. I will smile knowing that when all the guests have gone home and your new lover has retired to bed, you will sit upon a velveteen cushion and by its light you will send Alice in Wonderland Caterpillar smoke rings into the air. I will smile knowing that you are basking in its warmth.

And as you do, you can listen to the sounds of Argentine accordions sing you sweet melodies from my memories and you can watch how the figurines of you and I dance in the misty cobblestone streets within the chambers of my heart. It will be your own private theater, to play out any recollections or any fantasies you might have had of our lives together at any one point. And I assure you, it will glow for you just the same every night. It will shine in delicate ruby shades and spill forth a kind of fog bank made of love and hope. I hope that you will let it wash over you then, and carry you away to other times in space. Times when this burden of distance and grief did not have to come between us. Times when we could have learned to love each other still and been good for one another. Times I am hoping are still in store for us both.

Yes, until the day I die, you will be my Argentina. Beautiful and profound, you will have touched me just as this place did, invoking wonder and a sense of homecoming. You are tango heels and the chrome spit shined on a classic Buick sitting in the sunset on a small avenue in La Boca. You are the cheery colors and acrobatic fonts that haunt my dreams from every store's sign. You are the smell of hash and hand rolled cigarettes. You are golden media lunas filling the night sky, and the eyes of Evita Peron smiling down on me from the stars. You are the soul shaking majesty of the crypts of Recoleta cemetery. And when I die, I want my bones to be buried there, under your skin forever. I want my crypt to look like the plantation house I dream of raising your children in, weeping with moss and lichen but standing resolute and firm. I want you to visit that place, and run your hands over my death portrait and see the smile plastered on my face. I want you to know then, the smile was always for you, even in my dying moment.

And when you return home after your visit to my resting place, I want you to see how my heart still glows for your in its glass casement. I want you to know then what I have told you is always true, my love is ever last. My love for you is the stuff of fairy tales made real. And you will always have this love, the same way that I will always have Argentina in your kiss when I close my eyes to sleep.