XLIII

LOVE is where I both find my voice and lose it. I can touch the place in me where I vanished in the hands of a lover, crazy and foolish, driven and mad. I became a wild boar rooting in disturbed soil for truffles.

And they were truffles, wonderful and rich, but occasional.

In love, the tongue writes wet words on the skin in a shining script where letters disappear like invisible ink, leaving only sensation.

The most beautiful words cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of a gaze, with the skin of our hands.

And so…

 

In love, I whisper.

In love, I cry.

In love, I cry out.

In love, I breathe—we breathe together.

We hold the silence, suspended.

The days when love was for me a matter of art.

But in love, I also lash out, speak the unspeakable, and attempt murder with my mouth. In these moments I am beyond rage, I ravage the one before me in an act of revenge. Love is a humiliation. I retaliate. If you cannot be intimate, then I will make you run for your life. I want you. I want you gone. I want you here. I want you very far away.

This is how I want you: larger and smaller stronger and weaker taller and trembling more, more out of breath than I more burning more penetrating bolder bossier more yielding more frightened narrower and more relentless than you are more than I.

Desire speaks through the body. His eyes locked on mine as we made love on a day into night until dawn, when the humidity was high and the only sounds were the sustained sighs that break into cries with skin sliding back and forth with the sweat of sweet friction and elegant finesse.

It is “the lover’s discourse.” What I hide by my language, my body utters. The necessity. The connivance. Only us. The incalculable two. Understanding love as madness. What can be done? We are done. Never.

Everything she never would have said (precisely because of her concern with respecting accepted limits, and not off ending good taste), love said it—immodestly, immediately, inconsiderably, in…Love said: “….….”

And yet he stayed at the entrance.

Because in love all is not love.

Because in love not all is love.

To my mentor in words, Hélène Cixous, her words are my words are my confession to say, “Thank you, yes, exactly.”

“You corrupted me,” he said.

“We corrupted each other,” she said.

Our drama is that we live in a state of mutual invasion.

But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget.

I come from a woman.

Women are not to be satisfied.

And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.

And sometimes, I tell a story.