The Poorthry (En)

I think it was the day I heard the terribleness of her voice, that same night at Aldo’s house, transformed into someone she was not, possessed by the inescapable decision to place a solitary and inexplicable distance between our lives. Against the steps marked by promises, silencing the chords that sought to make eternal a shared song, she coldly asked me: “Can’t you be alone? Does everything have to be about the relationship?” as the conclusion to requesting that phase called… two months.

That day, something collapsed into a pit and was covered with earth. And among the countless cracks her voice left in me that night, breaking through, above all else, and letting the tired pain seep out through my lips, there he was—my friend, perhaps an unnecessary listener, irreproachably stoic—absorbing every confused word in the vagueness of his living room. He listened with such attentiveness… that his ear embraced me, and his embrace held up the fractured columns of my heart.

That night, on my way home, hours later, leaving his house, I began to know solitude. I saw the sad asphalt in an indeterminate sepia beside the lifeless sidewalk. Slow steps brought me to the threshold of my house, where I cast a final glance back at the street before the creak of the front door hinges locked me between its rust and its time. And I passed, finally passed, swallowed by what I was supposed to call home. Upstairs in my room, after dragging my soles up the kilometers of stairs, I saw fragments of a person in the mirror, with eyes solitary, lost, and loveless.

Later, the delicate frame of a life fell to the floor, leaving a trail of shards in the sound of an intimate crash that echoed for minutes and hours. And it wasn’t until a contest put order to the dark chaos of that imposed solitude—bouts of sadness, desperate incomprehension, silent tears learning the noise of striking the, once so distant, ground.

In that room, with its oversized television and bookshelves filled with colorful stories, its window with a view of the sky and a ceiling fan above, in that confined space, warm in winter and bearable in summer—now more a prison than a room, yet still a place for the repose of a life that probed the honest pulse of its heart. There, bent over the blanket still draped across my bed, sitting on a small stool inches from the ground, with an abrupt and dry jolt of agitation, sometimes moon, sometimes star, the ordinary space transformed… into an ethereal captivity for my inspiration.

Sea and sky, earth and firmament. New moon, full and waning, celestial aces with memories… trembling like lights found by eyes lost in the heights of the liquid night. Eyes that surrendered to clarity after the rain.

I came to know then that winged state where sadness anchors itself in the sea of a life. That state where melancholy drowns us in sensitivity, where we see with vulnerable passion the balance of days, the rigor of events, the pulse surrounding us; where the afternoon climbs the stairs and opens the door to our room… because life moves slowly in eyes fatigued from gazing. That state of complete defenselessness that purifies pain with the salt of tears—I called it Poorthry.

That time, which tamed me in the silence of the room, making it a vault for my stars and a sea for my storm, and Barranco the stage for the tremor of my steps lost in the slow and sorrowful night.

Poorthry, the poor poetry, born from the open trenches of every heartbeat of my love, spilling from my tears like an ancient rivulet soothing the ache in my heart.