All the Fires, the Fire (En)

"The fire, if left uncontrolled, devours; if tamed, it warms. The very same that burns forest and bakes bread, that lights up nights and reduces all to ashes. Such is sadness: a blaze that devastates, or a flame that tempers."

I wandered, letting my eyes drift over everything on that social network—post after post, image after image—perceiving the sensitivity of those who seek, in their photographs, the beauty of sunsets; of those who find companionship in capturing the phases of the Moon; and reflecting on the words of those whose day ended with a doubt translated into everyday poetry or a challenging question. Suddenly, I noticed something that resembled more a cry for help than a mere musing born of contemplation:

"I feel so broken, abandoned, and hurt to my core. I'm not looking for pity; I'm just trying to find meaning in the cruelty of someone who once claimed to love me but destroyed me like this."

There are moments when the heart quickens its beat—like when witnessing a violent scene in which the injured person lets forth a slow, thick, red flow of blood that invades the skin, soaks the clothes, and eventually stains the ground. Not everyone experiences it the same way: some watch from afar, paralyzed; others step forward to help, their own hearts thumping anxiously. I’d never have made a good doctor, yet the wounds of the soul disturb me in a different manner.

The words displayed on the tiny screen of my phone brought me a deep and grim resonance—a sound I rarely repeat, but which, once fully understood, gives me strength and propels me forward. The sadness left by a broken love is a language we’ve all spoken at some point, even though each of us pronounces it with a different accent. And so I wrote:

"Shattered at some moment, I thought that sadness was mine alone. And in watching couples—so deeply in love—I found injustice in the scales of destiny, which values little he who gives so much.

In the passages of life, sadness is not the only feeling; it is one among many—a feeling that refines and commands, that straightens and builds; thus, the tear that, with its salt, splits the undefended cheek is the same one that cleanses the gaze, allowing us to discern, beyond body and soul, the one destined to accompany us."
 
For the one whose soul feels lost, bleeding from its wound, enduring a long night and an unyielding bed… For the one who cannot stop moving, for the one to whom the shimmer of a tear—unbidden—brings that moment when the will finally shatters.
 
Know that it is so; know that it is the case for everyone. There are those who, like a child who cannot fathom how a toy works, clumsily dismantle the love that is given to them. That there are those who skillfully ignite the flame of love, yet never truly thought to make the most of it.
 
That malice, irresponsibility, or doubt… have no gender; that time undresses even the grandest lies; that not everyone is ready to understand or to give love. But around the corner—once the smoke has cleared, the message reformulated, with the image repainted in renewed vitality, the gaze made clearer and now adorned with a smile—there is a good wind, if you know which way your north lies.
 
Know that you are not alone—that almost all of us have been there, feeling that the end is but a stretch along the journey. That sadness remains the same, even though there may be different paths for the same battle. And that the fire which consumes you today will warm you tomorrow.
 
Know that I am with you. And with that which makes one cry, I have created this. And you?

 

 

“All the fires, the fire. All the sadness, the sadness.”

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.

The vertical gaze (En)

Hidden behind an intense, drifting veil of clouds, you reveal yourself fleetingly, intermittently, on a night when earthly worries consume the hours; unnoticed and almost secondary to the city's lights. Perhaps you are but a pale coin paid by all the lonely souls. Yet, to those stubborn enough to find you, you offer your companionship—perhaps already weary of illuminating—Moon.

Barely above sea level on Lima’s coastal plains, the summer fullness of this place doesn’t favor your constant presence. And even when, for brief moments, you manage to be the only true light of the night sky, most of the locals live out their Saturday demanding every minute repay the credit of being lived. There are corners where faces yearn for the dawn, seeking the night’s joy in bottles of liquor; children burning their last energy of the day playing in the gazebo of a park where someone, lost in silent thoughts, swings slowly on a wooden swing. People passing by, people arriving, people flowing with the rhythm of the cool night, heading home or to someone’s home, their horizontal gazes fixed on the glow of streetlights.

In this place of sparse grass and cement, my gaze strays upward. Night after night, it seeks you, steadfast in its contemplation, knowing that before the year ends, you will bid farewell on one of these evenings.

I no longer argue with the tenderness I see in love; I neither delight in it nor resent it. What impresses me now is the beauty of aged couples who have woven time into the expression of their love—so different from the romantic spark in kisses born for the fleeting thrill of passion.

I wonder, searching the dense darkness of the sky, if my eyes deserve your companionship. In the quiet passage of the night, behind the clouds, luminously alone, have you declared yourself unworthy of being looked upon? I search for you, with an almost enamored constancy, and finally, finding you, glowing and full, having climbed higher than the clouds, my eyes write to you. They compose this romantic patience that hasn’t faltered until you were found so that my words may at last describe your affectionate presence, your long-awaited company.

I wonder:
Do my eyes deserve your company?
Do you deserve my gaze?
I search for you.
My eyes write to you my patience...
My words describe your presence...

Finally, starry. XD