SOMETHING MORE BEAUTIFUL

2005-2009

Sabrina, have you counted? Do you know how many years separate us from London today? Sometimes, the ancient contours of our Rome appear to me in a cloud of smoke, and there you are, like a distant image at the back of an inverted lens… Do you remember, the first time, how I couldn’t see you? I went to India, searching for the secrets of Varasani, and when I returned, we met again, and already I saw you more clearly; and soon, I saw only you. We began our journey on the wings of desire, in cities, on beaches, in beds, beneath deep skies. Do you remember our entwined bodies, our twin souls, melted in dreams of Art? Do you recall the warmth of our bodies, twisted together, our naked selves, our two pillows pressed close? Do you remember that we invented, in a corner of this vast world, a space that was only ours, with our combined passions as its horizon? We lived with fire; I loved you madly, as a Muse; I delighted in your skin at my fingertips, your body in my sight; I caressed your warm forms, which were simultaneously revealed on the sensitive paper of my heart. We fucked well, and the thread of our days wove a tapestry of light that, as artists, we could have signed together. All of this seems so distant, like returning to an abandoned house, finding the remnants of an interrupted lunch, an unmade bed… life that stopped in its tracks…

If our stars had shone differently, we would have married under the Mexican sun; on that day, our wedding day, I would have looked at your body through the glass of my desire for images, your white dress entangled at your ankles, and we would have made love until the end of time, without illusions. But the mundane life clanged its noisy iron into our hearts: money, the hulls of airplanes in our back-and-forths, the compressed metal of a smashed motorcycle—and our greedy bellies only made the sound of a cooking pot… Perhaps we were searching for something more beautiful… You left, I followed; you returned, I came back; we hung suspended between two continents, our love swayed without momentum over the Atlantic—and then, its body gently drifted apart, you reached out to that other man over there, in Mexico, where I had taken you—and I threw the remnants of my life toward that old Europe that witnessed our birth—and I hid there to weep.