11:47 a. m. » Aquì és on sóc. Això és el que estic fent

It's too much. I've lost all hope of documenting well that which I've stood through. Each and every of my thoughts has gone over and beyond the line of subjectivity. I've been right here, at the bottom of this slow-motion avalanche of unregisterables. It's finally evident that I, a proud(ish) citizen of the world, no longer have the capacity to live under these conditions. Is it the city? The country? The continent? Seeing as I've consistently and assumedly undeservedly found myself accused of being from a different planet (which, to me, considering the sources, bears about the same credibility as Xavi's calling me queer), I suppose it could, after all though, be the whole God-forsaken place. A mind, or maybe just this one, can only stand these shocks, these blows, these shifts in perspective so many times. Those who are able to endure it have obviously in possession some sort of accustomarity to or resistance against (maybe even a, Christ forgive them, predilection towards provoking) this suffocating existence to which, apparently, none of us here can help but fall victim -- I might even go as far as to say that they're better people than me. And for this, if I didn’t know any better, I’d have given anything to stay. What I could be referring to is any number of things that have been realized in the past week. Cecile telling me that Serena had asked her why I couldn't be her daddy. The heated argument that broke out between the hated arrogant French woman and the beloved Swedish lesbian, the former of whom who didn't stop at saying that the idea of females being conscience of their own genitals disgusted her, but who continued by saying that feminists did the same; the rest of the class, including the teacher, then ending up stepping outside the room, before long finding ourselves consoling (as well as being blamed as at fault for not staying and supporting) the angry, bawling Scandinavian. In her bed, Serena's throwing up a bucket's worth of vomit set off by her cough; my taking a week off from school to stay home with her as her mother, as she herself put it, absolutely had to work; my learning that she'd been doing the same before school for weeks and almost daily. The mentally disabled nerd-type sitting down two feet from me on the Metro, asking if I liked Star Wars, generously informing that the original was to be aired that afternoon on this particular channel and at this particular time; moving on by pulling a razor blade from his wallet, commencing a kind of scraping, cutting act or ritual at something on the palm of his hand; my noticing a book about vampires on his lap, Serena sitting on mine. The fattest man alive sitting with the runner-up for the women mounted on his lap at eleven a.m. on a Sunday on a bench in one of the city's largest plazas, even Serena finding the sight disagreeable. Cecile's not coming home by nine as promised (my being meant to go to the reception of an illegal wedding) but finally at two -- and with a man; her asking me to go to bed so that they could, again, as she put it, use the living room; then my being forced to listen to the woman, the person, the thing I hate more than a thousand times more than anything I ever have, in what couldn't be mistaken as much other than a disgusting, repulsive state of ecstasy, while still, as if what was already being heard were remotely conceivable as stomachable, my being treated to hearing yet more semi-excessively audible satisfaction thrust into her, again and again and again (all topped off by her sleeping late the next morning, missing her plane, blaming it on her daughter, and asking me to go miles out of my way to some hotel [the name of which she had wrong] in order to drop off an array of gifts [alcohol, cough syrup, anchovies, and cheap Turrón] for whom I can only assume was said sweetheart). Or that which carries the most weight of all (and despite the impossibility to convey the pure disturbance it, itself represents), my teacher confessing to me in the loud, dark discotheque during my supposed going-away celebration that she'd been having an affair with (read: secretly fucking) my close friend, who already has a girlfriend (reminder: threesome), who's been (sometimes solo with just me) in my class for months, who I see almost every day, and, above all, who I confide in and talk to often, all in front of my very (blind) eyes -- and for about a month. That was it though. Right there. And it still is. I'm thinking about how just hours before learning this I was with her discussing that for a male to have a fetish for teachers probably isn't so uncommon, innocently turning to her lover for a confirmation, his vouching, and later after the surprise, her telling me that she had the same but opposite -- and that I didn’t even see it. I’m thinking about how the majority of my nights out had been spent with them both and how what they were all about was completely different to them than me -– the thoughts that must have been going through their heads -- and that I didn’t even see it. I'm thinking about how foolishly drunk and giddy the state she found herself in was while unloading the confidence on me -- like the little girl she thinks she is, on the verge of bursting, as not able to discuss or reveal to anyone this precious thing, throbbing, probably painful, it easily carrying the potential of costing her her job -- and that I didn’t even see it. I'm thinking about all the inconsistencies in their stories and plans as of late and my ignorantly blaming the language barrier. The night the relationship groaned its first groan, my leaving them alone in that supersaturated bar, him mouthing at me, begging me not to leave him alone with her, my walking away making a joke about the very preposterous impossibility that would go on to pass within an hour. How unfathomably awkward class must have been this past month for the two of them, and how he's stayed home for at least half the days, and how paranoid they've both been, and, again, how it was right there in front of my face, and how ridiculously unconscious I was to any of it. How I once asked her if she felt proud seeing her students, like him, speaking Castellano with natives and her simply saying yes. God fucking help me, I'm thinking of her, almost chubby, probably on the verge of ten years older than him, lying in bed after ñaca ñaca, them kissing -- or even worse: talking. I didn’t even see it. The monkey, the undone pants, the I love you, the Coca-Cola, the six-hundred Euro, the rolling, the terrace, the xinos, the xurros, the undeniable fact that I'm always fucking right. All of it, everything, always just when the time couldn't be any better. The posts I never even published. The false starts. The ones I never even wrote, too real, not having the heart for the exploitation. It just kept coming. An old man (the same I once encountered pulling a VCR along the sidewalk by its cord) dragging the upper portion of a streetlamp across the road. On the Metro a Spaniard picking, as if (God knows it would have been that much more excusable) it were his nose, the inside of his ear and finally eating whatever it was he'd found. A group of sixteen year-old girls outside a train station smoking marijuana while snorting cocaine off of the pavement. A brawl breaking out in an indie bar. That third-floor dwelling, assumedly gorgeous (never gathered the courage to really look, let alone bring up the weather) girl in the elevator again -- the same one who two weeks ago held the door for me for a full twenty seconds. A reflection from afar, judged before being recognized as my own. That my teachers saw me wearing a different face than the one I'd carried before. Acid rain and its cause serving to soften the fabric, the potential to forget how it is to as a community bear that repugnance which can only be seen by the outside. That I'd never known what it was to laugh. That, not only does paper bear no weight, but that no one even knows it. That it's like slaloming the rules. That the more I try to lose my bearings, the more they can't help but be found. That the twilight of my life here had set in and that along with it had come the insomnia, the dread, the impatience, and worst of all the semi-kinetic nostalgia that sparks this necessity to use metaphors. That actual beauty, at the end of it, isn't found on the inside, but on the out -- and that it's probably only what it is because it's got its path. I’m doing this on purpose because I want to do it again -– but, really, how can I be expected to leave? Isn’t it too late for that? The air I breathed, once inside my lungs, my body, or, really, everything else I left in general -- it's all still there, once or momentarily mine, now reciprocated into the streets, the tunnels, the tramlines, the pipes, the empty lots, and, most surely of all, the fucked up battery I could’t help but appreciate or probably love. I’m taking a piece of it with me, for all that I’ve left behind. I thought I had an idea of how it was going to end, and it’s not yet implausible. I smelled the city this morning for the first time. The exhaust, the perspiration, the smoke, the shit, the asphalt, the iron. It was like falling forwards. The only reason it being there because it wouldn't be tomorrow.