Control

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century

it has been denied to literature its capacity of dialogue

with an attempted substitution for a solipsistic and sad monologue”

José Emilio Pacheco

Them

The first day I heard the laughs was strange. I did ridiculous things before. Even more ridiculous. But this last one seems to like them more, it was more appropriate to their humor, I suppose.

When I was a kid I thought the spectators lived in the mirrors and that the first row would be the one in the bathroom of my house, a big mirror that covered the whole wall in which, under its base, started the ceramic of the bathtub. When I dared to look at myself at front I made figures in that wall, waiting for some of it make sense. With foam and the vapor of the hot water I distorted my image, strange has it been for the rusted silver. When I see myself up close the imperfections appear: the grains, black dots, bags, all the ingrown hairs, the receding hairline and cavities. In the mirror, an antique even when I was a kid, the spots were telling me that that reflection wasn’t me. Now I see my image only from a distance, I don’t feel comfortable up close, I’m never ready for close – ups.

It’s a funny feeling that of looking myself reflected and not seeing me, feeling that me, that my mind is way up high, like in the middle of something, grasping, trying to get to the end or, at least, come back, because it’s in a place too far from which my body can’t accede. I look at myself and it’s me but at the same time it’s not: there are things for which words are no good and, perhaps, that’s why the images help… The air around my face it’s unusual to me, this is the only face I know, but I feel I’m just using it and someday I will not recognize it, living someway still. In the meantime, my body feels cruel obeying orders of who knows who and what’s left of my mind downstairs seems confused, trying to understand what it’s seeing.

Without being able to find the way to explain it,arises a hot tranquility, exasperating, that generates the opposite effect on me, leaves me cold, dialing occupied, always.

I remember a lot of nights alone at home, boredom only mitigated by the tedium, getting naked and scream the moment I crossed the door coming from school was a liberating act.

With time and repetition this ceased to be fun, then it came back to it, maybe in an ironic form, and finally stopped forever, like I were taught to behave.

The big bathroom was the place I used to think more about my day while I undressed to take a bath. I’d made conclusions about the general sensations, if it was good or bad, if I made the right choices. Their reactions varied from surprise to laughter, generally laughter. Also I could notice when they were paying attention. It was an odd feeling that of just in that moment being able to feel, like a rumor in the shadows,persons that, in lack of a better term, they followed the plot of my life.

The one who can hear, under the incessant whispers, will find the truth of the story. I’m a believer of that not knowing that a thing exists can lead to the disappearance of such thing. I know someone watches me, yes, it can’t be any other way: I am the protagonist. Someone watches me and pays to enjoy with the things that happen to me, paying for them to happen: I have been chosen to this. I feel this. And sometimes I want to make a good show, but another times I just want to be left alone. Like making a wish I think “I wanna be normal!”, even that I don’t really want it. But I can’t be, I have to be left to my senses because otherwise I could felt even worse, suffer more and more to a breakdown, and being normal while at it! NO, no, I couldn’t live like that, so, I keep up like this.

I need some kind of retribution, that something good come out of this. There are certain things that one expect a reward from: the effort, suffering, a secret fight. But, why should we expect anything? Is that wait not making us feel worse? Isn’t it true that we come to the finish line more tired, older than at the beginning? The questions, the answers, are breaks. We just have to keep going forward.

I have learned so much that the sensation of liberty became comprehensibly fragile, it took an nervous energy, possessive, and those directors slash writers slash actors, Spike Lee, Orsen Welles, Woody Allen, became my idols.

I have learned so much that I took a new perspective from life: I would be the narrator and everything would be seen from my perspective, even what other persons said it would cross from the sieve of my thoughts.

It comes a moment when so much time passes that I distrust my capacity of speaking. It seemed right. I recognized common answers, time cuts, different perspectives, focalizations, structures that I wanted to undo. I saw good characters, bad ones, good actors doing bad movies, giving their best effort, to the point that one would want to find the question in their eyes “why do I have to take that check?”, but no, they are very professional. I saw persons acting like themselves on the screen.

I never saw Them. I never imagine anything about their physical forms. Just the voices when I’m close to the mirrors. But I know that they follow me at every moment ‘cause what I’ ve been doing all day, at any place, it always seem to be what They are talking about. They are not looking for action, or adventure, or suspense, or terror, not in the way it’s normally conceived.

It could be said that They were interested in a kind of independent filmmaking, complex, contradictory, the kind that’s about the existence and how we are subjected to it… without any guide or index of any kind. Something like that couldn’t exist in television, people don’t want to listen or pay attention to anything different for a long time while they are cooking, ironing, loving… why would they? It’s just T.V… but in a cinema they are forced to stay to the credits. They could only want a comedy too.

When I see myself from afar I recognize beauty and it’s like a punishment, a responsibility to do something with it, that inevitably lead to other people to get close and then far away. If I were fat, o really skinny, too short, if my face weren’t so angled and my eyes didn’t sparkle I could focus in myself but no… They chose me well. I see myself forced to waste my time by taking every second of it, to do something with my youth that time and again gives me more grief, something ephemeral, with people that doesn’t know me and, if they do, will go away. They’ll make me think that I just have to be together with people like me. And there are any.

I think there’s two moments when real life starts: when we finally establish a controlled routine, that we know at least won’t change unless we want it to with actions of a second, like punching the wrong guy or saying it all at once, that can modify or untie a whole life of making a being of ourselves; or when, once we are independent, we can chance our path how many times we want it. Control and independence.While independence it’s uniquely ours we try to control ourselves to not implode or explode, ’cause there’s nothing we can do to control others. To manage those apparently opposite gradients, even in the moments we live in the house of mom and dad, it’s all that needed to be conscious. For some this reality never starts.

A blurred beginning and an end, maybe equally blurred, that’s how people coincide, just that, errors, misunderstandings and tremendous tics we can detect. I should do something.

While I have thought all this I’ve been an enormous amount of time here, standing in the middle of the bathroom, observing my untrained body, loose of inactivity, to console myself with that face sometimes I don[t recognize but is so beautiful that it hurts not getting it better roles. I’ve stayed thinking and that’s going to deny the ending, my ending.