August by Romina Paula

Author:Romina Paula
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558614277
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2017-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

20.

Before I leave I spend some time with Ali. We have a little love session. I pick her up and hold her in my arms like she’s a baby, and she lets me, slippery though she may be, and hard though it may be for her to relax. I pet her stomach, put my head up to hers, rub up against her. She smells like roasted sweet potatoes, I don’t know why, I don’t know where she would have picked that up. But in any case, she smells good, I like the smell of roasted sweet potatoes, weird as it is that it’s on Alicia, Alison. I can feel her purring, your cat doesn’t make much noise, she doesn’t purr externally, it’s internal. But you put your hand on her stomach and you can tell.

It’s strange, since I’ve been here I almost haven’t thought about the past at all, it’s super weird. I mean the distant past, my distant past. Ours, here, before. It probably has to do with the fact that absolutely everything here is so before that it would just be redundant. Or not, actually maybe not, since most people aren’t actually here anymore, and those who are aren’t recognizable, can’t be identified with themselves, I mean, with what I remember of them. Maybe I didn’t want to think about before because I wouldn’t have been able to handle it: going to scatter your ashes from a bridge just into nothingness, into a landscape, thinking that was you, what you were. I guess a certain distance was necessary in order to go through with that and not completely fall apart, fall in with you. I don’t know, I guess because of your parents too, to make things easier on them. And for me, for me too, of course, for me, too. Oddly enough now (and it must have to do with my impending return), after my talk with Manuel, with everything I didn’t tell him about Julián and his family and his paternity and everything I also didn’t tell him about your house with how the light hits it in the middle of the day and that nobody is ever here then, just your cat who smells like sweet potato and me, all this silence brings you back, materializes your presence, or your absence, or the fact that you’re not here, your never being here again, so clear, so definitive. Then I think about the afternoons at the Percy or here in your room or in the living/dining and I kind of waver, I get weak. I realize, I think I realize that I want to leave, but I also know I want to take you with me, and it’s impossible because you’re here, very here, I just now fully understood that. From there, from Buenos Aires, I can miss you very contemplatively, look at you, at us, as though through a glass in a shopwindow, our common/shared past, behind glass, get into a funk about it but at a safe remove, removed by that window pane.

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