Pretenders.

Dialogue precedes them. Their conversation unfurls in a space where voices are neutral. Where their lines are being made by a singular screenwriter, narrated privatly in thoughts. They haven’t spoken yet, they haven’t come to acknowledge any sort of likeness between them to dislike, but here she tells him “I don’t like your kind.”

Because there’s a form of perversity in mirrors, on those who have the ability to shed on us the light of our misgivings, that are equally gnarled– very hard to ignore – And yet drawn, out of sheer masochism to endure another round, she invites him for a flogging.

His hands are strong, they mark on her the imprint of his dominance, they show her how to bend on the shrine of every blasphemy, spread across it with the heresy of her biting teeth, her insidious lips, the bone-white flesh of an elusive chimera. They bind her, without asking for permission, in uncomfortable positions that bare shame. 

And since he wont let her evade the scourge, he tells her “We were all meant to forget and be forgotten”  paints her spine with his callous fingertips, tactless and mettled to impose as he whispers words she’s said before. “Occasionally you don’t”

“sometimes this is a problem.”

And although she’s never liked those that reflect on her turbid transparencies, that remind her of the coldness that exist in the bodies that leave you lonelier through the night, disfigured and unwanted, sometimes, you gotta dance with devils to expell them out, sip on bitter drops of poison to understand — that even heartbreaks can be cured, that all things are finite, so are frustrations and laments, pain for what has been and never was.

“Me vas a romper el corazon.” She knows it, but she says it with a lightness that’s misleading, a tailored smile that gleams no weakness, that gives no end to fray, and his punishment is nothing less than his aloofness, how he whips on her the brazen brands of her volitions, burns them deeply in her skin to crack a sterling song. 

“English, Amanda. But no, I can’t break what is already broken.”

Because perhaps, what you need is never quite what you want.

“No quiero que te olvides de mi.” 

“Oh, I will forget about you, you already know this, don’t you?”

“I do, and you just broke my already broken heart with your honesty”

“Will you forget about me?”

“No, I won’t,  I’ll just pretend I did.”

And then she thinks, this is how we spend most of our lives pretending to be something we are not, pretending to feel things we don’t. I love you (not) I miss you (not), because once upon a time we’ve been unwanted, we’ve been disfigured, we’ve been flogged. 

mi vida

lucerito sin vela

mi sangre de la herida

no me hagas sufrir mas

no quiero que te vayas

no quiero te alejes

cada día más y más.

— Manu Chao.