Querido diario:

Can. We. Stop?

He estado volviendo mucho sólo para leer Good Dog, para ver las fotos de Zooey y Ben subidas estratégicamente en los días correctos, los videos combinados con fotos de donde ya ni es mi cuarto, y también para leer todo lo que ponía y pues esque si lo leo me acuerdo de porqué escribía todo lo que escribía y yo creo que enough is enough, apartenomegustaquelagentedigamuchovíaredessocialesytraigopegadaHouseofCards.

Beatriz Alejandra

Good Dog

The Olive had found a monastic simplicity in his movements and had come peacefully to terms with the fact that love did not exist.

The things he enjoyed were: a long walk, a hearty breakfast alone in a café where the chatter of people sitting at tables were to him waves against the bow of a boat moving pleasantly across the calm sea as his thought anchored to little but the motion of hand to toast, toast to egg, union to mouth. Call it a ritual. It was the closest he got to anything that resembled divinity, a sort of diner's Rig-Veda.

Now if you had asked him to name the things he enjoyed some years ago the answer would be quite different. Things he had enjoyed were: a long autumn walk with the Dawn with her cool fingers warming in his paw; a hearty breakfast with the Dawn sitting across from him with a puffy face fresh from sleep and the triumphant chorus of low-grade coffee and Chinese Porcelain.

But shhhhhhhhhhhh...

We must not talk about that now - not while the Olive takes his breakfast. Not while he pulls his cap down to block his view of the couple adoring each other across from him, not while he turns the volume up his head phones to drown us out, and not while he scribbles a faint 'fuck you' to us on his napkin. For now let's just let him enjoy the sight of light cutting through the window illuminating dust particles around him.

This ritual kept him regular. It kept him human. 'I want breakfast and an unwavering supply of caffeine to carry me through the dinner hour when I will choose between cigarettes or fish, therefore, I am.' There was a foundation to his worldview and a devour approach to his most basic needs. But it need not have been confused for atheism. It was not as thought the Olive had rejected God. He just felt God had rejected him and he felt no need to plead a case he felt he did not have.

He may have been a drunk and a dropout and any measure of failure but sometimes when he was least expecting it he could seize on a moment and find peace. He would look down into his black coffee while sitting at the window and catch the reflection of the last autumn leaf fighting to cling to a branch against a determined November wind. In this case, he wasn't sure which to cheer for. He wasn't sure if the leafs were just a memory the tree was trying to shake - in which case, he cheered for the tree; likewise, if the leaf were something weak, clinging desperately to something it was better off losing - he would pull for the leaf. Either way, one was bound to lose and for the Olive this is what November were all about. It was probably November when the Dawn left the Olive.

Yes, in fact it was.

The Olive and The Dawn had sat across from each other and with pumpernickel toast in his mouth the Olive listened as the Dawn made an uncharacteristic breakfast declaration of her steadfast love for him and put money on the table for the bill. That was the last time he saw her. The toast was still between his teeth.

But this wasn't actually how it happened.

As he eats breakfast, this is just the way he chooses to remember it. Details are for suckers. As he lies in bed much later, he'll remember it differently. He'll see her at 4am as she leans over him to make an uncharacteristic early morning declaration of her love to him before she leaves in a taxi forever. Another time he'll be standing in an airport terminal trying to find her in a crowd but she won't be there.

So, as the Olive sat rubbing toast into congealed yoke, he thought: how many years must pass before the memory of a lover can be finaly erased? His acceptance of the fact that love did not exist came also with the understanding that time also did not exist. The distance between bodies could not be measured in the illusory qualities of a month or a year. The world spins on his axis so daily we are made to face the same stars. In an ever-expanding universe he reasoned the memories would pass when the space between him and the stars finally grew too far apart for him to see. It is only too bad that the Olive has only a rudimentary underestanding of the workings of the universe and the stars he sought to distance himself from will always travel with him as part of a larger system of stars making it dreadfully impossible for the Olive to ever separate from his memory the ones who haunted him.

When the Olive left the diner, the sky was overcast and the leaves had not yet entirely vanished from their branches. He traced the colours. The yellows. The browns. The remnants of another summer passed. The streets were barren, the occasional passerby, the odd car or truck. And it was there on the sidewalk where he was walking with his hands in his pocket and his face in his collar in the plain of a day that he saw it.

The great wrecking ball.

Swinging from the sky.

Heading straight for him.

Life. For the Olive, it was the most profane of all the four letter words. The world alone implied all the contours of finality. The colours of decay. Of his choices, bad and worse.

It was coming straight for him.

Though he could see it, he did nothing but breathe deeply and hope that it would pass him, which it certainly did, but as it flew past him, blowing his hair across his face, he felt the tightness in his chest and the slow acceleration of his heart and the numbness spreading from his finger to his hands. But oh did the great wrecking ball pass him with nothing but the intent of increasing its potential on its way back and oh how it intendet to smash its target to pieces.

The summers, the falls, the lamentations, regrets and choices all comprised the ore of this great rock which struck the Olive square in the back as he was walking.

And it was a beautiful sight. Really.

It began with the aforementioned tightness in the chest and numbness in the hands and as a great wrecking ball neared him his pain grew to a massive knot in his throat which blocked any and all passage of oxygen in or out of his lungs, depriving his muscles of the requisite energy to proceed, until even his legs turned their back on his hips and with the force of the great ball in his back, the Olive dropped to the ground,

Crushed.

He lay there, writhing, knowing full well what was coming, and with no other way to break the bond the knot had taken in his throat, he did the only thing his body had energy left to do.

He screamed.

No.

He roared.

No.

He wailed.

And in all the wails and cries heard that day across the planet, his was by far the most beautiful.

When the Olive's face broke open, all the snot and tears his body could summon came forth from his face until he let out the second most beautiful cry heard round the world that day. It was, in short, his one true moment of unbridled being.

He did not hold back; he did not resist what it was his heart needed most so he lay on the pavement with his hand still in his pocket and his forehead upon the pavement bracing the weight of his body.

And it was a beautiful sight. Really.

The Olive, as he lay dying or as he lay living, cared not about the people who crossed to the other side of the street to avoid walking past him or the mothers who hurriedly picked up their young. The only one who did not steer away from the Olive was the Samoyed dog which walked eagerly toward him with a pink tongue flapping from its own snotty face, eager in all its pink-tongued dogness to like clean the Olive's salty cheeks. And with each new tear came a clean lick of the face until the Olive summoned the strenght with his newly oxygenated arms (for each wail brought in a revitalizing quantity of air), raised his hands and felt the chubby white dog's chubby white fur. He held his hands along the dog's hips and slid them slowly along its back and feeling the warmth of the body before him he squeezed his arms tighter and tighter, hugging the dog.

Just hugging the dog.

The strenght eventually came back to his legs and with dirty wet knees and gravel embedded handsomely into his forehead and pants, he rose to his feet, ran his fingers along the dog's face behind his ears and said the first and only words that came to mind, the first words in his first moments after having had his heart shorn open and his guts splayed across the street for the world to see and sniffing away the last bits of snot and wiping away the least bits of tears as he sobbed, and said,

"Good dog."

And I am a ghost of great, the sea, the sand.