thessaloniki
for chris
listen, i did not tell you right away but it was you i was writing about. i guess there is a mutual awareness that belongs only to the bodies that do not belong. even in the absence of verbal language, there is. and thus you knew all along, did you not?
listen, as you approached i wondered if you had left traces of your body on that bench just so that you could reclaim them at that moment—as if you had parenthesized time and space. i noted: you were an entire man unsure of your entirety. you came into the world i was building from within, overly aware of the personal, carrying but not advertising the knowledge of your presence as constant negotiation between the visible and the invisible, the absent and the confronting.
i should leave you said. you said i should leave many times. you said it repeatedly until you were able to conceive your body as a body allowed to exist in the space we both occupied as foreigners. and you said i will sit maybe i could sit if you don’t mind. and i didn’t, i never would. and she sees herself thinking that it is the proximity to the excessively familiar that her body fears the most. listen, i guess there is a fear that belongs only to the bodies that do not belong.
you said, i have no house but belong to many places. you told me that much. and you said it as if you were able to sense my inner ruminations. and you went on and murmured, you know, people became inevitably sad in all the places i have belonged to. and i wondered if the sadness people carry is the reason you keep leaving. and i wondered if the sadness people carry is the same in every place they inhabit. i wonder too much and know too little, you see, and thus you must agree, all i am left with is to imagine what cannot be verified.
look, they said the square we have been imagining was once a tower. i wonder if you know that this square we occupy day and night was once a tower to see beyond. and i bet you do, you most definitely do—when we said goodbye you said thank you your words were light words were divine words and i can now see better, i can now see more and you said it as if you held in yourself all the ghosts all the traces of that square as if you were yourself the seeing tower the square once was.
when we said goodbye, you pressed your hand against mine in what felt like a never before rehearsed gesture. a gesture that could only occupy a temporary now, like crumbs, like running waters. when we said goodbye, as you pressed your hand against mine, we constructed lasting embodied memory, did we not?
uncommon bird,
a flower shall grow for the imagined memory this square and i weaved of you.