thessaloniki
for chris
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.
as you approached i wondered if you had left traces of your body on that bench just so that you could reclaim them now—as if you were parenthesizing reality.
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 enter the space we both occupied as foreigners. and you said i will sit maybe i could sit if you don’t mind. and i don’t, i never would. and she sees herself thinking that it is the proximity to the excessively familiar that her body fears the most. i guess there is a fear that belongs only to the bodies that do not belong.
would you say there is crazy, would you say there is madness? you told me you were from many places you said you know people became sad. and i wondered if the sadness you carry is the same in every place. i wondered if mine is too.
it is not raining anymore but you have not left. you said i only stay when there is rain but there is no more rain and you are still here. and you make yourself awake and you say good morning you say i am waking up you say the sun is out. and you say posing it as a question from all the spaces from all the places similar to this one is this the space.
and i think yes, and she says yes, this is certainly the space.
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 wise words were happy 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 this square as if you were yourself the seeing tower this square once was.
when we said goodbye you did not know that the rain was but temporary rain and so you pressed your hand against mine in what felt like a never before rehearsed gesture that could only live in that moment, like crumbs, like running waters.
uncommon bird, a flower shall grow for the memory this place weaved of you.
perhaps it rains tomorrow too.
still, i wish i would have asked you if you like flowers.