#47 Intimacy

I'm not a photographer.

Just this year I started taking pictures of something else than vacations or small funny moments. Just this year I got a good camera and even that was an accident. I didn't get it for myself, but for the boy that left me 20 days after the camera arrived my house. A camera that was too good for me, he was the one that used to take pictures and because of that I don't have any picture of myself from the past 12 years. Just this year, this year that changed my whole life, because I had a camera too good for my skills and because I didn't want to  see it a waste of money, I took a basic photography course. Not only for the camera not to be a waste of money, but mainly because I needed to keep myself busy, I needed to have anything but cigarettes on my hand, I needed to have an excuse not to cry and leave the house after work on occasional Thursdays. It's a cliché, but everybody said it - you need to focus on something else, go take a course, learn another language, start a new project and I said ok, not happy about it, but forced myself to it.

I've always loved photography, but always considered myself a terrible photographer, all blured and no light or focus sense but now I think I had never found my subject.

I'm not a photographer. But I do take pictures. And my favourite subject, at the moment, is intimacy. Maybe because I don't have it, maybe because I'm single and I miss the feeling of being part of something. And I am lying now. I do have intimacy, otherwise I couldn't take pictures of it. I have friends and family that are so intimate with me that don't even notice when I pull my camera to capture them, no posing, no smiling, no changing what they're doing - it's almost like I'm invisble and sometimes, being invisible is just awesome.

If I was a photographer, which I'm not, my goal would be this invisibleness, going inside the houses, the beds, the gardens, and capture life and love as if I wasn't even there.

#46 Supermarkets at lunch on a Sunday are for lonely people

I entered the supermarket on a Sunday for the first time in 5 years. I never shop on Sundays. Sundays are for family and for cooking and for parks and for sleeping all morning and having sex in the couch while a romantic comedy continues on tv. It was 1pm. I couldn't see anyone except for the cashier, bored looking at her nails - they definitely needed some attention. I grabbed her microphone and I said, peacefully, Is there anyone here that wants to keep me company? maybe share a bottle of wine? maybe some sex? The cashier continued to look at her nails.
An old lady come off the yougurt hall and yelled, sadly, my darling, my doctor told me I shouldn't drink wine anymore.
A sexy young girl, mini-skirt and doc martins, grabbed her kind of ugly boyfriend, looked at me from the bread section and said we don't do girls!
An old men said I'll go with you. He bought a bottle of cheap wine and we sat in a bench and we held hands (I've always loved the soft skin of elderly people, so much loose skin, so many wrinkles and small scars and tinny dots, constelations) and he said his wife died last year and I told him that I've been feeling lonely and as we finished the whole bottle his bus showed up and he stood up and said we couldn't have sex because he's out of Viagra and I said it's ok.

#45 Do you believe in coincidences?

I don't. I believe in chaos and that because we are always trying to find a sense, a reason, a meaning for the chaos, we add the dots that never exist, like we add the small dashes between the stars to create constelations as if stars had little spider webs attached to their burning cores. there is only chaos, I keep telling myself. whatever will be will be. but somedays, mostly Sundays, which are always the strangest of the days, some things click and I find myself wondering if coincidence isn't just a force, like gravity, that physics never manage to measure.

This neckless has been sitting in my desk for over 6 months, waiting for the rightfull owner to contact me. Today I picked it up and for the first time I looked at it with some attention. It's braille. I don't know braille but now I am curious and yes, curiosity killed the cat and I'm sure curiosity will kill me eventually. It's an H and a P - HP. And you can smile and say Hewllet Packard as everybody else would in the world, but not me because my name starts with an H and today is P's birthday and I've already decided I'm not going to email him the song.

Now I can only wait to go home, drink a bottle of wine and by 8pm, mildly wasted and sad, call it just another Sunday.

#44 Happy Birthday

I'm not calling you babe. Or write you an email. Or think about you. It's a promise.

Today it was your birthday
And I didn’t know what to do
Are you supposed to call the people you love
When you know they don’t love you

Today was your birthday
But I didn’t dare to call
Though I thought about you all day
Even at midnight I wanted to call
To be honored to be the first one to send you my love
And wish you

Happy hippy birthday

#43 he's a very important man, my neighbour

I've said it before - I love looking at my nighbours, at their windows, trying to figure out other peoples' lives, what do they do, how much they love their families, do they dance? are they happy?

This is mister important house. He has books and diplomas framed on his office wall. He is having a meal just now in the kitchen.

My bets are that he's a dentist and he doesn't like his job. He was never a top student and always excused himself for it with the idea that it's not the grades that matter. Later he went to a couple of meetings mainly to show off to his wife who always thought that being a dentist was a highly respectful position. She didn't even finish high school and she thinks she was very lucky to have met him once at a disco matiné. His latest diploma is dated from 1987 - that was the last time he attended a meeting. He doesn't go to meetings anymore because he thinks he already knows everything and his practice is doing fine.Not really well, but pays for all his bills. 

Since I moved here, 5 years ago, I never caught him grabbing a book from the shelf. The last book he bought was 8 years ago because he met an old university colleague in the street, a good looking woman, and she was heading for the bookstore so he joined her. He bought a very thick mistery book written by a well known journalist that had his face on the cover and big red letters saying bestseller. He tryed to read it but always got bored after 5 pages so he said to himself that not everyone needs to be a reader to be clever and the school of life can teach us so much more and he put the book in the shelf and he doesn't even look at it anymore.

He's not in love with his wife. He never was. But working long hours, he needed someone to take care of him at night, cooking and ironing his shirts and all that shit and he is really happy about his decision. She is a good one, she's nice, doesn't bother him much and she still looks good after 20 years of marriage. He never cheated on her. He once thought about it, with a client, but then her teeth got better and she moved on to her life.

His wife loves him very much and loves to keep the house very clean. They have big carpets that she chose from a very expensive store many years ago and she dusts them weekly. It's a hard work because the carpets are really heavy and she does everything all by herself and sometimes when she's dusting it off the balcony she thinks that one day she will fall. She is very proud of doing all the house work all by herself. Some of his colleagues have housemaids and wives that spend all day doing nothing or going to the gym or shopping but not her. She wakes up everyday very early to have breakfast with him, in the kitchen table and then she irons everything perfectly through the morning. He would never suspect, but somedays, after he leaves, she goes back to bed and sleeps until 11 and when he gets back for lunch complains about how the new sheets are so difficult to iron. 

They always eat in the kitchen. At first, when they got married, they would always eat in the living room, but with time they thought it would be more practical to eat by the stove and now there is a big heavy fruit basket and a flower jar on the dinning table. The flowers are plastic.

Before he goes to bed he always has a snack and he sits in the kitchen and thinks that he's very lucky because there are always yogurts and fresh fruit in the fridge.

Before she goes to bed she looks in the mirror and says to herself she still looks good for a 45 year old and then looks at their weeding picture on the drawer and smiles.

They are very happy.

#55 looking for a flatmate

I love living alone. I do. But today, for the first time since she left, 3 months ago, I missed my flatmate. I got home and I opened a bottle of wine and started cooking  and then I thought - where is that sweet girl I could steal cheese from when I didn't have time to go to the groceries like today and it's just sad, sorry Rosa, you were a great flatmate and I just hope I can find another Rosa in September, but I do love living alone  and having a flatmate is just the easiest way for me to be alive in this system that feeds on money. Sorry girl.
 

I love living alone and having the cat and the remote control just for me, but here I am sharing with you (is anyone reading?) the strange life of a 35 year old living in an awesome apartment by herself.

#42 blood is thicker than wine

Blood is thicker than wine.
Blood is thicker than everything.

She could be me, you know. It was cromossome randomness that gave her the black hair. Just that. She could be me and we don't even look alike. Maybe our noses are somewhat similar, we both have the same large hips and twisted knees but no-one would say we are made exactly with the same materials.

She was the first child and the only child when I arrived. She was quiet and spoiled. Not really spoiled, maybe used to all the love and attention. Definitely not spoiled. Quiet and used to a peaceful and loving house when I arrived. I imagine it wasn't easy. I must have been a revolution in her life, tom-girl that learn how to fight even before I was born, restless and loud in her pink princesses and books world.

We, obviously, never got along. Apart from the family, the ones that loved her for what she was hated me for being the opposite. I remember the voice of the my first teacher, who was hers' for the previous 4 years - "how is it possible! she doesn't stop, she screams louder than all of the ther kids together, how can she be your sister, you who sang everyday at the end of the class, you who were the best student" and me the destroyer, the one who finished the first grade without knowing the letters, the one who didn't care about sitting because my energy was too big for that. The same blood type, the same mother, the same father, the same fair skin and nothing else in common.

I was 4 years younger and it had to be me to teach her how to kick, how to fight, how to curse and  not in the nicest way, but I could say now that it was for her own good - how does one survive in this world without this knowledge?

So we didn't got along for the first 20 years of my life and to be truth it never really bothered me or her. It was ok. Our parents weren't really happy about it, but it was not a problem as long as we didn't fight and didn't, we mostly ignored each other.

But blood is thicker than wine. It is thicker than everything.

And now you're thinking about the crisis that brought us together, who died, who's heart got broken, because this is usually how the story goes, but not really, not with us, we don't like to be the rule, we, the ones that share this thick blood, we do things differently, and it was love that brought us together. She got married and I don't have clue why or how or who said something, but she decided I should be her witness. We have a younger sister, a sweet always funny adorable younger sister, loved by everybody and she was the obvious choice - she would have been my choice and somehow the big one decided to go with me.

Love, from where I can see, is always a choice. And it's nothing but a choice. Love forever exists if you decide that it exists and that it is going to be forever and if you stick to your plan. It's a decision. "I will love you now and forever" it's not a hope in my heart, is not a desire that my soul is not going to betray my mind, it's a decision that I will forgive you when you're wrong, I will hold you when you're in need, I'll be laughing with you when you're happy, I'll learn how to like the things you love, I'll try everyday to see the world through your eyes So she decided to love me on that day and I decided to love her back and it was as simple as that because love is simple and is just a decision.

And blood is thicker that wine and is thicker than everything and we may not look alike but we were cooked in the same oven and we made the same choice of loving each other and that is all it matters. And because we decided to love each other, I feel my nephews as my own skin, she feels my pains like in her bones and because we want our love to be forever, we pay attention and we care everyday and the dress and the book that arrived my place of work today, just a minute ago, this package that mister postman decided not to bring to the 3rd floor without an elevator because he is just lazy and he doesn´t care, this package that just by luck was not stolen from the building entrance, is nothing but a pure expression of our love and she didn't even answer the phone to hear me thank and she will never read this text but since blood is thicker than wine and thicker than everything she already knows in her heart, from the moment she thought about buying this book and this dress, that I just loved it!