Soccer season arrives, you’re excited until you start waking up at 6:30 a.m. every day during the summer. As the first game is on, you arrive expecting to play just to realize you’re warming up the bench. It’s not a big deal, it’s still August and it’s easier to tan while sitting down. It isn’t until you’re laying there camouflaging between the soccer bags; laying like a lizard taking the sun in that your coach yells for you to jump in. You scramble up and trip between bags and *****, making your way to the sideline. You do the final stretches and make your way in awkwardly lifting your hand to high-five your teammate coming out who misses it completely. Then it’s game on, it is time to start playing. But that is not how it goes. 15 minutes into the game you realize you have roamed the same 15 square foot area all this time. I got the ball once, I controlled it on my feet. Yeah, I know. Unfortunately when I turned the ball found it’s way between my legs and fell into the opposite player. ******. I’m getting a good tan though; I think I was supposed to get that pass, I slowly jog towards it. Should I? Well now the ball is gone. Let’s go back to my 15 square foot area; my legs are tired. I see the ball coming from up in the air, I’ve never done this. I’m running, just keep running. No, that’s the sun not the ball. There’s the ball, jump, jump. jump. I jump and a 200 pound guy crashes with me, I’m on the floor. Done.

My father is a handsome guy, or so I’ve heard. Mommy and daddy split, with just the white sheets left in between their lives. Some unimagined darkness spoke with accuracy. These were her gifts, that primal lesson. It is a beautiful and terrible fear; like I have been balancing on the edge. There are no jobs, and snakes inhabit my tent. I pretend, she pretends, we go out life pretending. When at the end the hero dies, the luxury of growing up is not given to me. She has been going bald, but what do I know? She is her mothers daughter. It would be a logical conclusion, but I never realized the emptiness.

I read your letters sometimes
When I'm alone
A window separates
My dreams from our reality

I've been sinking
like a flower in a fountain.
Now, I'll try to catch the sun
when I'm alone.

You got tired of watching
all the flowers turn to stone.
While I try to catch the sun
I'll figure out who I have become

Today you stand there with him
A window separates
My dreams from our reality
It's burning my insides into stone.

I am writing the last chapter. State fairs and musicals fill the city. A season for leaving is coming. The symptoms start to appear: endless music, parades, parties, carnavales, vacaciones. We soak our dreams in alcohol and hang them to dry. Smoke our **** trying to forget. They told me not to look back in anger but it looks the same in every city. She was all I’ve had, Maria. I met her in the trail of broken ankles. Or maybe it was in the woods, what’s the difference? Now, she has become a replaceable friend. I won’t grief, instead I’ll go out and shoot a star. Yesterday I saw her for the last time. It is the final level; she gives me a wine glass and I zip it down putting everything away. Time as a window, I try to fight this urge. All this moments will become deaf photographs, just a printed memory–a life of separated realities. I will just keep packing my suitcase chasing shadows.  I drink and tell stories, some call it fantasy but I just bent over life and practice witchcraft. I am just tired of watching all the flowers turn to stone. I am afraid I will drift into words.

It’s like dividing signals, that is what amazed me. I have to resist the impulse to grab you and hold you. I still see you, slipped into the underlife. The faith of our bodies is crying a little. I love starting things, but I have to pause. All I can take is the greatest pleasure, a replica. I feel like I have a plastic bandage made of lavender. Anxious, with fire to fire, I will try to slip you into the night. As the sun rises and the day turns black, the cotton-fields stand in my way but I still see you. The inevitable is happening. We are reaching for death on the end of a candle, we are trying for something that’s already found us. We are like a storm or some holy dream. Calling out doesn’t do anything. The sound of glass speaks quickly and I’ve been down for son long that it looks up to me now. I have never been heard. I am troubled, immeasurably by your eyes.

The sun, crawling into the horizon gets ready to receive another merchant soul. Upon his departure he will float away, into the madness of the world. He'll leave his love behind, a dream washed away by the rising night and a new beginning with the arrival of the moon. A sigh of love falls into the endless ocean, with despair crashing into the waves, yet to belong in a new home. He was gone, one push, enough to free a soul away. The wind never brought back what it took away, nothing was ever the same.

It was six in the morning while we drove downtown. There were some freaks, but it was just a human pattern. We drove past them and kept going while we watched the children running, the hospitals dumpster and the virgins graduate. We drove into nowhere, and it was dark with the trees surrounding the car. I had been deceived, and I was shuttering to my knees; but there was a rebelliousness to it. It was a battle of shadows, but you still didn’t have any opinions. I said: Let me start by asking you. But I couldn’t finish, it was the absence of badness–the **** beds and the soaking pillows that filled your empty room. You never felt it again, like a dry wall, empty on the inside. Breathlessly I gasped for some air, and reach out for you.