Jealous Guy

it comes on and I dissolve into a river of tears and in the current rush past days in a kitchen, friends, a documentary, Sira, whisky cocktails, morning after pills, and much misunderstood love.

hide and seek

behind the trunk of the old pine tree, the girl kept waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. but no-one came to find her. they'd gone over to someone else's house for tea and forgotten she was even there.

grandma

i remember one day, walking through the strong winds coming from the river, walking up to the shopping mall to get some feminine products. my third or fourth time coming on. me in embarrassed pain. her so small, but resolute. muttering to herself that no-one had told her. family traits.

i loved her short hair, and the way she smiled. her efficient ordering around of grandpa. the way it was always clear with her when things were right, and when they were wrong.

i never told her i hated her diluting my orange juice. but i drank it all the same.

km 333, half way to hell

on the side of the road, scrawny kids, travel dirty, wait under the shade of dwarf palm trees. some stick their thumbs out, most gave up on the kindness of strangers some time after the sun reached its midday summit.

I wonder if I will ever again be on the roadside, or if I'll ever be the kind stranger. a lifetime ago, maybe.

30 degrees.

black, shimmery pools of imaginary water reflect back the sky on the tarmac.

when I was young I would dream of the car diving in, water everywhere, and a long swim into the depths of the highway, to where it's really going.

the sky breathless with the haze rising upwards. a lonely tero eating carrion off the melting road, taking flight just when. bugs on the windscreen.

somewhere out there, a fortress.

where I grew up

where I grew up is a place of palm trees and seafront avenues and running and a soft breeze and a foodie market and the smell and gentle sound of the coming waves

photography project, 1997

I started taking pictures of my stairs in the winter. Maybe they're a silly thing to take pictures of, but they are after all the entrance to my new home in this foreign country. Maybe that's why I've grown so fond of them. They welcome me after being out there in the big scary world, and they say good-bye to me every morning.

So I've taken the pictures, and developed them and printed them, and how much work that has been... almost as much as getting used to living in this country, almost as hard as growing out of my habit of wanting to run away home every time I was out in the city.

And here they are, my stairs with their flowers and the people who go up and down it every so often... Only when I looked at the pictures I realised they were quite gloomy and sad, and I'm not any more, so to cheer the pictures up, as I'm cheered up, I added some colour.

And that explains it all. Hope you like it.

outside the jaime roos concert

i once met jaime roos. i was, for some reason, invited to the pre-concert rehearsal before a show. i wonder who else was there? he came to the group and i said something stupid to him. about liking his songs. or about how one of his songs made me feel nostalgia for uruguay, even before i left for good. a previous knowledge of how i'd feel. a constructed memory. he was ok, let me gab a little about london and then moved on.

after the concert, i left the place with my friends. outside, a mess of people, cars, hazy light. a car ran over one of the drunken boys. as he was hit, his body flew up, describing a perfect arc across the pavement, falling limply like a leaf a few meters away.

silence fell on the scene for a brief moment. and then the boy got up, dusted himself off, and walked away.

i often wonder about this memory. is it real? did this happen? dream world takes me over. perhaps the boy was me? perhaps i never left? perhaps one of us is still suspended, mid-air, drawing a slow motion sky bound curve, never quite falling. fulfilling some ancient prophesy of ascent.

a story

a girl sits facing a boy just outside someone's front garden. the boy has curly blond hair, blue eyes and a pocketful of confusion. the girl wraps her arms around his neck. they kiss.

how life came into my life

i used to lie by the pool, one hand and one foot dropped into it, my body catching the late morning sun, channelling water cool up my left side, my right side tracing fingertipped lines in the puddle spilling out from under me. a name spelled out. heart shapes. clouds. closing and opening. focusing on the shapes, trying to read the message inside my eyelids. flowing from red to green to ice cold blue. sliding down the shape of my waist as it rounds into my belly. just melting there, into the grey slate stone, into the pool, into the sun, into the far away future.

writing

in the winter, we put shiny tights on and hitched our skirts sky high. days would pass crossing and uncrossing legs, catching them taking a look. sighing as we wrote word after word after word and killed time until the late afternoon. piling on a bus east bound. siestas at a friend's house, couples spilling out to each empty corner, quietly exploring the ways in which sleep can be feigned while adventures take flight.

expectations

daydream, history and divinations. the gap between expectation and creation. not so long ago, i was here, and you were there, and he was nowhere to be found. a small, forgotten thought at the end of a tangled dendrite. a tiny spark-of-contact away from full-blown reality and mystery.

pea

when i was a girl i had a little secret growing inside me. shooting tendrils into my tummy. resting itself in it's tiny home. stretching out in the evenings.

memory

mum and dad used to pile the kids in the car at night and drive across the border. early memories of waking up surrounded by sleeping siblings, sun rising, travelling fast...

Voyage (voyage), Et jamais ne revient.

nothing's gonna change my world

sitting around the kitchen table, watching john lennon videos, cutting each other's hair, drinking whisky with dulce de leche, snogging in the corner, playing video games, smoking each other's cigarettes, running wild.

flashback

a meeting in the port tells me old friends are now: running service stations, managing 5-star hotels, defrauding banks, in mental hospitals, middle aged.

i see within myself alternative lives hiding in the corners unfolding in imagined landscapes. in one i am a famous architect, in another a lonely alcoholic, in yet another mother of boys and girls now in high school, owner of a seedy bar, married to a drug dealer, elephant hunter, snake charmer, school teacher, housewife extraordinnaire, kung-fu fighter, cabaret singer, international secret agent...... long distance runner.

origin myth

a woman lies on her bed, hanging on to her tiny egg. men with beards and glasses and syringes and test results tell her it won't stick around. the woman disputes findings, denies instructions, refuses to move, sends her man on errands, waits. four months of stillness later, the doctors check the heartbeat and say: you won this one, missy.

stills

what i dream(ed) of as a girl
scribbling a name on a piece of wood
smiling across the table to a handsome man
receiving a bunch of handpicked flowers
sharing a secret and giggling
a big fat belly in spring
beautiful arms to look at surreptitiously
catching the sun in one hand to stop the night from ending
butterflies in my stomach
africa, another world, anywhere
rainbows forming in the spray of the sprinklers
magic, not tricks

a-ha moment

one conversation and 14 years later i realise the pattern that was established and entrenched while carelessly giggling atop the shoulders of a swarthy, quite promising young would-be architect, taking pictures of a not particularly interesting house.

trans-atlantic

in the shimmering sun, over the waves, a seagull is reflected. the seagull watches its reflection on the ocean and a memory of skipping cascabeles jolts it out of its serene trajectory. a pebble skims over the surface barely touching. sand shifts under the weightlessness of magic footsteps. the sun blushes at the sight of the horizon, always welcoming. a knock on a door goes unheeded. a cow wanders into a lonely kitchen, still reminiscing of the scent of fresh baked cake. in the pine trees, on the coastline, oven birds find a bit of string or two, to add to the growing nest, children needs must. and the frogs, ancient troubadours of seashores, sleepily lull my dreams away.