Dádiva - Sun, Feb 01

You can read the Portuguese (BR) of this chronicle in my Medium profile. Click here.

Dádiva - Marcos S. Rutherford (Photo from Église Saint Sulpice)

I began looking for God when my heart started to declare that now, only the celestial could hear me. When I stopped in the middle of some random forest, and I would look up at the sky and supplicate for something or someone to lift the weight of a pain that seemed to wreak carnage on my bones. I would plead, with eyes brimming with tears: please, let there be something, let there be someone, let there be God.

I have never been religious. Despite the Catholic monuments that always stole my attention, the untouchable divine never occupied any space in my heart. I left that space for the poems I read, the paintings I contemplate, the songs that recount fervent passions, parties full of joy, and also the incurable sorrows born after hearts are broken like bones—but without the ability to regenerate.

Since life decided to gift me with the knowledge of your existence, my days are filled with the memory of you in my own existence. It is a price that don't take me for the dreams I have in the dark. In every restaurant I go to, I try your favorite dish just to tell you if they got the recipe right, like your mother's one. Every museum I step in, I search for the art everyone claims a 'breathtaking', only to laugh in their faces as I prove to myself that no man could ever create such a wonderstruck image as you. If I read, it is to fill myself with knowledge that might accomplish you, too. Knowledge is a gift; so are you. And although I do not know every love song, all the ones I have heard have become about us. There is always you.

The misfortune of this gift, truly, is not that my first and last thoughts of the day are your blue eyes, your golden hair, your crooked smile, or your delicate touch, but rather the insistence that these details live only in my mind.

The curse that brilliantly pursues me is the result of an Apollonian encounter capable of dismembering my ethical senses and the commitments I made to myself. Between words spoken and promises made, what remains is only the sound they echoed, in memory of those who heard them. There is no prophecy I would not break for you.

Amidst the rubble of a world you will shatter with your absence, the mad in blood thoughts will endure: like selling a beach house we never bought, tear apart the children of a marriage we never signed into existence, and watching tennis matches of players whose names we do not pronounce. Will I always wonder? Don’t get me wrong, this is a testimony of love. But I supplicate, in my own name, that I no longer feel the emptiness of not being able to have you.

Amen.