I’m still sweating her out, so I have to write her, to exfoliate her, the cursed blackhead of my adolescence. Dina Dino Dynamo, gutter of my entrails, a dynamite stark in the middle of my tranquility. I can only picture her vaguely, except for her signature black hair flowing down her back, sinusoidal and serpentine; the thought that she could have cut it or straightened it or whatever without me knowing anything about it had me going crazy. I needed to know that the Lernean Hydra attached to her skull was still capable of terrorizing. For months on end, I would think of how her hair spread on a pillow, strangely uniform, reflecting the dim lights, deviously covering territory until all fabric was engulfed, and I would think oil spill, I would think she’s spilling her oil on my pillow and I’m so grateful for it I must stay very still so as to not scare it away. I wanted that hair on my tongue, those filaments in my throat, if I couldn’t inhale her whole, bones and all, pilosity and tendons, how could I truly possess her? I read somewhere that once you die, your hair is one of the last things to decompose. After a while, all that is left is skeleton and hair, a mane that lingers in the ground, keratinized and full of dust; keratin means death when you’re an epithelial cell and yet her cells are perennial in my mind’s eye. I have long imagined a black mossy cloud in her grave, dripping down until her coxal bone, full of knots and full of dirt and full of bugs, full of life, of very small phosphorescent earthworms, of everything that eats big bad girls in the dark. Dina I’m still sweating you from each one of my pores, you dilate them until I look like rotten mesh, it’s been five years and I need to bury you, I can’t take it anymore. I can no longer wake up with a start whenever you summon me — I know you’re the one calling, the cursed parasite of my dreams. I want to vomit you up like ethanol, then sleep you off. I want your fingers to make me purge. No wait.
Dina, I loved you as we once loved our mothers, like a kitten sleeping belly up in total trust. A love with a mouth opened wide, dripping with pus, you were an open-heart surgery to me. I always refused to compare you, to sketch you with adjectives and literary devices, to describe you in the gentle and tiring manner of an old snob (at fifteen you can’t like literature, it’s an age too mean and yet too tender for realness). In truth I knew all too well that if I let myself go I would write you sonnets, my raw diamond, as beautiful, no, more beautiful than the moon, my Selene in human form but whose divine still oozes, you have always been nocturnal and larger-than-life and extremely beautiful and I had a phobia of the real and the sentimental.
I’m making it up today by extensively describing you as my demise.
You were a night of high fever to me; I don’t really know if I made you up in my delirium. You haunt and you shake and you tire and then you disappear, I think sleep paralysis demon, I think stay at least, like sleeping with someone distant and unavailable, at least stay the night. I don’t even know how you disappeared anymore. I got up one day and your apartment was sold. I went to my eight a.m and you weren’t in front of the gate with the eternal Marlboro Light at your lips, smelling like men’s cologne and acrid smoke. I don’t even want to know. I sleepwalked for months so as not to try to dissect, understand, beg. How could I ever ask you anything? You ignore so powerfully, so beautifully, you’ve always been prettier when you inflicted, damned Greek goddess phenotype. So, of course, I kept myself quiet. I swallowed the lump in my throat and stuffed my index fingers in my ears. I didn’t gently gouge my eyes out as I would have liked to, I didn’t harass you with sobbing and puerile messages, I didn’t follow you like my fearful kitten instinct screamed at me to do. I stayed (I will be, in the main lines of my history, eternally the one who remains), me and my unfortunate tendency to sediment, I became Pompeii while you were constantly rejuvenating.
But I don’t want to ruminate. I want to simply and efficiently cauterize the gaping wound that you left in my youth. Dina, one last formal call: I’m begging you to free me. A word to the wise.