This is a translation for my very first post in the community. Hope you all enjoy it.
Recently, for a yearbook of an association to which I belong, I was asked for a phrase describing my personality. As a good Literature student, my first and most obvious choice was to steal another man's words. Words that had echoed in my own soul. However, I was told that no quotes were allowed, that it should be "something more personal": projects, aspirations, forseeing my life in five years.
I have never been good for that sort of things. In fact, I have never known where to place myself in a space. I usually do not know where I stand; I do not find a place where I can sit back, behold the landscape and say "This is who I am and this is what I do". I am, in short, an imprecise beast.
This was only context. Being my first blog entry, I assume that it might interest more than one of these friends that we collect on social networks. Here is my reply to the email:
Good Morning.
The truth is that it is impossible for me to do that. Not because I do not have an idea of who I am and what I want, but because if I organize those ideas and utter those words, I annihilate the possibility of every other signifier, more things that I could be and I have not yet discovered... And not only would I limit myself so fiercely. If I say those words, I expect something from life, even more: I seem to demand something from it; and it owes me nothing.
How do I see myself, in five years, in a country like Venezuela and studying Literature? I see myself alive, in some corner of his concrete entrails, in his uncertain fog.
But alive.
In five years I want to turn off the lights and feel a heart pounding in my chest;
and to embrace as many as I can and to help whoever wants it;
and to love until the walls that shelter me collapse into themselves;
and to listen to the violent whisper of the streets;
and to learn the language of the jungle;
and to plant flowers on the pavement;
and to fall asleep in parks and buses;
and to be devoured by the rain, caressed by the hail;
and to walk aimlessly until I lose myself;
and to disappear into the lightning and to appear back in the ocean.
I want to bleed out my ruined veins until I understand;
and to be destroyed in beautiful ways;
and to be brought to my knees;
and to weep tears that plow my face;
and to stir up some stranger's heart with art;
and to sing out of tune, until the neighbors ask me to shut up;
and to pretend that I know what I am doing;
and to lock myself in an untouchable place;
and to laugh and to smile;
and to make someone laugh.
I want to be angry and curse;
and to look at me in the mirror to confirm that I am still a human;
and to swear to my mother that I'm not crazy;
and to discover secrets in words;
and to think to know that, therefore, I exist;
and to listen to music that explains life itself;
and to kill a king, to be captured;
and to kiss the grass that grounds my feet;
and to have a thousand faces under my skin;
and to die and to be reborn.
In five years and in ten years and in twenty years. The only difference is that I will be five, ten, twenty years older.
I want to live a humanly imperfect life.
I want to live and to know that I have lived.
—OM.