Back (or write)

First of all, there is a symbolic amputation: this is not a love story.Not even letters.Not even redemption.This is a hemorrhage contained in paper, so maybe it bleeds slowly, like a razor forgotten in the inside pocket of a jacket. The kind you come back to when you’ve lost the fight.People have told me more than once that writing love letters is a sign of weakness.I disagree.Weakness is pretending you don’t feel it.Weakness is memorizing speeches about detachment while dreaming of a touch that no longer exists.Weakness is having words and not using them.Loving is something else, it’s a kind of permitted violence, a vice that cannot be rehabilitated.I don’t know if I’ve ever loved. Of course you have, that’s stu-pid. Of course I have, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this book.In fact, I don’t even know if what I felt was love, or if it was just a well-dressed need, with Italian shoes and ironic promises that life made to me.I just know that I wrote it.And that was enough.Writing has always been my way of pretending to be alive. And if there are letters in this book, it’s because there were silences too dense to bear.The letters are more real than the bodies.They don’t age.They don’t change their scent.They don’t lie afterwards. Yes, after sex.They only say what they had to say when it was too late.Like an epitaph that is meant to be loving, but comes out venge-ful.I love poorly.I write well. I think so, I write well, but there are those who disagree and I don’t disagree with those who disagree with me.And maybe that’s how it’s always been my punishment.There is a gap between what you feel and what you can say. This book lives in that gap.Maybe that’s why I seem incoherent, or even pathetic, or too naked.But if there is something ridiculous here, it’s the noble kind. It’s the ridicule of someone who isn’t ashamed of having loved and failed.The ridiculousness of those who dared to write, without want-ing to save themselves with it.I’m not a poet. I hate poets.I’m a man on the run - from others, from myself and from a woman who didn’t want to be a character.I failed in every direction.But I wrote it down.So, reader or accomplice, this is for you.For you, who still write love letters with no addressee.For you, who folded papers in silence as if they were sentences.For you, who still believe that there is lucidity in the despair of loving.It’s not a love book.It’s an agglomeration of absences and presences, mistakes and successes, desires and needs.And maybe - just maybe - an idiotic attempt to come back.