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4:55
Early morning message.
It's two in the morning, and I've tied the rope tightly to one of the bridge's beams, but when I've started to go down tied by the waist, doubts turn into a swarm of insects that walk on my back. The jar with the red paint is heavy and makes stability difficult and the roller is long and hinders movements. I should have put on the black sneakers instead of these slippery, fat-soled shoes.
As I walk down, ideas circle through my head like those bumblebees around streetlights: where do I start being authentic and end up being ridiculous? Where is the highest part of my sense of humor and the lowest of my esteem? Is it true that I have stayed like an Eskimo in the Caribbean without my girlfriend; that I will spend the rest of my life looking under the stones for a complicity like that?
The patience he has to listen and the look of May morning, where that smile is never lacking so that I feel peace and harmony. And look, he had touched the pelvis of women from the age of twenty, like someone who opens empty gift boxes, or perhaps with that mixture of sadness and helplessness that furtive encounters leave, until she appeared with her, I don't feel like it, although I like you a lot, bastard of all the demons.
At last, I have managed to write Please, and I am overwhelmed with the satisfaction of imagining her little face of surprise and the smile that I love so much, upon discovering our signal code. I know that I play the last card, that if with this madness that I do for her, she does not react, it will be the end.
Then I think of my fingers combing her hair, and the mystery of her mouth wallowing in mine and her warm and hard breasts warding off the early morning cold, and I realize that the fear of falling down this ravine is nothing compared to the of losing her, nor the rage of imagining that in the blink of an eye she will have another love there in her land of palm trees and parrots.
A lover less whitish and colder than us Europeans, although he says that it does not matter, and it is not good to generalize human things, that skin pigments and character are different things. Who knows if he has managed to dull my brain with that mixture of tenderness and innocence, and suddenly I have doubts if the reflective red paint that I have bought will do the effect that I hope.
I am also not sure that the quantity is sufficient because the letters must be large so that they can be seen from the road. The rope bothers me around the waist and I have heard a siren. Surely someone has warned the firemen that I am acting crazy on the north bridge hanging from a rope like an escaped Romeo from some legend.
My friend Manu may be right, and I am now bogged down in that sticky mud of separations and cannot see clearly that Alina is an ordinary girl, with curly black hair falling over her bare shoulders and green eyes. It may be that her latin accent and so honey are making me the hell of all this desperation and I do not realize that a few weeks later I can discover the other half of the happy orange we are looking for.
Mango bizcochuelo don't go I'm left with less calligraphy because of the rush, and I'm running out of paint. I hear the noise of other sirens, and I've seen silhouettes moving upstairs saying something over the loudspeaker, but I can't quite understand because the wind is blowing hard. Total, if bad things always happen, like the gusts of wind in its tropical storms, and it doesn't matter that we both have lost our jobs and that one after another the doors have been closing.
What I should never have said that night we got mad was that one of the big reasons we're so screwed is you. It was as if I had slapped him, and I was more hurt by his tears rolling down his cheek and his stories of sailing ships that carried his great-grandfather and the drums of the black Africans.
And I don't think that's the real reason either, because you know very well that we would have tightened our belts as far as necessary and this would be nothing more than a new challenge, a swollen river and green grass on the other side. The real reason is my lack of pants because I have never dared to tell him what he really means to me and I have taken refuge in fear and machismo with that armor that looks so bad on me.
The air has increased, and the cold is killing me. I do not feel my hands because of the effort to hold me and up there they have turned on headlights that blind me. A fireman comes down while he doesn't stop talking to me, but I don't understand what he says through the air.
Before he arrives I will have finished writing that phrase that I should have repeated to him many times, and have taken off my tough guy costume, that now what is fashionable is to live without commitments, and suddenly I feel that it takes more courage to accept that truth than to be hanging here in the middle of the night, writing it. Now I know that crises also serve to take advantage of every last drop of paint left in the jar and write from the heart: let's love each other more damn!
