Back (or write)

<p><br>First of all there is a symbolic amputation: this is not a love story.<br>Not even letters.<br>Not even redemption.<br>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.<br>People have told me more than once that writing love letters is a sign of weakness.<br>I disagree.<br>Weakness is pretending you don't feel it.<br>Weakness is memorizing speeches about detachment while dreaming of a touch that no longer exists.<br>Weakness is having words and not using them.<br>Loving is something else it's a kind of permitted violence a vice that cannot be rehabilitated.<br>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.<br>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.<br>I just know that I wrote it.<br>And that was enough.<br>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.<br>The letters are more real than the bodies.<br>They don't age.<br>They don't change their scent.<br>They don't lie afterwards. Yes after sex.<br>They only say what they had to say when it was too late.<br>Like an epitaph that is meant to be loving but comes out venge-ful.<br>I love poorly.<br>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.<br>And maybe that's how it's always been my punishment.<br>There is a gap between what you feel and what you can say. This book lives in that gap.<br>Maybe that's why I seem incoherent or even pathetic or too naked.<br>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.<br>The ridiculousness of those who dared to write without want-ing to save themselves with it.<br>I'm not a poet. I hate poets.<br>I'm a man on the run - from others from myself and from a woman who didn't want to be a character.<br>I failed in every direction.<br>But I wrote it down.<br>So reader or accomplice this is for you.<br>For you who still write love letters with no addressee.<br>For you who folded papers in silence as if they were sentences.<br>For you who still believe that there is lucidity in the despair of loving.<br>It's not a love book.<br>It's an agglomeration of absences and presences mistakes and successes desires and needs.<br>And maybe - just maybe - an idiotic attempt to come back. <br> </p>