How Did We Get This Far Apart?

As the dream elapses, this song hits my brain. It's a dark afternoon. Everything seems to be in black and white. I feel tired and annoyed and confused and weak. I am inside a house. It looks like an old big house. It's like a funeral. It's cold. 

From my place, I can see a pale garden thru an enormous window. It looks like winter. I am in the kitchen trying to get some peace of mind. Your mom cries and your dad tries to be strong.

We all know that you're dead. And we still cannot process it. Apparently, someone close to you killed you. Your dad tries to ignore the fact that you won't come back. Your mom seems to be more realistic. And I can't believe it. I hadn't seen you for years, and I cant' stop thinking that we used to be so close together. 

The song remains hitting my brain. I feel the music running like sickening blood throughout my body. I feel the voice of Robert Smith inside my ears, smashing gray matter. I feel so sad and guilty, and I cannot stop thinking about you. I remember you exactly as you were, when we were so close. 

The Girl Was Never There, It's Always The Same

I had a girlfriend who loved to smoke pot and to do some other drugs. From the beginning, I always thought she was a snob. She talked about meaningless issues of her life, as if they were the most relevant thing in the world. She never heard me at all. 

Besides, she dressed all in fancy brand clothes and her language had an elitist affectation, so no one believed she was a junkie. I hated it, 'cause I was the opposite to her -I wore awful and old clothes, and never spoke of my life to anyone- and people immediately thought I was the junkie, including her parents. I didn't do drugs, I was just a poor shy boy. 

We had been together for a month or so. She was some sort of knucklehead. We kissed for the first time in a cemetery, in front of people who visited the tombs or their loved ones. It was a sunny day and I couldn't stop thinking in their grief and suffering, while our lips remained glued. I kept my eyes open. One tiny little girl stared at me with a grim look and an older woman put a hand on one of her shoulders and took her away. As they walked, the older woman shook her head and started to mourn. I felt guilty. Thought maybe the girl just had lost her dad and that they were visiting his tomb. 


We kissed for the second time in a retirement home, in front of older people. We were there in some sort of an extra class, with other class mates. Our teacher asked us to watch older people for understanding some stupid psychological topic. It was too damned boring. Elderlies were so excited, and I felt suffocated. They couldn't stop talking about their own lives, nor couldn't stop complaining about the way their families just abandoned them in that place. So, we went to a lonely room, and started to kissing. 

Besides my old and awful clothing, I used to have long hair -I had 20 years and didn't care about my bad looking-, and, unfortunately, an older lady saw us -and saw me from my back- and she thought we were lesbians and she started to scream like crazy. We had to run away from the retirement home. At one time, elderlies were screaming, so offended, and looking for us. Two women were kissing at the retirement home!

The third time we kissed, we were camping in a forest. My girlfriend started to put the tent in a place she considered to be nice, and asked me to buy some water bottles. I walked to the nearest village. In a few minutes I got there and bought four or five water bottles. I hadn't experience at all in that kind of journey, so I got lost when I tried to return to the tent. Walked for hours. It got dark and scary, and I couldn't find the place. It started to rain and I decided to walk to the village, again. I asked someone else's help and finally found the place where the tent was. 

My crazy girlfriend yelled at me. She was so mad. Asked me if I was stupid or what. Asked me if I wasn't aware of the risks of leaving her alone in the middle of a forest. Asked me many things. Of course I was worried about her, all the time. I had really tried like crazy to find her out. 

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In her rage, she never thought I was about to die. At one time, while I was lost and desperate, just about giving up, I drank the last water bottle I had bought in the village, and I started to run like crazy going nowhere. Suddenly, I tripped on a rock and rolled on a free fall along a hill and, somehow, managed to grab a tree a few meters from a cliff.

When she was a little bit quiet, she started to smoke. Didn't invited me, but I just took the pot away from her. It was the first time I smoke pot. It was raining, again. Got so high and I closed my eyes and started to dream about what would it be to get lost in the middle of a forest, or to die in an attempt to find out the tent where my girlfriend was.  

A Forest

Oh, You Know That I'd Do Anything For You

My grandfather had a birthday party when my brother told me he knew someone who could give us a cat. His friend had an older cat with kittens, and she couldn't take care of all of them. We just had had a French Puddle, and it really hadn't been a good experience, so I had no idea if having a cat would be different. Nevertheless, I was sort of enthusiastic 'cause I had seen alot of kittens and I thought they were interesting and mysterious. I felt attracted to cats, 'cause they always seemed involved in honest playfulness or boredom. Certainly, cats were not like a noisy, smelly and dependant dog. 

Once I was kind of convinced by my brother, we started to talk to our parents. When they were kids, they were more the kind of kids with dogs, so I thought it would be difficult to convince them of having a cat. Besides, we didn't take a good care of that French Puddle we had. 

Surprisingly, my father was enthusiastic, too. He told us that, among several dogs, he had had a little cat when he was a kid, and he immediately asked us "How are you gonna' call it? Is it a male or a female?" My mother wasn't sure at all. "You're not going to take care of that cat. You didn't do it when you had a dog", said. After all, she was right. We didn't care, or even got sad, when one of her friends took away Cookie from us.

After a long discussion, we decided to call it "Socrates", and I don't remember exactly why. I think I wanted to name it "Kerouac" or "Hitchcock", or something like that, but my brothers just thought those names were so pretentious.

Socrates was an amazing cat. He looked like a tiger and he was so intrepid. In a few hours, he learned how to climb up the stairs. He was really too connected to me. Early in the morning, he just scratched the door of my bedroom to wake me up and asked me to feed him. Standard food was available for him all the time, but I just gave him palatable food every morning. 

I opened the door and he started to purr and allowed me to touch him. He used to sleep in my bedroom all day long, and I remember being writing or reading a thousand times, while Socrates just stared at me with his sleepy gray-yellow-blue eyes. Somehow, he seemed to know how much I loved my books, 'cause, even when he scratched or bit everything, he didn't touch them. 

Socrates grew up too fast, and started to run away from home. He learned how to run away after three or four months since he arrived home, and I thought it was the most natural thing to happen. He used to dissapear for days and then to returned thin, starved and dirty. He ate desperately and slept for hours. 

At the age of six months or so, we decided to neuter him. It was thruly sad. He changed alot. It was like if he were angst and couldn't understand why in the hell we had done to him so. 

When he recovered from surgery, he became more rebel and intolerant than he ever was, and he started to run away from home more frequently than before. One night, Socrates went away and never returned. For months, I couldn't stop thinking how would it be for him, if he could survive. I didn't want to believe that it might be possible that he was already death. It was awful. I felt terrible. 

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After almost ten years, I still miss him. He was my best first friend. 

A dog-lover would say it was karma, for not taking care of that French Puddle. 

WHAT else do they know?