Interstellar

It is important for me to read. Reading makes me think and thinking enables me to write, which then forces me to draw and drawing makes me happy. Happiness invites me to read again and reading gives
me peace. When in peace I Forget my pain and feel no anger, being in this state eases my anxiety and leads me to a point of unwanting desire and happiness.

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I travelled to Europe with a book on my backpack, that was it. Left behind where bookshelves all around Caracas and San Felipe, back in Venezuela. Traveling with books is a stupid decision, they weight a lot when there are enough of them in the same place -a back pack for example- and if you actually have shit to do, reading wont happen. Reading is a silent and selfish activity that invites others to interrupt its passive danger. I have a storage room in Barcelona for all the books that are still unable to travel to their new home in Bern. Some one asked me how many books i´ve got there: ten, twenty, fifty books? I told the truth, its more like ten boxes of them an those are my actual books. The ones
here with me were bought as soon as i’ve got my first job in Switzerland. Traveling with books is a stupid and privileged decision that I always take, specially if i travel to buy more books. As i moved to Europe and started doing the traveling tattoo artist routine my back was packed with tattoo stuff, which was very heavy in that time, and books to read since the traveling, as back in Venezuela, was done in buses. This lead to chronicle back pain and back to a broken leg that led to a mess that kept me in bed for almost two years.

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A big part of my bookshelf are the fossils of emotional relationships I had with people whom I loved and that were unable to deal with my honesty and my lies. I started buying so much books as soon as I
could afford it and it immediately started feeling again how it felt before books became the emotional graveyard for my invulnerable loved ones, my bookshelf (for a moment in time) stopped feeling like the
location where people who obstructed with books my road to their wounded hearts could rest in peace. Long time ago I spent life with a person that would take me out and buy me books every time she lost
control of the narrative, a convenient hoovering process that would shut me up for a couple of weeks.
Of course, its always easier for some people to give away what they have and don’t care about, than to give in control of what they lack.

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Living in Spain I started going to de public libraries to borrow out comics and books that i didn't have the chance to read and enjoy back in Venezuela. Public libraries were an integral part of my life in
Barcelona and they made my life livable at various points during that time. I remember discovering the comics section at the Biblioteca Ignasi Iglésias-Can Fabra and being totally blown away by it, everything
i wished was there and i could take out about fifteen books at a time so having no job meant something else than just smoking, being hungry and anxious.

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The first and only bookshelf i had in Bern was a gift, a pricey IKEA interior designer piece of furniture. In it I played out how i want my future bookshop to look like. It was filled with books and
feelings, toys and maps: the stuff that love is made of, for me. The day we moved the bookshelf to build it up in my room I had a complete and horrible meltdown and went motionless dead eye for a couple
of hours, it was paralyzing for me to see again boxes piled up and to sense the vibe of a move-in situation was simply too much for me -the moving dance- since I’ve been doing it for so long finally took
a toll of me. I cant move that much anymore, boxes and messed up rooms make it very difficult for me to live in them. This bookshelf started filling up unto the point where there was actually no more space
in it anymore, until now. The top right corner is vacant, never more packed with uncomfortable and embarrassing feelings and books, toys and maps: the stuff that love scapes from, for her.
P.S.: Some weeks ago I was in my bed writing this text and like so many times before when i have had a bed to sleep in (because i don’t need to travel for a living), just beside me at my right, and as my night
companion, there was a tower of magazines; books; notebooks; a pouch filled with writing and drawing tools, I will say without any shame that I felt lonely there. I must also say that even though books are
the thing i love the most, books are always the rests of dead bodies washed away at a sunless beach, like photographies, just a chunk of memory devoid of warmth.

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Books carry no heat in them.