The Bern Books - 3rd Installment

Triggering content might include graphic references, for example, to topics such as self-harm, sexual abuse and violence.

Sabotage shows where protection veils. Protection is subtle and gentle, sabotage is loud: it will let you know (let the other know) what its supposedly protecting, what it shouldn’t show for fear of loosing. I can tell nothing while oversharing right there where my silence shouts out everything I wish to hide. At the end of the day that which we protect by means of sabotage will grow unhealthy within us, poisoning our care system. The soft veil of protection frees us from our dependency to it by making it possible to comprehend our fear, making possible a dialog with ourselves that the sabotage within ourselves interrupts. Sabotage is pure fear, nothing grows nor heals around it.

What is it that we wish the other never knew, that which we want to keep for ourselves and from ourselves, Hidden even from us?

What do my insecurities tell me, what do they tell you? How much do I have to say before my fear turns harmless and it becomes evident that it just needs care?

When does the disaster of my past stops building the fear of my present?

*

We are drinking a coffee together, watching the people go by and you share your pain with me, a very uncommon pain that I might be able to relate to and to which I can hopefully shine a light upon. You are trying hard to communicate with your partner, you're trying to make your love life work in the distance (The truth is that this triggers me, but I also understand it and might be able to help you), and I think of the actual country-to-country distance that separates you two and immediately realize that this might not be the problem, I realize that this is not the problem and I confront myself with something that I didn’t want to acknowledge: as a foreigner I will fall in love with a foreigner, as a foreigner I will love a foreigner. I’m having a coffee with my best friend in Bern and I realize that I might have to talk about my anger and my sadness, one of the three things I share with her partner, the third is our country. I want her to empathize with feelings she doesn’t, shouldn’t and gladly don’t know anything about: the self doubt -some would say hate- that comes with misplacement; the non-transferable anger of the home left behind so that our home doesn’t disappear; the never-ending struggle that comes when one realizes that by feeding those who take take their meals for granted we are also feeding our families, those who never take their meals for granted, us; the schizophrenia that un-pieces us in the journey of unreliability. I’m trying not to make her forget herself and get lost in the guilt of privilege, its hard work to do so when there are feelings involved, when the only feeling that really matters[1] is involved. I might be exaggerating, but loving an auslander is most definitely tuff love.

*

We are in your car talking shit and being dudes, openly hoping that no one ever listens to us express ourselves in these ways. Nothing crazy, just a little incorrect-Honest-to-the-teeth to ourselves, forty year old dudes talking about things long gone, but also two forty year old dudes opening up unto each other about how we care about those that we care about. My friend shares his life with a foreigner, he is the foreigner to his foreigner. It is a beautiful thing and a difficult trip so I want to know his angle, I ask him about language, he tells me they talk their own language: a combination of their two mother tongues within the protection of a third language that is foreign to both of them, the place in the middle where their love explains itself. We also talk about humor, he resents the fact that he is just a funny dude unable to get some of his jokes across that frontier that their language separates.

*

In Hopscotch, the beautiful romance from Julio Cortázar, the two main characters have a secret love language, a love tongue they named Glíglico.Present in chapter 68 of the book, Glíglico is a sort of literary dirty talk with which Cortázar builds an erotic scene between two foreigners.

*

I always fall in love the same way, but I’m learning to communicate it differently. This his me. I like me as much as you like me when you’re on the way and I like you as much as you like your-independent-self, probably for the same reasons, we probably like the same things that we fear. Loving is the completion of an unavoidable lack, a feeling finding its wholeness in the other without (completely) risking itself.

*

So I was raped[2]. There are levels to this, and I would not dare put me in someone else’s shoes because I have my own pair of shoes to deal with, but I’m pretty sure all of this flattens in the same place for all of us: Abuse. Something wrong and utterly timeless was done to us, to me. I was put in a room without consent to do things I still struggle to understand, to accept that I -as an adult- still like. To not feel what I felt those years I spend my time fantasizing about how any of you, specially those close enough, plot to fuck me over. Again. Instead of crying out loud I rather swallow tears that become poison and sabotage everything that’s beautiful enough to bring me joy. Yes, I rather do that, no, I do it, I do that everyday and even though it hurts it will never hurt as much as those days spent in that consentless room. Abuse takes the love given to me and transform it into fear, into doubt and darkness, into anger and sadness; abuse transforms the evidence of care into a wound that was already there; abuse is embarrassing and that’s why I write, out of a never resting feeling of shame given to me and only mine, a shame powerful enough to silence my voice and my emotions, my shame was too big to own, to heavy to carry and hold, but my shame also made me vulnerable and vulnerability is a map. I don’t know how to love without the shame that I put inside of it, I don’t know how to voice my love hence I write it, because this is the only place I’ve ever felt safe. This is where I learn how to love without shame, outside of it.

*

Communication is whatever we decide every time we decide we want to communicate, and Language is whatever we make of it, it might even be the same line it uses to make us foreigners. We get to decide every time we choose to love, that’s not a contra,it is a very clear pro. Kissing starts happening when language is not enough and love is what happens when words stop working,

*

All the time I spent thinking about thisI used the others as my mirror, to detach myself from it, thinking I was protecting myself. I spent all that time thinking I was writing about someone else, sabotaging myself with that fantasy mirror. It was running crazy thru thismirror labyrinth, in and around my inability to reflect me, where I found myself, where my humanity stumbled upon my reflection.

I’m just a dude that found a mirror and traded it for gold.

“My falling in love is in no way the subject of this book, and yet honestly compels me to place it among the details, for I think -I know- that my story would be a very different one if love had not forced me to deal with myself”.

James Baldwin, take me to the water.

[1]Love.

[2]Between the ages of 4 and 7 I was invited to a party I didn’t want to go to by two girls that were at least twice my age.