NIne

I heard her voice singing out of the shade of the street, melodiously and lively, an eccentric song was vocalized in vain. She was crooning out her story. She just needed, I guess, someone to listen to her attentively enough to wonder why she was chanting all alone in the middle of the slums, but not to speak it out. It was a rot night, burned by the public lightning of the boulevard and there was me walking with an indifferent and fake rush down the streets, among the buildings, the rusty vapour in the air and the silver shade of the moon.

At first, I thought her song was just the residual reverberation of another noisy annoying night but, for a change, embellished by a vague tuning of an old clarinet aged by the acid rain of a psychotic city. Somehow, her song reminded me the sound of the chords of “Moonlight Sonata,” or maybe not the chords but the mood.

I walked to her. At the beginning, it was hard to recognize where the crooning was coming from, but, finally, a wisp of fire uncovered her face and a spark of her hair almost reached my feet wakening me up and burning my conscience with cloudy doubts, what made me wonder... is she real?... is she human?, and if she is real... what is she doing here?...  I am not dreaming, am I?

 The darkness made my legs numb and even though her shinning stood a couple of meters just before me I could not get closer, my body showed no response, how could I imagine that what I was staring at was about to turned into my obsession. Curious and unusual, what can I say, her figure approached me, and with subtle harmony she uttered her name discoursing nine letters that whispered a déjà vu in the air. I could not move yet, and with the disturbing and overwhelming doubt that if what I saw coming was just another symptom of my fictional existence, or my need of one; her hand reached out and held mine. Her touching literally blew my mind away and muted my throat, not every day you have the chance to tear the walls of daily and rational life down in ambiguous state of lucid dreaming.

I tried to talk, but talking would only ruin her flawlessly uncaring tone adding an obnoxious counterpoint where just one voice can prevail. Then she abruptly hushed, and stared at me. A catatonic sarcasm posed over her countenance. Perhaps her absent smiling was just my hallucination, maybe that one, her small image, never even existed; the truth is that her incandescent beauty lit up my whole silence. Although, for a moment, I could see her unexpected decency, she didn’t see my necessity of one.

Then, she started to head away… did I make her afraid? I don’t know... what I could tell is that after three steps she turned back to look at me again with a brand new expression in her face, an expression that I could recognize immediately, an expression that I am so used to give. It was doubt.

My pulse started to normalize at last, I could not move yet but at least I could feel the words starting to slide out from my mouth. However, before I could say a word... she just talked to me.

 She said with a passive and tender voice something unexpected (just like everything in that moment), a question.

She asked: Let’s go!... Aren’t you ready to give everything away?...”

So I wonder for few seconds...

And then I said...