Let Go
"Only he who loves flies"
Miguel Hernandez
Sometimes the distance scares you. It happened to me last night, it came in and surrounded me. It was facing me. It muzzled my senses with a belly laugh of absence. For sure, for several nights it had been looking in the window of my night. Absence, distance, letting go. These sounds are everywhere. And they have taken me.
People around me have made me think of this by going and by letting go. Two significant letters put me on alert. The first, from a dear friend whose girlfriend has left, deciding to study in a country far away and promising that she will return in a year. A year is 365 days of change, if we take the fascinating theory of Alvaro Mutis: "Every day the people around us change, and we don´t realize that we do too; maybe this is what men call loneliness." So the change of one person next to another can be a daily adaptation, or even, when the changes happen separately, many times it is in such opposite directions that the promises become obsolete. My friend says that his girlfriend "promised to come back in a year." Wow! (And did she give you the flight number?) This makes me think of Penelope´s song by the great Serrat, when after waiting so long "on her green pine bench" for her love to return, when she sees him she only says "You´re not who I´m waiting for."
And why promise? What happens to the promises and the oaths when one of the two has a change of mind? Do they go through with it because "it´s a promise" or because they are acting from volition, from feelings? In the first case, doesn´t it sound terrifying? Egoistic, savage and horrible? I don´t know, maybe the full moon (or is there one these days?) is confusing me more than normal, but I think that sometimes promises and oaths work against the freedom of human beings and so should be abolished, especially during farewells. There are two ways to see a goodbye: as an end or as a beginning. And surely both give happy reunions.
But better to wait, let time pass, and see what it brings.I was pondering these questions when I received the second letter, this one from Gerardo Rod who, talking about his novels, touched in some way on precisely what I was feeling: "And the surest thing is goodbye, nothing else, you have to have the white handkerchief starched . . . raise your hand and wave in that gesture of farewell that is so remiscent of the gesture of erasing, and use the same force back and forth . . . Elaborate each new goodbye, not leaving a kiss on the hurt but making this hurt a final and beautiful kiss; the monster kiss that gives the heart to that which devours only because it doesn´t understand. . . But there will come a day when you will have a wisdom of goodbyes and
Loves go away, friends part. People leave physically or spirituallly (or both, or only one, and with variations on the theme), but we don´t let them go. It´s something like tying down a piece of spirit. We understand that they are going, but we don´t know how to free their spirit. "Why don´t we have a language for endings,/ for the end of love,/ for the concentrated labrynths of agony,/ for the muzzled scandal/ of the irrevocable collapses", in the words of Roberto Juarroz.
Last night I talked again with that sad friend, who is far away from me, in another country. In mid-conversation the telephone card ran out; I spent 100 pesos for 5 minutes. It was then that the distance - standing in front of me - let out a laugh and then felt a little ashamed and covered its mouth with a shawl. But I saw its eyes. And its look hurt me.
Everything seems to be a chain of letting go. I let go, you let go, we let go. Or we should at least. Difficult art that enlarges the freedom and deepens the tones of purple dawns and the sound of the wind over dry leaves.
Hopefully one day we will learn to let flying happen, outside of possessions. Without explanations or promises or rancor. I think that is love. Also.
A Spanish poet said something that today comes and touches us, something like "The seagulls are born of the handkerchiefs that say goodbye in the ports." I think that is a positive way to look at goodbyes. Making seagulls, such a pretty thing . . .
Lucky those who know how to let go.
Softly.
Lucky
"No somos nosotros"
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