Amora: Stories

by Natalia Borges Polesso

I like cooking, it passes the time, and life, and at least we’re eating, and you know, people talk less when their mouths are full. And when their tummies are full, they spend less time thinking about nonsense.

It occurred to me that maybe they’d never once danced or gone drinking together—or maybe they had. I thought of how naturally Taís and I went about things. I thought of how scared I was to tell my family, and of all the teachers and classmates who already knew about us. I closed my eyes and saw Grandma’s and Aunt Carolina’s mouths touching, in spite of every obstacle.

I wanted to know more, I wanted to know everything, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

It’s like everything that comes out of my mouth is so abstract it can’t possibly have come from me, I hardly recognize it.”

My language. It’s chaotic, it comes from inside me, from a part of me that’s still wild. A part I don’t understand. I can’t grasp what I’m feeling.

Things get lost between my head and my mouth—somewhere unknown to me—and they never come back. I’m stuck. I can’t reach those things anymore, you know? Not even just to feel them. All that’s left here is this senseless knot and it scares me. ’Cause there are times when I’m so good at hiding the truth I don’t even recognize the story anymore, and it’d be totally weird if things actually happened the way I said they did. Like fiction.

I feel like I’m articulating the words in reverse. They turn from words back into unformed thoughts. My chest itches on the inside, maybe this is what they were before they became jagged thoughts: an itch in my chest.

She knew from the beginning that Moira was a mistake. But she couldn’t extricate herself from their codependence. It wasn’t their first betrayal, they’d both tried to find in others what they’d lacked from each other.

I got tired of traveling. Of the feeling of being always, immanently, and unstoppably in motion. I’ve been away for so long I don’t belong to any one place anymore. I’m like an object, you know? Untethered from the world, identifying with nothing, floating alone through the vast void and its infinite possibilities.

This is a desire. Not a cry for help, not my soul reaching out, none of that. Just a desire, begun.

Sometimes, I find myself thinking about the metaphysics of progress, of our bodies’ journey, you know? Of ways to abstain from practical lives filled with dread and flowers. We talk and say obscene things, but there’s nothing to sustain it, nothing can bear the weight of lived experience. I see it in their faces, in every wrinkle that’s yet to be etched on my face and may never be. The battle is being waged inside me. And it’s impossible to express.

I’ve been thinking of myself as place, you know? The body as place? The body as metaphor for a place traveled, or a life’s cartography—with all its marks, signposts, and islands.

I lay down and cried for how love grows into distance.

You’ve always been melancholic, poetic, and a little sad, too, but a lovely kind of sad. The sadness of a moon dappled between the blossoms of an orange

It hadn’t been love, it hadn’t even been interest. Just a desire to know another body.

There was no space left to fill inside; I was full up. Full of words, all of which were your name.