Montevideo. Nine in the morning. Eight degrees. Some sun. I run next to the Río de la Plata, along the rambla. I’m not going any further or faster, but if there is a calligraphy to run, today I find a new calligraphy powered by the music of Trent Reznor. In the infinitesimal state of suspension that occurs between one step and the next, that moment in which the body remains in question mode, a passage in which there is no certainty about whether the next step will land on the floor, a floating in which the body can fall to one side or the other of the net (will it still be alive, will it vanish?), I am flooded with a salvific emptiness. I do not run. I swim, or fly, or sail. And in that hiatus, in that white cavity, words appear: trinitrotoluene, icicle, leaf litter. I don’t keep track of them, but behind each one there is something corpulent that is potentially, contained and ready to expand. That constellation of nothingness, that gap, occupies me entirely, and the world, which had been erased, appears. To see you do not have to stay awake but dreamy, not asleep but in a trance. The world can only be seen when the gaze becomes tender and not hostile, soft and permeable. What weighed so much weighs less. Concern, brokenness, the doctor’s raised eyebrow in concern: everything is erased. The river shines like a sheet of copper on the stones. What is obvious—nothing needs me to exist to exist—becomes evident. I run without need for me. Anger, love, nostalgia and melancholy, everything is still, although the blood runs through me strongly. Writing bubbles in that hiatus, that moment of suspension without guarantee, that leap in which anything can happen, even nothing. What’s a little suffering compared to this? There is a phrase I read somewhere: writing offers a remedy against nonexistence. Sometimes, like now, it allows something better: it allows you to almost not exist, to disappear completely.
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