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Edition #7
Flames and Storms
Alitza Cardona
Edited by Laurine Heerema

Crazy and Cool: Not like the stories before

I am seeing you. As you lay over there, my mind races. I think —of course loving you will require me to understand how your fire will endure the unyielding desire that flows and forever becomes. You have built your peace with the cold. I know too well, it can be terrifying to be a castaway of flowing ideas and disappointments. Even within society, these continue to build an architecture of circumstances that pretend to be nature. No story that has the potential to result in trauma, started without some form of love. I know at this point, I will never aspire to be a first. The first to make you feel nor the first to innovate through our differences. Neither with you nor within my social circumstances. Social realities continue to endure through social prescriptions, however, with you I feel I can be the last. The last to build what could be an exceptional form of nature, made from complementary forces. I think to myself, I will meet you at the close. I believe we can all meet there if we wanted to. That boundary that will contain our duration. I believe trauma is a pause that disguises as a crisis. One that questions the desire to challenge the motivations that have become dependent on seemingly consistent conditions. I know —I keep talking about trauma, as a figure that creeps on you and this account.  But isn’t it so? We never expect those circumstances which will sculpt for us some future version of our many befores. 

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In many ways the conditions we are born into bequeath us ideal images shared as ideas. These, reflect, in many cases, our position in a society that pretends to be the becoming of some kind of reality. At some point, where ideas become free of the molds of practice, beginnings become experiences and illusions, the tragedy of an end —I turn to the right. Your white back is like a map that draws a mirror of emotions —I turn to face the ceiling. I see the sun flooding through the blinds. I remember that I come from a country that melts in the heat of a blasting sun. “I see you baby”, I whisper in Spanish. You lay there worried about sleeping enough, while being as brilliant and passionate as that sun. Yet, you don’t know what it is like to sleep amidst warm nights and growling hurricanes. I believe you are oblivious to the freedom that comes with becoming one with a sea of feelings that house many unknowns. I do feel. That’s the space we need to fill. That one, which separates the forms that do not know each other. 

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As my country melts, yours floats in crises. Possibilities become fixated through traditions and the reality of this is that tradition might be a cage. Some cages are beautiful yet, we could question the space that holds for wandering. The limits of this cage do not leave space for innovation. I do carry some of its values behind symbols. As conditions change, some of their forms preserve what makes us relate. However, did you know that we can carry castles without walls? What if we lift the weight of many stories that make us feel that perspectives diffuse in one gaze —You wake up. I see the darkness in your eyes that just started to shine with curiosity -– I say to myself: “maybe this turns out to be a simple memory”. Today we will continue to keep producing another story in our lives — I continue my internal monologue: “I don’t know, at this point, if this other person is capable of creating meaning”. 

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To build stories. Is this freedom? In many ways, freedom has become founded by fixed possibilities offered through our capabilities of production. Life has accelerated so much that I've had to think of the idea of you as part of a thread, bound by society and place —I believe this scenario is not enough. Throughout the many forms we can weave, threads can bridge intimacies and confidentialities, but through them spaces persist. Forms are built from many dimensions. As we cover ourselves with the sheets,  I still imagine. “I can see you baby”, I think — Flexing the cloth, holes form as I play with the sheets. The spaces through them can become larger. I perceive them to frame an image, one that can seem forced, like the exhaustion I feel, only building for myself. “Don’t you find individual foundations so fragile?” I ask you in many ways that are not carried by sound. Individuals keep building with the idea of many other “you”. There are some things you cannot measure with the scientific method. I see you. Yet, I do not dare infer some generalizations, of reasons and things, people do as individuals. How can we judge the conditions that limit another as a creator when stories develop throughout so many plots? Realities of differences enrich the universe, yet we defy its normalcy by profiting on assumed separations. 

 

 

I desire you. I get on top of you, because like me you are the world. We are free to change, to rotate. Movement: confusion, consumption, extraction, production. Transformation is upon us in each pause, because even if for you this is a game, you will not win. You will not lose. There is that certainty. We will come and become. Our environments will change and places will become one ocean. But I promise, we will float even through our tears. Not everybody has the socioeconomic capability to invest in rules and regulations. Sometimes we cannot afford to follow the rules. There will be voyages to find ourselves without earth under our feet. You think about progress as a system but the problem with this way of thinking is that sometimes structure ignores details of the unpredictably creative. Creative people are a force. We can open new possibilities in an unfolding present. I can show you. If you could open to this. The two of us can make sense of this form of intuition. Space lies behind an arched door made of cultures. Its firm structure can hold the weight of traumas that thread corrupted stories as a political landscape. Cities and its noises were forged from the same fire that feeds fear and illusions.

 

 

This story can be the beginning of a journey. This reality only imitates an assumed nature. Yet, when it means something, an artificially produced process only becomes a path. Now that you hug me. I see you. Do you want to walk with me outside the norm and into the storm?

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