Sunday, March 15, 2009

Love

By Odilia Rivera-Santos

My examples of love were partnerships, always. my parents worked together; when my mother was pregnant, she mixed cement for the house she and my father were to build together.

they were just like Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, George Burns and Gracie, Sartre and Beauvoir, Frida and Diego, Pablo and every woman he met -- except my parents owned no books, had no money for absinthe and no time to sit around to ponder their existence. 

Partnerships are very sexy to me; after kisses, great sex, fresh fruit and a cup of Earl Grey tea, there needs to be a plan, a bunch of decisions that require the intermingling of intellects and the desire and heat of each other's ambition.

The intelligent jaded artist and I sat together often. I tried to reawaken his senses and wonder, but he called me naive. To him, the world was a blank slate and people were full of stories not fit to be written.
One night, in that dark bar in the South Bronx, at the end of the world past the last stop light, we were waiting, as we talked, for something -- a metamorphosis 
I'm no expert on any subject, but this act of conversation, in the early evening, while we admired the paintings hanging next to the textures of old wall paint and rusty doors was sublime in the nineteenth century meaning.

I thought about the best way to to welcome love: drifting toward, falling in, stumbling upon, accepting or ignoring the knock on the door altogether

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