Loving someone who hurts you
The first time you pulled at the pink curtainit was almost imperceptible,but someone else noticed
and pointed it out to me.
Then I saw it, and I didn’t think it mattered.
The second time you scratched the pink curtain
I saw a piece of frayed fabric, a black hole,
almost like a dot on paper, like Kandinsky’s,
a free curve over a point.
The third time you cut the pink curtain
a scrap fell to the floor, and I picked it up with trembling fingers,and looked at it through the rays of sunlight;
I tried to sew it back together with needle and thread, but I was so nervous that ripples formed in the fabric.
The next time you came with a knife
and abruptly cut every thread.
You didn’t care that some parts were irreparable.
Everything began to fall to the ground, to spill.
The neighbours leaned out to look.
It was impossible to cover that mess.
Half the curtain was lost in the bin,
and you tried to throw away the other half,
but I defended it with my teeth and nails.
You came again, your return already expected.
So I went ahead and hid the curtain,
and you spent the whole night telling me
you never liked it,
that you should never have seen it,
that it was a depressing curtain,low quality, ugly, dirty, old, heavy, uneven,
that no normal person would have a curtain like that,
and that life was better without it.
But I knew that you knew,
that we all knew,
that the curtain was mine,
that I had had it my whole life,
that it had always been there,
and now it was broken,
and I no longer knew what to do with it.
And then one day you grew suspicious
and began to look for the curtain,
because you knew I wouldn’t get rid of it.
And everything became a war,
and the curtain simply breathed
inside my lungs.
And I wondered
how much longer it would keep beating,
whether living like this made sense.
And then I asked you
if you had ever cared about the curtain,and you said yes,
that you cared when you saw
that you could block out the sun with the fabric,
but you stopped liking it when it was torn,
and the light began to filter throughand reflect in the mirrors.
They were small cracks of truth,
sparks of justice,
between periods of overwhelming darkness,
behind closed doors,
in a house lost in a landscape.
And one day I touched a piece that had remained intactand wondered what it was worth,
now that you were gone,
now that there were no scissors.
And I thought what everyone thinks:
that there is so much fabric in the world,
but that this one kept me alive,
and that the problem with cutting fabricis that some breaks can never be undone.
And I remember all the fabric I once had,
and now it was just a tiny piece, minuscule, apologising for coming undone,
trying to become camouflage,
forgetting the corners of the window to the world,
and the wind that moved it
among cotton bubbles,
the brightness of Mondays,
and the daisies of the rain.
Gaby Sambuccetti 
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