Wednesday, June 15, 2005
ausente
snippet:
When days looped and the static of small gestures became suffocating—getting the mail, kissing his wife, writing and erasing equations, scribbling formulas and proofs—Gustavo would put on thick, black frames that he didn’t really need, ones encircling his tiny, green eyes to make him feel like he was doing something out of the ordinary. Like his father and mother before him, both now buried somewhere in central Mexico, he didn’t believe in fate, instead in that which he could only understand now. So, something as simple as turning on the television, reading the newspaper backwards, wearing two watches, tapping his feet while his students took exams—these were small revolutions. It was a day like this that he first decided to write on an empty page; one ripped out of an anthology of Chilean poetry, in great detail how he would end his marriage. If his life, as he saw it when he had just graduated at twenty-two, became a loud drifting, he would end it.
the rest soon come.
