The Empty Chair

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I lack what I desire.

The empty chair in my bedroom is the enigma of my life.

From the beginning, I tried to find someone to fill that space.

Now, I remain attracted to the possibility of its emptiness,

of someone who could fill it, yet doesn’t.

Since I was a child, I’ve feared two things that eventually

came to happen in my life very early: the death of my mother,

and the unpaired destiny, a single life. It’s one of those things that happens.

Everything you fear the most happens to you in life.

From a very young time, there was the urgency of absences:

be it of a nanny, or the mother that cared for the father.

I learned, in a forced way, to fill all the empty chairs of my life

with possibilities of lack.

In Canada, years later, I remembered this affect

when I moved a chair around.

Next to my bed, that object brought me back the lack

of my childhood, and the fantasy of knowing how to fill it.

And so I became: loving from a distance – the mother, in particular.

I have always been deeply in love with my mother.

I have no reason to deny it, since it is written under my name.

And the farthest she was, the deeper I was able to feel her in lack.

Such suffering taught me the raw material I was desired to be:

in absence, I am, and is from where I’m able to speak.