It’s not pointless to love, finally. Just like training snakes, it calls for a refined technique and losing our shame of performing in front of the world in loincloths. And nerves of steel. But loving is a job with benefits, too: its liturgy soothes the idleness that maddens—as Catullus knew— and ruined the happiest cities. Under the tightrope there stretches—don’t ask for a net, it’s not possible—another rope, so loose,but ultimately so pointless at times, below which there is nothing. And half-open windows that air out your anger and show to your night other nights that are different, and like that only love saves us at last from the grip of the worst danger we know of: to be only—and nothing else—ourselves. This is why, now that everything is said and I have a place in the country of blasphemy, now that the pain of making words from my own pain has crossed the thresholds of fear, I need from your love an anesthetic; come with your morphine kisses to sedate me, come encircle my waist with your arms, making a life preserver, to keep the lethal weight of sadness from drowning me; come dress me in the clothes of hope—I almost had forgotten a word like that—, even if they fit me big as on a child wearing his father’s biggest shirt; come supervise my oblivion and the gift of unconsciousness; come protect me—my worst enemy and most tenacious—, come make me a haven even if it’s a lie —because everything is a lie and yours is merciful—; come cover my eyes and say it passed, it passed, it passed, —even if nothing passed, because nothing passes—, it passed, it passed, it passed, it passed. And if nothing will free us from death, at least love will save us from life.

(Translated by Tomás Q. Morín)