The bad news is, this is me saying goodbye.

Not goodbye FOREVER, mind you, or at least I don’t expect it to be.

But yeah, this blog is going on hiatus for an indefinite period of time.

Things don’t always line up the way I want them to, and a couple of personal setbacks forced me to rearrange my priorities.

And to be completely honest… This site isn’t one.

No disrespect intended to my readers, but the fact is, I’m not producing original content here, and that’s where I feel my writing time (shorter and shorter as it’s getting) needs to go.

As for practicing my translation skills, again, things have happened, and that’s not a necessity anymore.

So yeah. For the time being, this site is done.

I won’t delete it, it will stay right where it is, and I’m sure some day I’ll come back to it.

In the meantime, you can catch me on Twitter, or on my main blog (although the latter won’t make any sense to you if you don’t understand portuguese, but there you go).

Thank you all, wherever and whoever you are, for your attention and pacience.

See you all soon.

Damned he might not be, but his horns certainly made him look like it. They weren’t big, less than two inches high, but they were certainy prominent. Then again, you could easily be so distracted by the abundance of piercings all over his face, that you really wouldn’t notice the horns at first glance. Seriously, I was glad it wasn’t raining. His face would probably attract lightning. I actually almost mentioned that, but then thought twice about it. The man took his body modification philosophy pretty seriously, and i didn’t want to offend him.

He served me dinner, which was excellent, and I ate as he talked.

“I don’t think the human body is perfect at all. Transsexuals are the most extreme example of how the body we’re born in is given to us by default. It’s up to us to explore it and improve it, so it better expresses who we truly are.

He laid his plate on the table, only a little bit of something left near the center of it.

“Is that all that’s left?”, I asked.

“Yep. Wanna try it?”

He cut a little bit of one of the ends, and put it on my plate. The texture felt strange in my mouth, but it didn’t taste half bad.

“How does it taste? I admit, I’m curious…”

“Could be worse. But why the curiosity?”

“Because I never tried it before today. It’s a special occasion, you see. Today it’s been exactly a decade since I embraced body-modding as a lifestyle. And being such an important date, I decided to cook something I’ll only be able to cook twice in my life.”

I knew I wasn’t going to like the answer, but I had to ask.

“What is this, anyway?”

“My left nut.”

I can’t remember the rest of the evening. I know I left puking my guts out, and was like that for hours.

He spent weeks trying to get in touch with me, leaving messages apologizing, said he hadn’t meant any harm. I believed that, but I never called him back.

Months later, I heard he was dead. Struck by a bolt of lightning.

My hands appear on my breasts, I’m not even sure how. I don’t remember sending them there, but there they are, and I’m glad. The way they feel them up and massage them feels so good… But not as good as you feel. It feels so good having you behind me, and in me, feeling your leg muscles tightening, and pushing against the bed, so you can get the leverage you need to enter me, deeper each time.

The pleasure seems to grow within me, real deep, I don’t even know where, but it’s like a ball of energy radiating out, and growing, growing…!

My breathing gets shallower. And you stay with its rhythm. You stay with me.

- GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLL!!

Your scream came from the living room. Suddenly, you pull out from me. I lift my face from the pillow, just in time to catch a glimpse of your legs running towards the living room.

I get up, frustrated, and put on my robe. I find you in the living room, still reattaching your upper body to your waist, the cybernetic connection making lots of small coupling noises, saying your body is about to be whole again.

You smile at me.

“Honey, we won! In the last couple of seconds!” You tell me that, sounding like you’re feeling more pleasure than I ever gave you. “I gotta go celebrate with the guys. I’ll be back soon, ok?”

I almost don’t have time to react before you’re out the door.

I’m alone. I sit on the couch where you were watching the game while you fucked me in the bedroom, and I weep.

Seems that I’m not even worth the attention of the lowest part of you anymore.

I know you are The One.

But there’s no way to escape this talk. I need to do this.

“Love”, I tell you, sounding almost like a lament, “you have to understand. I love you so much… but I just can’t give you what you need anymore.”

You keep looking through me, like I wasn’t even there. Still apparently emotionless.
“I can’t support you anymore, love. The stuff you need just costs too much money. Whenever a bill comes in from the stuff I buy you, it’s almost a rent! I just can’t…”

Your eyelids close in slow motion, as your chin drops just as slowly, leaving you with eyes closed and open mouth. I try not to think about how much I owe. But I fail, and tears start falling from my eyes.

I know our relationship can’t last, I know I don’t have the means to support you anymore. But it hurts so much. And I just don’t have the heart to say anything else.

You look like you’re losing your balance for a second, and before I can even move, you fall on your face. I jump in your direction, too late to catch you. I take your inanimate shape, and I hug you as tightly as I can. You don’t react. You can’t anymore.

I just can’t stand seeing you like this.

So I make a decision. My hand goes down your back, until I find a sort of groove where you never let me touch you. I put my hand in it, and I pull out a bit of plastic and metal, that smells like it burned a while ago. I throw it away.

“Ok. Fine”, I say, trying to sound all decisive between tears, “just this once. Just this one more time, I’ll buy you another EPROM chipboard. But it’ll have to be a second hand one, I’m telling you right now!”

I don’t even know. I saw some REALLY weird stuff when I worked for Strange Lives magazine.

For instance: I remember this one time they sent me to interview a circus animal trainer. I thought it was a pretty boring subject, but I hadn’t been there that long, so I just did as I was told.

I was interviewing the guy next to his elephants. I didn’t ask for it, but he seemed intent on showing them off one by one, all proud of himself. As we talked, he was going on about how the circus life is as stressful to the animals as it is to humans, if not more, but how it’s a different kind of stress, etc., but how certain things relieve stress regardless of species.

So as he was talking, this elephant kept poking him on the shoulder with his trunk.

“Is he saying hello?”, I asked.

“No”, he said. “This means he wants one of his own stress reliefs.”

And like it was the most normal thing in the world, the trainer pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket, took one from the pack, lit it, and gave it to the elephant. And I was just there, speechless, looking at an elephant smoking a cigarette.

And the guy just laughed.

“It’s like I say”, he said.”Everyone gets rid of stress however they can.”

So we moved on to the next elephant, and that one started poking his shoulder too.

“Is this one a smoker too?”

“Nah.” The trainer had his back to me, at this point, and he was messing around with something that he took out of his other pocket, but I couldn’t see what it was.

Then he puts something up to the elephant’s trunk. It was a mirror, with three white dust lines on it, and the elephant inhaled it all in an instant.

I was kind of shocked, and the guy must’ve seen that in my face. But he just shrugged.

“Friend, I’m just paid to give them what they need”, he said. “I’m not one to judge.”

Well, not “in love”. Not really, that was too strong an expression. He was attracted, that’s what it was. One of those attractions that take over you when you least expect it. Yes, that was it. It was an attraction.

Which first appeared weeks back, when he went to one of his usual haunts for drinks with buddies. And she was there. Beautiful. Perfect. The center of all attention. She was clearly enjoying herself, at least judging by her body language.

But she didn’t smile.

Which gave her a sort of enigmatic look, even more alluring.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of her all night. Eventually, she looked into his. And kept looking for a few moments. He ended up looking away first.

But he couldn’t get her out of his mind, so night after night, he went back to the bar, hoping she was there. She often was, and at some point, their eyes would always lock. And then we wouldn’t do anything about it, and inevitably she’d turn her attention elsewhere.

Until tonight, that is, when he finally found some courage, and despite shaking all over, went up to her. She saw him as he walked towards her, and stared at him. Was she happy he made up his mind? Was she surprised? Without a smile, he couldn’t tell. But she kept looking at him, until he sat next to her.

He looked back into her eyes, and smiled. She kept looking into his, and finally, she smiled back.

Her smile seemed… dead. That’s the only way to describe it. It seemed to suck back in all the light that she radiated. He even felt queasy, taken over by a sort of emptiness that almost knocked him out. But he kept looking at her. She, on the other hand, lowered her look to the table. She knew. Maybe that was why she never smiled.

He got up, and went back to his friends’ table. He looked at her. The soul of the party was gone, lost in a dead smile. She was still surrounded with people. But in his eyes, she was the loneliest woman alive.

Sometimes we are so caught up with whatever it is we’re doing, we actually totally forget what we look like. We just don’t think about it, and the mind just files that information away.

Then when we look at a mirror, the brain just doesn’t recognize the face it sees as our own. For one second, we’re freed from our mask, from the image other people associate to us. For one second, we’re free of the baggage that comes with our identity.

For one second, we’re free.

It always fascinated me, that moment. I guess that’s why I chose to dedicate my life to it, to studying the connection between image and identity. I know some day, my work will be accepted, and humanity will learn not to let itself be defined by the Physical. It will learn that that moment of non-recognition is the moment in which we truly are ourselves. And it will finally start walking down the path to the ultimate cure of mind and spirit. It will use abstraction of identity as a path to illumination. And it’ll be because of me.

I stop in front of the bathroom mirror. For a moment, I can’t recognize the face. It’s not mine. For a moment, I’m free. But the moment passes, and recognition returns.

The face is still not mine.

I remove the torn skin from my face, taking care not to tear it even more. I clean my face, my own face, ridding it of the blood from the other man’s face, which I then return to its owner, now as dead as the piece of skin.

Then I change my mind, and throw his face in the garbage. He may be dead, but he still deserves to be free.

Last minute invitations were nothing new coming from her, so it wasn’t the call asking to meet me two hours later that surprised me. What surprised me was her mood.

She was so happy, so cheerful. That’s also normal, but that afternoon, she seemed to be a couple of steps up in the giddyness scale. She was playful, funny. But more than that, she was in constant physical contact with me. It seemed like she couldn’t go more than a few seconds without touching me. She’d walk locking arms with me, giggling, and seconds after she let go, she’d hold my hand, gently caressing it before gripping it.

She also frequently caressed my face. And her look, my God, her look… I don’t remember ever seeing her look that way. Her eyes seemed full of tenderness, and her smile almost let me feel that that tenderness was for me.

That afternoon brought back up every emotion I had tried to repress.

I couldn’t stop myself, and I asked her where all that happiness was coming from.

“Where do you think?”, she asked back with a smile.

“I have no idea.”

“Well”, she said, coming closer, “I’ve been reevaluating my life, looking at myself, inside and out. And I saw lots of things.”

“Like what?” I’m not sure she could see the hope on my face, but I suspect she could.

“Like…” She paused. It seemed to last forever. “I finally realized what you mean to me.”

I couldn’t help myself. I smiled, she smiled back. A huge smile. I hugged her. I needed to feel her that close to me.

“I love you so much”, I said.

“And I love you”, she answered. “You are the best friend I ever had.”

And I swear I felt a part of my soul die.