I AM FALLING IN LOVE
EVERYWHERE THE WORLD we know is splitting in two. Each half in turn in two and so on without rest. Earth like a cell rotting or diffracting; it is not yet possible to tell. Beginning and end meet and merge. Apocalypses and infancy face to face. Fascism advances like a political corpse stubbornly taking the last steps before falling. Sometimes the dead assumes the form of a naked white guy with an antlers on top of the head, other times an Italian businesswoman, or a national-security neocon-feminist mummy; sometimes it speaks English, sometimes Russian, but always the abstract language of the market. On each side of the fault line everyone is running in opposite, sometime indistinguishable, directions. There are feet that fall into the sixth-extinction abyss. And hands that cling to hope. On one side, the whole universe is closing in on itself: The past repeats endlessly. Shareholders high on crack get their stocks out of colonial mud, and wash them, for the last time, with petrol and blood. A gas noise escaping from a pipe is a sad soundtrack. Everywhere I am waiting for the travelers who will never come. Meanwhile, not far, what seemed impossible is already happening and opening to the unknown. Apatrid bodies rise and speak. This is the case in Mexico and in India, in Chile and in Uganda. This is where you act and live. This is where love begins.
Forbidden electronic signals record your actions and bring them up to me. Smartphones are graves but are also ephemeral doors: The applications are precarious delivery kids working for GAFA who dare to give a middle finger to the patriarchal state. This is how I see you, as if you were next to me, standing on my screen at the edge of history. I see you taking your hair in your hands lifting it up as if it were a living banner. And then cutting it off. The time when it was necessary to hide menstrual blood, saliva, sex, rage, hair, love . . . is gone. The strands of hair, black and white, are now falling over your shoulders. I haven’t seen anything more brutal and joyful since the Chileans were confronting the rapists with their chants. Your shaved skull is a naked manifesto: A genealogy of uncharted dots links the ’70s punks and the ’80s shaved dykes to your revolt. Your falling hair is a nonbinary statement of antipatriarchal disbelief. Who would have imagined that your hair was stronger than power. Words and scissors are miraculous weapons. You are thirty-three. You are thirteen. You are sixty-three. And this is the year 3000. It doesn’t matter if you are Kurdish or Iranian. If you were born at Versailles or in Ghana. If scissors can trim hair, they can also cut across political naturalized identities. Here comes the new trans Internationale: Freedom, not identity, is what remains when veils have fallen, and hair has been cut. That haircut is theory and practice in one gesture.
On another sheer zone, I see you also in the streets of Moscow, defecting from the military, refusing to believe the myth of the natural enemy and to kill, running the risk of prison, torture, or death. Saying no now is better than forever PTSD. I see you claiming the streets, speaking up, negating jail and institutionalized life, escaping the wards of racism, abandoning the loops of carbon energy, deserting heteropatriarchal binary life. In your hands, you carry nothing but future things. Secession. Withdrawal. Cut. Marvelous or supernatural deeds are not as rare as we think; rather, we should say that they happen by stealth. I know: We fucking live a horrifying beautiful time. And I am falling in love with you. Love is that process that impacts subjectivity by dis-identifying it, expanding or modifying the limits of what we thought was our own identity. La mañana es Clara. Les soirées sont bleues. Si la nuit est rouge. La révolution is you.
I do fall in love with you in the middle of a paradigm shift. Until I understand that the paradigm shift is you. No one can say no to a love like this. You have arrived, at the same time as the uprisings, to also cut my rage in two. Before and after you. We make love in hotel beds separated by ditches and read the poetry of René Ricard until four in the morning. Someone will say that it is a pity that the possibility of assimilating all the beauty of the world is necessarily filtered by the face of this or that person, is reduced to the always improvable quality of certain kisses, to the capacity of someone to condense the whole universe. Except if that face is yours, if those kisses are yours. To fall in love is to feel the revolution begin. There is no revolution that does not produce a new body and mine is being born today between your arms, on the streets of Tehran and Moscow, of Santiago and La Paz. The military newborn who deserts war, the policechild who kneels in front of the demonstrators. The teenager armed only with electronics and scissors. You are the revolution. I belong to you. Your skin is the only temporary gender autonomous zone. Before, this concept was political fiction, pure speculation. Now it exists here: between us. In love. Insurgo. Insurrectio. For you, I am going to leave behind all my sad affects. La mañana es Clara. Les soirées sont bleues. Si la nuit est rouge. La révolution is you.
