My sweetheart’s cat has gone missing; been gone two days. It surprises her – and me – how attached she’s become and what it does to her to think her furry friend is out there somewhere and that no-one knows where to really look. I wish there were something more that could be done, that I could do more; that peace of mind could be as easy a thing to make as the chapters we open and close so precareously all the time in the stories we write!
A cell phone in Dublin slips into a coma and there is no prayer that will bring it back to life, so I read on facebook. All my friends seem to be chapter-closers these days. By late afternoon, the plug gets pulled at last and the mourning there too can begin (an iPhone is my hope), the closing of a chapter that immediately announces the one that is soon to come.
I just closed off a job of ten years today and though I must have, I don’t remember seeing a soul. Just walked through the door and rode the borrowed bike back to the station, where I smoked my 17:30 cigarette and took a train I have secretly been hoping I will never have to take again. I already miss it, the job, the people. Knew I would, that this I too would mourn.
But the pling in my pocket, as I am reading through this morning’s non-news in the free non-news newspaper that was handed to me by some kid in what has always looked to me like the jacket of a race car driver – for some reason – announces the opening of MY chapter NEXT, page ONE.
I swipe and find there is a message from the design department, containing four files in total: Book Cover – front, Book Cover – back, Book Cover – spine, Book Block pdf, requiring my last revisions and (please, not to fuck around with corrections anymore, for we are rather pressed for time) approval by morning.
As I want to jump with joy at seeing I am now another monkey with a book, I decide that the mourning part I will skip today and just lather myself with that heavenly balm called EGO and stare into that mirror in which I am always pretty and will always have something to say.
Claudio Tapia 