Today will be mostly vacation. I'll try to go to Burgo de Osma, see its castle and the streets of the old center, and read as I wait for the moon to catch up. I'll go early because nobody can foresee what the situation will be: if it'll be national collapse of millions gathering in a fringe a few hundred kilometers wide or if it'll just be one day after the previous one and before the next, just like for the moon it'll also be one saros after the previous one and before the next.

I'll think about 余韻—yo-in—me-dedans—Я-dentro—the remaining resonance: the sound that persists after the bell has been struck, the reverberation that outlives the note, the haiku that has no period and keeps pouring its whispers into you, even after it ran out of 5-7-5 syllables.

I'll think about Lao Tse and how Confucius went Sileto after meeting him. I'll think about the virtue of silence and the indécence of existence, that inevitably breaks it.

I'll beg one last time the moon, the invisible moon, the absent moon—that is always there anyway—to manifest itself; and by the laws of the cosmos, today, it will, and everybody will go Wooow! Me too.

I'll think how nineteen years ago, it did not, and in nineteen years from now, it will, because of the physics of syzygy and of exeligmos. It'll sweep through the sky without revealing itself, as it's been doing all this time backward, and will keep doing all this time afterward. I'll think about these nineteen years, on both sides of me. One when I was not yet, and the other when I will be not anymore.

I'll take Stendhal with me, after all, not Ghelderode... because I want to see him—someone else, not me—I want to see him humiliate himself to the World. Because he too was looking at a moon which was not there. I'll be the one sniggering and he'll be the one Stendhaling.

I'll seize the opportunity—it's a once-in-a-lifetime one—to leave it there. To leave my last arguable violation of my promise—to never touch her again, not even with a comma—somewhere on a rock of this hill, where there is the Cross of Christ. Not the one of his calvary, but the one of our century. Mine.

I'll keep it as a code to myself: "since the day of the eclipse, I never, ever, referred to her again. Not even with a comma." I'll nail my heart to the moon with the cross of Christ. It'll be the final period. One big enough to fail to notice.

It will be difficult, not to speak about her eyes, about her ears, about her hair, about her words—all of which identify her and identify me as surely as a disk floating in the sky identifies the moon... and like Stendhal's Metilde, it's what she did not want: be identified, be involved. Her expressions, her words to me, «forma barata», «carece de ritmo», «nada que añadir»... I'll ask the moon to sweep this away, to swipe this over, I'll cry all this into the black hole that it will open into the sun and hope that they'll be sent on the other side and into the fire, like my four pages to her, once it completes its arc and becomes invisible again.

It will be difficult, I know. But because it will also be difficult to go against the moon, it might just work. It'll be difficult even if the moon sits on me, because I still have my hand on her lower back. As Angelus told me to, or had me to, or saw me to. That's not something that I can "untouch" or bring to any kind of "anymore".

But the beauty of fulfilling the promise, to recede into words—as I did already—and then into less than words—as I'm about to do—will be its own kind of completion for a long, for a strange, for a beautiful poem.

I'll keep reciting its verses to myself, of course—it's part of me—but that'll stay part of me. Her name, which I never wrote, and which was the most direct, personal form of address one can give to someone, will always resonate as an echo inside me. Echo tua. This most delicate, balanced and torn-apart name—which could be the title, the opening and the closing word of a novel, and the thread of everything this story would narrate—will keep singing and shouting. But by smothering it inside me, I'll be able to turn bad public prose into a good private poem, with just a promise fulfilled.

And although she will neither know nor care, the 余韻 will then be Completo. Period 🌑