Suicidal Mila
Lets get them. Go get them, girl. This story is for you, my dear Steve, she says to herself. You arrived at a good time…Steve - finally, someone to think about, to fantasize about. She knows that because he will not answer her e-mails, and will ignore the long texts she will spill all over her sent messages folder; it is just fine, comfortable. She will be able to write forever. Forever again. Forever number 3 and bingo my ass. He will be her thought recipient because he will never answer. She will never see, feel and taste his opinion. Not allowing her to know him, he tries to save her from indulgence, but she, capable of passionately loving anything that moves given the correct circumstances, is not easy to stop. Rare constellations occur every so often that allow her to open herself to love. She starts writing all over at this point.
She has thought of herself as a protagonist in a series for Sony, and seeks artificial situations that she considers crucial because of their weight as exaggerated human traits. She praises the conception of archetypes as phobias, in the sense that they attack you. Therapy was a pleasure for a while, but seeing the cost, the time and the fear she stopped.
If he had just written back once, Steve, I mean, she would have felt better, better painter, better mother, attractive at least. Had he written back once, she would have forgotten about him, and perhaps even gotten chubby out of happiness for not spending so much time in her favorite airless room: the platonic love glove compartment. An emotional space so tight that it becomes funny which is precisely the thrill, it is funny. She loves it, loves him, forever. Again. And there we go.
The thing is that dependants, kids, that is, gave her a sense of forceful happiness that rules out platonic romance for lack of time to weep or suicidal divas to be attractive. Of course she knows quite well killing herself is not an option but living without enthusiasm permanently or worse yet, having fits that jump back and forth between ecstasy and misery is.
He would have been ruled out after the first letter, but innocently, he accepted twelve years of harassment. Getting his attention is now a fun and pathetic game, one she profoundly enjoys playing. So, new excuse to write in hand, she pulls herself together and decides on her options.
Her third boyfriend post marriage-gone-rotten told her recently, and somewhat around the fact of having met Dear Steve that she was far too enchanting. This meant: Sweetie, shut up. She, of course, prefers solitude then mouth trapping boyfriend and suffers. She suffers and indulges without his help. She is indulgent at heart and fate has not yet disseminated her cure. She’s trapped and wants to be. Wants to die, wants to be, wants to die, wants to be, wants to die, all far too silly, for me. Dear Mila, Poor lonely nasty and lovely thing.
Sanity, equanimity, self-assurance, placidness and character are basic and the shit load of responsibilities makes her nervous. Too long, too much time ahead of her, too much to learn, too long a way to go. But there are all those books to publish, which must be, of course, written first, and where is he? Steve! there you are. Hi Steve. Allow me. Not that this is complaint time, a word that sometimes people use to describe the concept of self-questioning. No, not that, just mumbling, talking to you, Steve. Are you there? She will be aware of what has been going on when the image created by the taboo her parents represent stop being a pain at 34. Too old, poor girl. Silly thing. Country road in her thighs.
So, envy. That’s a good one. She would tell him everything. Writing to the void. “Caracas has a way of giving people an overblown ego with respect to art, to visitors, like those egos typical of the first World. It has to do with oil, we have tons of it and had a very quick social mobility for quite a few years” she would say, and “That’s no longer the case though, fortunately or not, hard to tell, but we decided to keep the French attitude”. She likes that about this city. Having lived in Toronto for a long time gave her a sense of belonging with this place that I doubt would have developed otherwise. She still longs for Toronto, she left good friends there and praises like gold her good memories from those years, but here is where she sees what she seeks. Overwhelming one more time. She doesn’t move forward easily. It is not simple to leave a city, to travel without culture shock awoken guilt. She is guilty, very guilty for loving what’s gone and wanting to die out of blindness where she loves what goes on. Guilt.
Her spot among the famous is not yet built and building it is too much work. What is Venezuelan and what is not, what matters about things like being from one place or another and what does not matter at all. Confusing ideas. Mila has no apparent control over these thoughts and that seems to be her problem. So she thinks. What matters and what doesn’t and therefore whether living is worth it or not is her thing.
Suicidal Mila. So, Steve, this text is for you. Mila speaking, the narrator is off. I turn her off. I turn her off whenever I need to. Steve read this text! Please do it, read it all! It has been written for you. She is so strong these things happen
Too much passion out of place. Most people’s problem is that very same. Too much passion, therefore anxiety, anguish, of course, remorse, guilt and thus revengefulness. Once hated the self flies away and egos come back with all answers. And I love Mila. Bye Steve, she says. No more for tonight. It is 5: 28 pm but this wine makes it tonight.
Suicidal Mila writes every night to someone she does not know. That is what makes her so sad but she cannot stop.
Mila’s partner is the nanny of her little daughter, sort of speak. That is the only real company she has is what I mean. I don’t even visit her as I used to anymore. Her place is a small and overcrowded apartment downtown Caracas, full of objects she collects, anything from metal junk she finds in the street to art her friends give her, o objects she considers would be good toys for her child. There she lives with her baby and a woman who helps her, she is Venezuelan and strongly believes she cannot do it on her own. There is always a different woman, they do not last longer than three months. Mila does not know what to look for in them in order to choose the correct and long lasting domestic help she requires for her mental health, or perhaps her mental health does not allow for her to establish a long lasting relationship with any of these women, I don’t know, but will not judge that either. Venezuela has a social system that doesn’t make it any easier. No social assistance from the State, close to slavery salaries for domestic employees, a terrible public transit service (Mila does not have a car and nor do the maids, of course), adverse conditions in general for the most basic and simple capitalist happy life this woman thinks she should be leading.
Her intellectual capacity is average. Although she is multitalented, she is not specially good in any of the things she does. She has dreams coming out of her pockets, forgotten, hopeful, promised, ruined and awaiting dreams, but never enough energy to insist on any of them, she changes them, abandons them. I know, here goes some judgement, but it is hard to speak of anyone without making them.
I met her a few years ago, we studied together, back then I had just arrived from Germany and she was the best student in class. She liked me from first sight and offered her help immediately, which, of course, I needed badly and thus boldly. Back then she wore her hair very long and very straight, her big brown eyes were hypnotizing, and her smile gave you a deep and irrational urge to cry. She captivated me. I gravitated towards her the minute I stepped in that classroom. Where is Mila or my day will not be the same? Would be my morning question, and then my body would just find her.
If I remember correctly, she lived with her boyfriend already, but certainly didn´t have kids because we used to go out a lot and that is something she never did again after giving birth. At least not while she was married. She is such a natural party animal that it would not surprise me to know that she left that man because he didn’t dance. And I do know she feels he nearly killed with guilt trips about good and bad behavior, when all she wanted to do was dance, and have drunk talks about philosophical theories she liked reading, to give them a name. She was very faithful to him, though, to the point it seemed ridiculous to me, I always though she should have tried something different, let herself go a bit. Julian, a classmate of ours who was madly in love with was unfairly banned from our group because he asked her one day for a kiss as payment for a silly bet. She liked him back but instead of enjoying the playful request, she stopped talking to the man to this day.
Things have changed since she left John, her husband. Last week Jamiroquai had a great concert and she came with me. Her friend Andrea came too as well as Paul, my boyfriend. Pablo and I lost each other for the first 6 or seven songs of the concert, and because I had just seen Irreversible, I ended up misreading his personality. I thought him capable of forgetting about me or leaving the agreed place of encounter out frustration for not finding me there immediately, so I moved, but also sent a false explanation as to where I was and Pablo went to the wrong place. Meanwhile I kept on imagining him dancing and not paying attention to my messages, which were getting gradually more and more desperate. It was Mila who calmed me down, she explained to me how I had lost perspective, told me about my paranoia and made me look at myself.
Pablowas very angry when we finally found each other that concert, and I was very sad, it took us at least 20 minutes to get back to normal, relax and enjoy the concert. And Mila explained it all to me. That doesn’t seem like the same woman who has not been able to stop thinking about the fact that she assisted Spencer Tunick and his crew by volunteering to help in the photo shoot he organized in Caracas - she translates well but says that that day she made a mess of herself- and did not do a good job. We saw each other after in 2 different art openings that same day and she was devastated. Later that week I went to an event around Luis González Palma, a photographer from Guatemala. The author of the text was there and Mila came with me because I translated the text of the catalogue and wanted to meet the New Yorker woman who had written it. Well, my dear Mila got drunk that day and made a mess of the situation.
I’m grateful Jamiroquai was good, and she was wise that day. Getting lost was a drag bad enough to ruin the concert, but I managed to dance at the end, and Mila’s insight still puzzles me.
I told her I really wanted Jamiroquai to take off his hat, it was so hot! But she laughed for a while and then said she didn’t know why we were friends. She should see that movie, irreversible, I’m still suffering its effects and if she is all of a sudden so wise, maybe she can help me deal with the memory of it. When Mila was about 5, a man came up to her on the stairs to her apartment - were she lived with her mother alone- a man who was not from that building, and who put his finger inside her vagina after having convinced her that he was not sure whether she was a girl or a boy and thus he had to see, Mila was frequently asked if she was a boy and wanted to proof she was definitely girl, so she let him touch her. This felt so uncomfortable that she quickly left and was pretty lucky because he let her go.
Mila is probably writing right now. She has surely told Steve how the concert was. The place was used in 70% of its capacity. And it made you wonder how many of the same people from the concert were naked downtown Caracas a week before. That would be an interesting statistic. Cultural entertainment? could that be the titled as such? Anthropological partying? Encyclopedic fun? I think for this last title you would need to add horse races or stock market. Anyway. Good night Steve. Sleep tight. Mila is the one who needs to write to you, but I’m in charge of saying so and you seem close enough already. I regret, however, that we didn’t meet. Mila showed me this letter a couple of days ago, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her I don’t think she should send a letter like that, I don’t know, but I feel worried about the way she is approaching you:
Dear, Steve:
The perturbing photo you sent me recently has made me think of paying you a visit in Miami. It is a shame that I don’t trust my instinct to such a degree. However, I do have the guts to tell you that if you were closer I would try to call you.
Thanks for the photo,
Mila
She likes you so much, I want to write to you myself. Her excitement is contagious. She has a taste for extreme situations. She always wants to look over the edge. Plain old sanity is no good enough for her, and madness would be too silly. She lives in the space in between. The character, boyfriend, obsession, whatever who was in her life before Steve used her to get rid of his girlfriend and Mila let him use her to get rid of her husband. Everybody was mistaken, everybody lost and everybody has changed since. Changing is best, so it is a good thing everybody is always mistaken.
Mila was so desperate a while ago about not being able to establish an efficient communication system with John, the father of her kid, that she decided to call for help. She called her father, of course. She couldn’t understand herself, her own feelings and was so confused as to who was right or wrong over a very delicate conversation about properties and custody she had had with her ex, that she felt the need for a referee and called the family priest, the man who baptized her, to ask if he could help her talk to John, not that she is very religious, but she does trust this man, she feels he is honest and that is more than she feels foe just about everybody else.
She ended up so frightened about the deficiencies of her memory and of her skills for discussion and defending herself that she took notes of everything she felt and thought about his behavior and her own for months before the first “dialogue” appointment.
Mila will never admit it, but she feels she failed in the most important project she ever had: her marriage. She invested her entire self as people do with money. She thought he was a bank account of affection but expected to see profit in the short term. Her husband, however, had long term plans for her investment and gave, as far as she could see, low interests and hardly any benefits at all. Out of such a calculation, nothing good can be perceived, so soon this amorous transaction fell to pieces and she is now struggling to cope with her emotional bankruptcy. Steve is the result. Letter sent out and turned into thin air, black holes of the heart. Paper in hand she went to that first date with the mediator and got so scared, she could not speak. I had to sleep over at her house the night.
The other day, there were the most horrible news. Three kids had been kidnapped and killed. Their chauffer was also murdered. It is an electoral year and everybody on the look out for political trouble. The incident with the three kids caused a commotion. People closed roads; there were public manifestation around the country. Mila took the whole thing personal. She felt, I guess, that there were mother of all ages, students, grandfathers, people eager to protest out on the street suffering before the cameras. I think Mila sees only a hint of what these signs might all mean, but perhaps feels their true magnitude in a way she cannot even begin to explain.
I read once that it was more spiritually intelligent to be lost than to understand it all. Perhaps Mila knows this and thus limits her efforts for comprehension to a degree I cannot fathom. I find it hard to understand why her thirst for knowledge is so shorthanded. She never reads the news because they seem monotonous and useless to her, but before a case as scandalous as this, she even gets dressed at 9 pm, strange phenomenon for her, and walks out of her house, leaving her daughter with a caretaker, to go protest twenty five blocks away out of borrowed grief. I don not get it. I of the stupid kind I guess.
When talking about her plans to meet with this third person and her ex husband to talk about her children, last time she asked me for an ear about this topic, Mila brought into the conversation the murdered kids. They were part of her arguments. She said she associates her apprehension about custody and daily routine agreements about her kids with her ex, with the same type of sensation she had while protesting: in my opinion, two very different things, if I’m honest. I adore Mila, she is a good friend, but her esoteric view of life sometimes seems to me to the very source of her unhappiness. Maybe if I had children I would feel different, but I doubt it.
That was Mariana speaking. Mila has three close friends: Mariana, who she sees every day, Paul, who is now dating Mariana and Justin, who she was once mad about but whom was not at all interested in any sort of romantic encounter with her. As things are, it is hard to tell if Mila and Mariana love or hate each other. They seem to be in love in a way, but they are ferocious rivals over Paul’s attention. Mariana almost fails to acknowledge Pablo and Mila were ever inseparably close buddies.
Pablo misses Mila as much as she misses him, but has to consider Mariana’s hidden, so she hopes, jealousy. Mila is the only one who actually expresses herself, but that is often the case because she is simply blunt on a permanent basis.
II
When Mila and I met I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had seen in years and got so excited about such a discovery that I approached her with friendly and very welcoming excitement. She responded falling “madly in love” with me and I was as much flattered as I was frightened. She was married yet trying not to be and finishing some novel about a platonic love she had been completely obsessed with. Back then Justin, her professor was the recipient of her passion, something we all know whether she admits it or not. I replaced this guy. So she started writing to me.
She has threatened me with a story she is supposedly writing, which of course I manifestly feel would not be a good idea and secretly cherish. Mixed feelings I guess. Anyway, Mila writes me but I date Mariana. Camila Carpio, 35, divorced, mother of a 3 year old daughter, painter at heart, translator, wit several undiagnosed psychological pathology wannabes, thus light disorders, writes to me everyday and I date her friend Mariana. A most uncomfortable situation I must say.
However, Mi la is so constant about the whole thing that it is easy to feel comfortable with it. About her, I have always felt though that her smoking habit is too much. When we met, she looked so healthy and beautiful that I would have never guessed she smoked and let myself gravitate towards her, gave her all that hope she plays with in her letters. But she smokes and have no understanding what so ever for the such a suicidal attitude, so that is how she began to show all the other things I would never be able to relate to about her. She also cries frequently and gats angry easily. Mila would hate me after a two months with me but would brake up with mw in three years, without showing what she felt, I would find out through a book, just like her husband. There is no way I would enjoy that and love is a thing to be enjoyed. This is why I have to find a way to stop Mila from writing to because she will drive Mariana away from me.
Pablo thinks about Mila as much as she thinks about her but for entirely different reasons.
