Liberated Thoughts — An Old Tale

I cannot sip the bliss of my joy alone and in secret, so do not knit your radiant brow, reproaching me:
Let us keep the secret of my return — for me, and for you.
For I suffocate, even if I do not ask you, you yourself: And why did you come back?
The clouding of the smile in your eye rebukes me: I am to rush to you like a madwoman, to wipe the dust of forgetting from your arms, from the gleaming doorknob, from your mind... and to lower my black lashes, to spread a seclusion around us in the imagined dark. And to fall silent, so that motion is paralyzed in my senses, and I perish, then, in you; and I become a paltry shadow, and you become a tyrant who storms my room whenever he pleases, to deck an ecstasy in it, or to spin cobwebs in its corners should I dare and anger him.
Do you remember your idiotic loftiness in withholding from me your cheap gift — the gift from whose dwarf phantom I drew help in bearing your absence through elastic, endless months? That lifeless thing poured into my body the power to mince the tongues of the curious and crush them. And it lit up before me caverns of human riches, which the methods of my ignorant, silly, ruinous upbringing had buried in order to destroy...
How then, how did your practiced softness manage to force me to grovel before you, sobbing — I, who need nothing — while you condescend, a tyrant, to pardon my humble weakness at your feet? How, how did you command me to the letter: Ask me for the gift, that I may present it to you.
Only utter its name! Only... only...! Quite simply, in the black core of my disappointment, I in my turn commanded you:
Let us part! And let your shoulder brush mine every day and take no notice of my existence. And let me not feel yours. Listen! Let our eyes turn into colored beads. And our lips into shreds of snow. And our hands into dry rods. And our legs into iron wheels!
And your wanton, mocking laugh hurled me far... far away. And it set down in my green notebook a better solution, one to bring me back to my senses in the sobbing of my longing for you: "We have quarreled. I have found an end to this dreadful nightmare. He is a coward... a coward... I despise him... I must go away... away..."
Why did you come back —
did you come back so that we might chew over our past?
So that you might visit me for minutes and be gone for weeks? Make me laugh for an instant while I sob for days? Shower me with a greeting I boast of and treasure, then ignore me, deliberately, before the eyes of all the people, so that I shrink into corners, worn down by my humiliation?
No... do not come near.
Only lean your back against the door, and feed the hesitation flickering on your fingertips a bitter defeat. And watch your pride tear itself apart at your feet: one foot struck down as it crawls toward my feet, to touch them and kiss them and bury them on every black and stormy night! And one foot making ready for flight, and for retreat to a throne you call dignity, built for you by your forefathers, the men, out of what they plundered of the buds of women's dignity — from my oppressed grandmothers! It will ask you to let young men other than you win me over, so that I may gather up the scattered fragments of my life and dissolve it into their lives and bask in stability...
Try to understand:
a life of stability, for me, is death, and I want to relish motion, pulsation, renewal. So do not be surprised if I tear you out of myself, out of my path — to cut myself a free path in which I choose my own aims.
Do not breathe a word,
for I have had my fill of chatter. Love, to me, is one problem among my daily problems, ramified and discordant; and if you have come believing that you are all that matters to me, then be gone at once from my sight!
I, you arrogant man, am lost and perplexed: between leaving my work — and how shall we pay the rent of our new house if I leave it? Between the cigarette my adolescent brother burns in secret to prove his manhood, and the fading of my father's hopes, wilting away with the burning tobacco. Between my searching in vain for the red fountain pen that was lost, and the cursed pencil staring at my hand. Between the pain that flares up in my tooth, my ear, my head, and my begging for time I once possessed and sold for a few liras...
This moment,
I have smashed the fetters of the rotting isolation in which you locked me... and here I am, swaying forward serenely, to cast off the film of my selfishness and of yours on the sill of the door you lean against,

and I shall go out to the people: to those who love the individual for his creative worth. For the joys of his humanity. For his immortal ambitions... Not as you love: for a leg whose flesh you flay with your eyes, at your leisure... at your leisure...

Do not try to persuade me. Carry the cares of your mistakes alone, so that I may be tender with my first literary newborn, and protect it, and spin it a place in every breast.

I fear your disdain for the life of all my literary offspring; you are not the man who suits me. What are you waiting for? Leave the sill of my door, and go look for the woman who will cook your food. And untie your shoelace. And throw herself on the bed. And breathe in your fetid corners!