HOME

30 Trillion beloved.
You are incredibly beautiful, yes you are!
lovers, you see me? what is it that you see?
30 trillion.
You beautiful creatures standing there in expectation,
since we always want it to happen,
the revelation of ourselves,
the mimesis in our encounter,
mirroring the desires,
beloved,
30 trillion.
Bare with me while we think together, this exuberant waste.
Are you here yet?
Let me quote Plato:
Have we found back from the swirl of souls wondering around in hope to grow wings?
Our infinite soul, the one which cannot be beaten, lives in a constant competition with itself.
With every encounter, we move closer to the goddesses on their chariots.
And the more we do so, the more we grow wings. Indeed cognition hurts.
When feathers grow out, when they brake our skin, make their way through our cells.

The phenomenon of personhood, isn’t it, the soul. I made all this up, but it could be true.
Still bare with me.

So, 30 trillion.
Your body consists of 30 trillion cells. Thirty trillion times the code that you think
will build you if used correctly, according to the plan, copied with no mistake.
Copy paste, copy paste, erase, copy. YOU!

You, who had a childhood in which your first memory is your flooded room,
who knows which suit to wear according to the single malt you’re pouring into that strangers glas,
who is busy figuring out your nationality,
you, whom I envy for the courage to reproduce facing radioactivity or melting poles, chose your catastrophe,
you, who watch acceptance speeches one after the other
unable to discover the talent in yourselves that will catapult you there,
wondering why you want it,
or scared of nights filled with ammoniac dreams of the 65 meters we walked down to the prehistoric paintings,
paintings which were made to show how majestic a bull can be compared to a hunter.
The pain, being hilarious, the forgetfulness, the helplessness,
you,
we, who now will have to breathe deeply standing here in a full narcissistic cry.

Lets understand,
than if indeed, in this very moment, the ceiling would open up and one of those alien spaceships
would fly into this room, maybe if it’s tiny , sit on our head, and then, disturbed by the crash,
maybe it was a crash, yeah, lets leave it at that, would try to regain orientation, figure out who we are,
which species they have encountered...
What would you say if I told you that they would most likely wonder what that interesting thing called human is,
because
we
are not ourselves,
we are this thing we call myself but for each one of our cells we are inhibited by 1.3 bacteria.

That makes, depending on your weight, depending on your wealth, depending on your vanity, your sickness,
the history you face while touching the bars in the subway,
touching the door of the public bathroom in that jail you once visited,
out of a need to proof your courage, feeling ignorant while doing it,
depending on whether that mail was written on the keyboard in that internet cafe, out of which cannibalistic phantasies became reality or not.

Are you infected?

Did you or did you not wash your hands after the handshake with that person who promised you a future?
Detergent: the relation between the evil and the cure.
Detergent: the relation between the evil and the cure.

Depending on that and so much more you have an average number between 30 and 50 trillion bacteria living in your body, beloved.

A million is a thousand times one thousand.
A billion is a thousand times a million and a trillion is a thousand billions so a million millions.
30-50 million millions of bacteria live in that bloody shake shack that is your body.

Lets celebrate while we recognize that we are all but an aggregation, a mixture of microorganisms and human cells,
that our DNA is a small friction of the genetic material on our bodies.
We host trillions and trillions of creatures with their own bodies.
Every single gram of you contains 100 billion bacteria.
We better learn to communicate!

Listen for a second:
Populations and populations crossing the desert that is the skin on our arms,
hoping to survive, like streptococcus progenies and staphylococcus epidermis,
traveling with the dream of arriving to those famous oasis, the sebaceous areas:
the armpit, the space behind the ear
and with a lot of luck maybe to the place of fairytales which has just the right temperature, the right moist.
Propionibacteria crossing the dryness of your arms,
afraid of wax or razors, the apocalypse of assimilation
in hope to someday make it to the place of species diversity, make it to:
the holy bellybutton.

Beloved put your hand on your bellybutton: this is not about you.

While we fuck, we help them migrate, that’s what we are there for!
Lets embrace our beautiful existence as dirty highway motels for microscopic life,
mixing fluids, creating new environments, hosting wars, orgies and revolutions.

What if love was a parasite who likes the urin your lover pisses out?
Would it be less romantic?

30-50 trillion beloved.

Lets dive into our narcissistic pain.
But before that let me tell you, there is an older version of the Narcissus myth,
found in an old pile of trash in Egypt, centuries old,
where Narcissus, not like Ovid wrote 50 years later,
actually dies in his own puddle of blood.

Alicia Agustín 2017