Borges and I - My Bloody Valentine

Happy Valentine's Day. Here's a literary love letter I wrote, re-posted from the Year Zero Writers blog. Enjoy.


Moxie Mezcal, Author of Borges and I

[Editor’s Note: The following letter was found in early 2013 in the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina in Buenos Aires. The original manuscript was discovered folded up inside a volume of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) by an anonymous patron. The text, which was written in Sanskrit, was sent to the Universidad de Buenos Aires for translation into Spanish. Subsequent attempts to translate the Spanish text into English have exposed the apparent shoddy and rushed work performed during the original translation. Attempts have been made to procure the Sanskrit manuscript for producing a direct English translation; however, it would appear that the manuscript has been misfiled through a clerical oversight and can no longer be located. As such, the present translation should only be considered as a true translation of the Spanish version, but cannot be guaranteed to accurately represent the original language.]

I follow you through the fourteen twists and turns, zigzagging between stone ruins, steel skyscrapers, concrete underpasses, dusty libraries, and lush green hedges, beneath the intricate sun. We trace a circular path together, you and I, progressing only by degrees, if at all, pushing forward to the center, the supposed heart of it all.

I never clearly see you. You exist only at my vision’s edge. Always rounding the next corner. Always one step ahead. Sometimes I go days without seeing you, and I begin to doubt that you are actually still there. I think that perhaps you have taken some unanticipated turn and slipped away, leaving me alone to chase your ghost. Sometimes I wonder if you had ever been there at all, even at the beginning, or if it has truly been this ghost, this other one all along.

But then I see you, and my mind is satisfied that we are indeed making progress, in defiance of the arrow’s law, which keeps the others mired in the tyranny of ever-multiplying halves.

I wonder what will happen when we reach the center and you have nowhere else to elude me. Will you turn to greet me, extending a welcoming hand? Will you be like me? Or will I realize that you are in fact the other?

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.

(Signed)
Moxie Mezcal,
Author of “Borges and I”


Check out more bloody valentines at the YZW blog here, here, here, and here.