Lope's Thoughts

Look at yourself. Not the face the mirror has been rehearsing for years, but the one hiding under your skin. Look closely. There is a small door behind your left eye. You have never opened it. Inside, an old version of you is sitting at a table made from yesterday, turning pages with hands that have forgotten their own shape. Open the pages. Do not ask who wrote them. Some words were written by storms. Some by strangers. Some by nights that refused to become mornings. And some, some were written by you while you were asleep. Turn the page. A black sun is hanging from the ceiling. It has no heat, only memories. Underneath it, your forgotten dreams are growing teeth. They are waiting for you to remember their names. Turn another page. There is a road running through your childhood. It has no beginning. It has no end. Only footprints. You follow them until they suddenly become yours. Then you realize you have been walking backward your entire life. Look at yourself. The book is breathing ...

The dice is still rolling. I heard it last night inside the belly of the moon, knocking against its silver bones while something beneath the earth counted the numbers. One. Two. Three. I looked outside. The stars were gone. Not hidden. Gone. As if someone had reached into the sky and quietly stolen them. You stood beside your palace wearing the proud smile of someone who believed the universe had chosen him. “Look what I have built.” You pointed at the towers. You pointed at the gold. You pointed at the doors that opened whenever you approached. But behind you, the shadows were whispering. They knew something you did not. The river did not ask your permission before becoming a river. The sun did not read your name before entering the morning. And the wind has never stopped to ask who deserves to breathe. You simply woke one day with food on your table, a roof above your head, and enough light in your hands to believe you had created the sun. Grace is a strange creature. It enters quiet...

Sometimes I wonder if the trees are only standing because they are too polite to fall into the sky. I look at them and something inside me becomes quiet. Not peaceful. Quiet in the way an old house becomes quiet when everyone who lived there has finally gone. The wind moves through the branches like someone searching for a name they once loved. I wonder if it finds it. I wonder if the leaves are letters God never finished writing. Every autumn He tears them out and lets them fall across the earth. Every spring He begins again. Perhaps that is why the trees never complain about losing themselves. They know how to become empty without becoming nothing. I sit beneath one and listen. The roots are whispering under the soil. I cannot understand them, but somehow I know they are talking about me. Maybe they remember my ancestors. Maybe they remember the first human who looked at the sky and asked, Why? Maybe the roots have been carrying that question for thousands of years. The river has no ...

I noticed something strange yesterday, people have started growing extra faces. Not everyone, of course. Mostly the people who say, "I really like you." while their eyebrows are secretly filing complaints. I first discovered this at a little café where everyone was drinking coffee and pretending not to listen to everyone else's business. The woman beside me smiled. "What a beautiful day," she said. I smiled back. Then she turned around, and I saw her second face. It was wearing sunglasses and whispering into a telephone. "Yes," it said, "she is sitting right here." I looked behind me. Nobody. I looked back. The face had disappeared. The woman was smiling again. "Lovely weather," she said. I nearly swallowed my spoon. I decided to investigate. So I walked through the city with my eyes wide open. There they were, two-faced people walking everywhere. One face smiled at you. The other face walked behind you carrying a notebook. Some had...