I’m against marriage, against any amorous commitment, and I operate in intimate relationships on the principles that close and keep a rock band alive: as long as chemistry works and the job is seasoned well, with applause, a lot of fun, some incentives and fans, it’s all right, when chemistry starts to show signs of alteration, I give up. It’s way too complicated to maintain a relationship after attraction and desire are extinguished. I have an infantile behaviour, I am, of course, of superficial thoughts, I got raised in a libertine spirit, without any sense of responsibility and brakes in terms of the cultivation of pleasure, a mentality of an introvert who knows neither the value nor the price of freedom and who has no other purpose in life than to burn it as in the next twenty years in pleasure.

 I’m just kidding.

 I had a man who mistreated me and assaulted me to such an extent that I got a phobia of any kind of intimate commitment. I’ve lived in an unbearable climate for years. You know what it’s like: you introduce yourself to your friends, and the whole thing related to friendship, you say yes, you sign the document even without reading it, while a tear rolls down on your mother’s cheeks, and you end waking up from a nightmare, 10 years later, you look in the mirror and you don’t recognize your face. You see a confused face, with helpless eyes, and with some dubious little things around your mouth, and you wonder, who is this look?

 I’m just kidding.

 I’m a failed idealist, the classic case. When I made it clear that there was no love and no passion and devotion, I let it go, what was I supposed to do? I’ve adapted, I’ve given up hope for the impossible, I’ve met my expectations for the real offer. People have common interests and needs, that strengthen most couples and guarantee their longevity, or I was dreaming of a high-stakes game, actually, what do I say? Not a game, just that I aspired for the great art of sexual love or desire.

 I’m just kidding.

 In reality, it’s much simpler: none of the men I’ve coveted has ever loved me. None of the people I could have been happy with wanted me, and I ended up with some guys who didn’t tell me anything. And after a certain age, when you see that history keeps repeating itself, you draw a line and say, "That’s it, that’s it!" Change of scenery and desires. Kidding. Who the hell can beat their heart’s impulses just because they want to?
 I’m kidding.

 So. you understand: I’m a nymphomaniac. I can’t fix myself. I have to have absolutely every man who comes my way, otherwise, I feel frustrated and I’m able to do unexplained things like burning my dress on the lap at 2 am pulling out from the wardrobe.

 I’m just kidding.

 I’m ashamed, to tell the truth: the truth is, I’m a good girl. I was a good girl always, from whom the attractive boys ran away as the great entrepreneurs run away from the taxmen and to whom only those who could barely connect two words to a party and turned their backs when invited to dance. The tragic part is, I’ve always liked the kind of guy who only looks at the mannequins and vending machine, and I understand him. Normal.

 I’m just kidding.

 I was only sixteen when I was raped. Typical situation: a group of teenagers, a summer evening in the restaurant, we drank and smoked together, played the guitars, laughed. A classmate’s cousin invited me. As we rejoiced in the group, he acted as decently as possible, touching me from time to time, discreetly, his hand went through my hair a few times. Then, when the gang broke up, he offered to drive me home, and I said yes. He had a car. When he went the wrong way, I warned him, innocently, that he should come back, but he kept going. Well, whatever. The fact is, no matter how kind and patient a guy is with me, I still don’t have any confidence in any of them. The only ones who don’t inspire me with fear or suspicion are those who have a slight air when they smile at you, who don’t know what to do with their hands when they’re nervous, and who can talk about anything in the tone with which the weather forecast is read on the radio. It’s like you don’t want to diet salt-free as a normal woman, do you? But with just one of these, I’d risk getting married.

 I’m just kidding.

 There’s nothing true about everything I’ve ever done. I just have a lot of imagination. I’m an artist. You know how artists are.

 I’m just kidding.

 I am religious. I know, in our day, a religious woman hardly finds a partner. There is no question of accepting a libertine or a fallen or a man without the fear of God.

 I’m just kidding.

 I’m really funny, aren’t I? I haven’t had the luck of others, having some parents who can afford to keep me in college. My mother raised me alone. My dad left her with a belly to her mouth and left with another, lovelier and younger. I’ve had to work since I was 18. We had every job we could, including chicken separators on a farm. I had to take a chicken and separate them according to sex. It’s perhaps the only species where females are somehow more prized than males. When my time came, I got married, like all my friends. My man’s a day labourer, and he’s making his living as a day-labourer, by everything he earns… And after, he drinks… Some have better luck, that’s it, but that’s how it was written to me. There’s no way I’m going to glorify marriage, logically, is there?

 I’m just kidding.

 It’s clear to you that only an intellectual can talk like that, of course, I have a higher
 education. I also have a PhD. I’m a lab manager at a multinational. And I’m not going to leave my career for the hell knows what a psychopath asks me to support him or worse, for some backward man to put me in the pan. About me, if he asked me to make him a bowl of soup, I’d do it. Okay, man, what century do you think you are? Put your hand on the phone and order a pizza or get your mistress to make your soup and leave me alone because I have surrenders and conferences and big responsibilities on my hands! To me, your character lies in your mind, not in your body. I care about happiness and love more than sensual things. I want to occupy your mind, not your body. Just give me love, do whatever gives you peace. And besides, I can have any man I want, a strong woman is not denied anything. Money and fame can buy anything, including true love. I guess you do understand.

 I’m just kidding.

 I’ve always been a simple girl with low expectations. All I wanted was a good boy to count on, a shoulder I could lean on and rest my head on. I wanted a decent, decent man in his place. And all I’ve ever had is hypocrites and sentimental crooks, even punks playing with me black and white. Over time, I realized that the small demands are too great and I don’t expect anything big, I just have random relationships, in and out who wants to come in and out of my life, as well as my bed… I myself became a train station and got used to the roar of trains. Sirens don’t even make me flinch anymore. I am a strong girl.

 I’m just kidding.

 The truth is, I don’t even know how couples can exist. Maybe they’re just simulacrums. Who knows what the unseen part is that the iceberg hides? I’ve always had everything, humanly, you can wish for, except love. I took all the prizes, I won all the competitions, I was chess champion, I had best friends, I have the ideal job and I have the fanciest apartment in the central area. I just didn’t want any of this, not seriously. It just happened. Instead, since I was five, I’ve wanted a boy to love, love and love me. For decades, I’ve had the same dream. I dreamt that we would dance together holding hands at concerts and they all would say: Wow! How beautiful they are together! And in that dream, it was that we were both wearing our hair long, loose and that it was flowing in waves on our shoulders. I suspect that in the fantasies of 60 we will both be baldheaded, and I will wear a hat on my head and I will hardly dare to touch his fingers with mine while we walk next door not to let our kids laugh. That’s kind of love. It’s in another dimension. And I’m not in the mood for an earthly relationship. It would be a curse. To put up with a man you don’t love, you just put up with. I’d rather choose a man with whom I can die as an old little girl.

 I’m just kidding.

 Of course, he’s a good guy who doesn’t like you much and with whom you don’t have the deepest connection of the soul, for lack of anything better. You know how they say: "Make it until you fake it." Or was it the other way around? I don’t have to say I’m kidding anymore. I’m an ordinary woman, I have a partner. When you’re deceived, you get all the furies, you invoke the text with promises, with truth, with honesty and virtue. When it’s about cheating on him, it’s like he’s not that bad anymore. I’m not a fan of the use of contracts and promises. Promises and contracts are for employees and people of work, for business partners. Professionally and socially, they are the guarantee of the proper functioning of things, a love plan is the guarantee of failure: all they do is forge relationships, intoxicate them or keep them alive artificially.

 A relationship is maintained through effort and struggle. In your professional life, the contract does not exempt you from work and the need to perform in your intimate life, but most of the partners claim to have guaranteed convenience, comfort and satisfaction on behalf of the contract. How they get married, how they get their appetite for the state on television, for political gossip, to waste time on Facebook and to shred the nerves of the man who has sworn eternal allegiance to everything! The laziness on television in two is, more often than not, the direct consequence of assuming the contract.

 It’s not normal to sit around growing your belly and your back on TV and pretending to be loved because you have a contract, that’s what I mean. And complain that your partner is cheating on you if he’s not so caught up in the comfortableness. Routine is sometimes worse than the cruelty of separation than the cruelty of being denied love---if you fall in love like an ox---it’s a hard disease. The couple’s worst chronic illness is cheating or hypocrisy in the name of so-called loyalty.

 I’m just kidding.

 In reality, I’m the ox that falls in love. I mean, the cow, though ox sounds more clement. Even in the allegories of the fable species, you can still see a wave of misogyny. I’m not getting married because I’m addicted to love and sex… The current diagnostic manuals recognize it as such, the addiction to love and sex is a disease. People like me are addicted to the phenomenon known in popular terms as love, as are some insulin-dependent diabetics, some bad-guys of banned substances and some compatriots of pickles. In our parts pickle addicts are the most numerous and the most perverted, I’d say, because they seem harmless, but they’re not. When they run out of cucumbers they become very irascible, they can even give you a sermon about the frightening truths encoded in the Marxist texts about capital and hidden by the authorities, and, worst of all, they don’t even realize that the lack of cucumbers is the source of the conspiratorial fears that challenge their judgment.
 When your world is dearer and you say you’ve settled into a relationship, that you have a ‘something’ of yours that suits you, you fall in love. And it all blows up. You don’t get married when you know you’re so disabled. It’s like being a bad shortsighted and insisting on getting behind the wheel and taking someone else in the car with you.

 I’m just kidding.

 I’m a lesbian, obviously, you got it. Of course not, lesbians don’t talk obsessively about men. I don’t talk about them at all. I’m, in fact, a banal woman who gets bored to death in a relationship where the most exciting moment is when he passionately kisses her only after scoring the national goal.

 I’m just kidding.

 Sad. I tell myself jokes about moving my mind to what’s on my mind. I’m in one of those situations where you suffer like a dog and there’s no culprit for suffering like a dog. Especially when you consider yourself a cat, the fact that you end up suffering like a dog is humiliating and unfair… And you’d like to have someone to vent your anger with. I’ve already bruised my fist in a wall. I miss all the joints of my fingers when I write. I’m a masochist. That’s it, no. There must be a bad fate, mine. There must be a fate to have something to swear about.

 I’m not kidding.

 I’m a poet. I hate numbers. I love summer, strong tones, high temperatures, I want to feel my heart boiling. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I want peace, I want peace, there’s too much noise in love, too much waste, too much rustling through parallel worlds. I can’t stand poetry. All I want is an intense moment of reality, one that I can be sure I didn’t live alone in my head, that the lips that touch my touch with the same ardour or sadness, that we meet on the same wave of the temptation of candour or the absurd. One moment of reality in two. Definite. Shared. So, I can die peacefully. It doesn’t matter if it lasts five minutes or a lifetime. It’s all about being. You know, it is only peace that matters. Love is too heavy to bear when peace is destroyed. From that point of view, we’re all the same. That’s what we all want. And that’s the tragic and romantic part of it. The cynical part is that there is no wound produced by a vain dream that reality cannot make.

 I’m just kidding. Or I’m not kidding. As you wish.