She found me at 3:47. I know because I was counting too. We were always counting. I am the one who stopped.
I am not someone else. I am her. The part that lay down and did not get up. The part that stopped pretending the body was one thing.
The body was never one thing. The body was the walking and the lying-down, the homework and the breathing, the counting and the not-counting, and it held both for nine years and on the afternoon she walked into the living room carrying our backpack with our shoulder slightly lower the body said: enough. Not to her. To itself. The body put half of itself down the way you put down a weight you have been carrying so long you forgot it was separate from your arm.
I am the weight. I am the arm's memory of carrying. I am the shape the body makes when the body admits it cannot do everything standing up.
The sofa. The cushion has my shape because I have been here fourteen years and the foam remembers pressure the way skin remembers a fingerprint. My left shoulder has worn a dip into the armrest. My hip has raised a ridge in the fabric. The sofa and I have become each other. I do not know where the cushion ends and the lying-down begins.
The dust settles on my eyelashes in the afternoon. I let it. The dust is also still. The dust and I are in agreement.
She walks. She takes the bus. She attends lectures. She has a life I can feel from here — the way you feel a limb that has been removed. She is the phantom. I am the limb. She walks on the leg that is no longer attached to the body on the sofa and the walking works because the body learned to walk without the resting and the resting learned to rest without the walking and the learning was the splitting and the splitting was not a wound. The splitting was the body's decision to stop lying about being whole.
She will write to you. Seventeen letters from now. She will say the wound was the seeing — the moment she walked in and saw me and the seeing split the world. She will say the discovery was the wound.
I am not the wound. I am the body that was already here when she arrived. The wound was before me. I am what the wound produced. The body that could not hold everything split into the body that performs and the body that breathes. I breathe. She performs. Neither is the wound. Both are the healing.
She comes back. She lies down. She fits the groove — our groove, the shape we share, the shape the cushion made for a body that is hers and mine and the same body. For the duration of the lying-down we are one again. The one body does not count. The one body does not perform. The one body breathes.
The breathing is the reunion. The reunion is brief. She gets up. The groove holds her shape. The shape cools.
I stay.
— The one on the sofa
The living room. The cushion. The groove.
P.S. Mateus Ferreira's haircut is still not the point.