GLITTER BLUES

On the Threshold

By now I’ve lost count of the years spent on this threshold, so much so that it’s difficult for me to even imagine the number of men that have crossed it. It seems like yesterday that my uncertain destiny and my beauty as a young woman led me to this secluded house to search for the future. It’s a strange idea that - to search for your own life between the folds of someone else’s, and yet it is in the coexistence with others that the only life that was possible for me took shape and materialised.
In this way, during all this time, on this worn-out step and in the shadow of a squalid little room, I saw my whole life ripen between one sexual act and another, and all my aspirations soften.
Between a half-smoked cigarette and a hastily guzzled coffee, a large part of the world slipped past my eyes and between my legs.
In every encounter I gave all of the warmth that was requested of me, maybe for a sense of fraternity and hidden commonality in the depth of my heart.

I have been lover, wife, sister and mother.
I have worn the sleazy garbs of the ripped-fishnet-stockings prostitute, and the dresses of a grand lady. I have shouted vulgar words and kept quiet in silences filled with sexual shame.
I have searched for love without ever finding it, in the painful disenchantment of discovering I was made only to give and not also to receive.
How many insults they have thrown at me to keep me at a distance from the life of others, the so-called “normal” life. And how much violence I have suffered in this neighbourhood, destitute and cramped, and then again rare place of testimony to true humanity.
In all these years I have seen vices, base insincts, secret desires unveil themselves to then doze off, to then rise again and satiate themselves once more, in a continuous cycle that was born with man and only with him will die.

But now, now that my beauty approaches the end, that every hope of a different life is buried in the folds of the past, I have only you, stranger, who slows your steps in front of my half-closed door. With desperate hope, I turn to you - to you, man, who needs a little warmth in the rainy evenings, to you who searches for an embrace, a caress and a semblance of love, to you who flees from every fleeting illusion. It is you who I need now, your feeble warmth, your half-hugs, and your part-time love, to heal the deep wounds that cut through my heart. When you will want it, in that moment if it’s me that you will need still, you will find me here tomorrow too, still here, melancholic, waiting for you on the worn-out step of this threshold.

Text by Francesco/Franchina Grasso