The Last Bullet Is for You Read Online Free Page A

kneel down before a statue. I will spend hours in St. Peter’s Basilica among nuns from around the world and young priests dressed in black cassocks, and in their presence I will hope to find some peace. I will murmur endless prayers, I will splash my forehead with holy water and apply it to the insides of my wrists in imitation of Christ’s stigmata, either that or the perfume I can’t wear anymore since you left because I bought it just before I met you, and they say a woman who changes her perfume changes her life. I will load all the cannons to shoot you out of me and write all the words so that one day, sooner, or later, or never, on your deathbed, you will finally hear what I was trying to tell you.
    Give me a heart transplant. Replace my heart with the heart of a woman who does not suffer, a simple heart, a quiet, well-brought-up heart, a heart made for family life, that takes the kids to school and the park, then puts them to bed, a heart that does the shopping the cleaning the cooking, that works and is convinced making other people happy is the meaning of life, with coordinated schedules and not a moment wasted. A heart a bit naive, a bit lethargic, that knows what it has and appreciates it, a heart that beats to the rhythm of a quiet life.
    I don’t know if there is any deeper solitude than a broken heart. I don’t know if my pain is greater than what I felt when we lived together, the suffering you dragged me into, taking me by the neck and holding me under, trying to drown me.
    One day I found myself in the Place d’Armes metro station near the Old Port, one of the places I like most in Montreal, where bureaucrats from the courthouse mingle with Chinatown merchants and tourists, the entryway to the old city, and Notre Dame Basilica overlooking the luxury hotel where we spent our wedding night.
    As I climbed the steps, a flashback shattered my peace of mind. Like a stray bullet to the heart: a memory.
    Eighteen months earlier, we had agreed to meet just inside the turnstiles. I was trembling. I was waiting to see you come into view, your pale beauty on the steps leading up from the platform on the orange line. You were passing through Montreal, it was the very beginning, we were going to spend the day not in bed, for once, so you could get to know the city a little, a day without making love, without touching, it was a game, a way of letting desire build.
    When I saw you, my heart stopped, and my whole body yearned for you. I wanted to draw your skin over me, find nourishment in each of your pores, dive down to the wellspring of your tears, deep in your eyes. I wanted to be your blood, your soul, a quiet beating inside you, I wanted to live in your heart.
    That day, the day of the stray bullet, I saw a sheet of paper glued to a window on Coloniale Avenue. Someone had written on it, “The only way out is through.”
    The weeks go by, a month has passed since I wrote to say I was leaving you, a month without you after two years with you in my heart, in my arms, in my bed, you monopolized all my time, you took up all the space I had in my head, like an ink blot spreading across a sheet of paper. You left a month ago, you left Montreal, and Quebec, and America, that rotten place, but now that I have taken you off life support you refuse to let me go, your letters keep popping up on my screen, plaintive words, sometimes loving, other times violent, words whose sole purpose is to maintain your hold on me.
    Your letters are like the archers’ arrows that flew toward the body of St. Sebastian, and every time I’m afraid I’ll fall back, I fear I’ll surrender and end up drowning with you.
    Once Julia asked me about the ideal image I had of myself, how I pictured myself. I told her, “I’m the head of a group.” Joan of Arc leading her army, liberty on the barricades, I dream of myself as a guide or a female Dirty Harry. But it’s just a dream, a construction. I