Encontré aquí una carta que escribió Fiona Apple para explicar porqué cancelaba su gira por sudamérica... Lo entendí perfectamente. Ante el Amor no hay nada más. Comprendo que no sea la mujer que antepone su carrera profesional al amor. Comparto que sea la Mujer que se queda en casa haciendo Hogar, y cocinando al Fuego para el ser que Ama. Conozco ese Instinto. Hay quien desarrolla el de tener hijos... Hay quien desarrolla los dos. Y también habrá quien quizá no tenga nunca ninguno. Cada cual contiene un Universo y su Historia en sí mismo. A veces es difícil comprender, pero siempre se puede compartir en el respeto...
It's 6pm on Friday,and
I'm writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet.
I am writing to ask
them to change our plans and meet a little while later.
Here's the thing.
I have a dog Janet,
and she's been ill for almost two years now, as a tumor has been idling in her
chest, growing ever so slowly. She's almost 14 years old now.I got her when she
was 4 months old. I was 21 then ,an adult officially - and she was my child.
She is a pitbull, and
was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her
ears and face.
She was the one the
dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.
She's almost 14 and
I've never seen her start a fight ,or bite, or even growl, so I can understand
why they chose her for that awful role. She's a pacifist.
Janet has been the
most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact.
We've lived in
numerous houses, and jumped a few make shift families, but it's always really
been the two of us.
She slept in bed with
me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into
her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or
spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of
her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.
She was under the
piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she
was in the studio with me all the time we recorded the last album.
The last time I came
back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she's used to me being gone for a few
weeks every 6 or 7 years.
She has Addison's
Disease, which makes it dangerous for her to travel since she needs regular
injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and to excitement without
the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to
death.
Despite all of this,
she’s effortlessly joyful and playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy
about 3 years ago.
She's my best friend
and my mother and my daughter, my benefactor, and she's the one who taught me
what love is.
I can't come to South
America. Not now.
When I got back from
the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.
She doesn't even want
to go for walks anymore.
I know that she's not
sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of
mortality and vanity, they do not. That’s why they are so much more present
than people.
But I know that she is
coming close to point where she will stop being a dog, and instead, be part of
everything. She’ll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me,
wherever I go.
I just can't leave her
now, please understand.
If I go away again,
I’m afraid she'll die and I won't have the honor of singing her to sleep, of
escorting her out.
Sometimes it takes me
20 minutes to pick which socks to wear to bed.
But this decision is
instant.
These are the choices
we make, which define us.
I will not be the
woman who puts her career ahead of love and friendship.
I am the woman who
stays home and bakes Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend.
And helps her be
comfortable, and comforted, and safe, and important.
Many of us these days,
we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us
feeling terrified and alone.
I wish we could also
appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.
I know that I will
feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for
her, in the last moments.
I need to do my
damnedest to be there for that.
Because it will be the
most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I've
ever known.
When she dies.
So I am staying home,
and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and reveling in the swampiest, most
awful breath that ever emanated from an angel.
And I am asking for
your blessing.
I'll be seeing you.
Love, Fiona