out-of-office: andrea abreu (english)
Summertime! The international house of literature Passa Porta will briefly close its doors from 20 July to 15 August. We have entrusted the contents of our - and your ? - auto reply assistant to 12 different authors, in various languages and genres. Their out-of-office messages, including their personal reading tips, will be unleashed on you in four episodes over the next few weeks. Follow the series and use your favourite message for your own out-of-office!
Andrea Abreu will be our writer-in-residence at Passa Porta in December 2022.
She has published the poetry collection Mujer sin Párpados and the fanzine Primavera que sangra. She is also the author of Panza de burro (Barrett, 2020), which is translated in more than 10 languages. She is part of Granta’s Best Spanish Voices Under 35 list. At Passa Porta she will be working on Pajaritos peñados, a novel set in the north of Tenerife during the first years of the 21st century and exploring the questions of familial abandonment, co-dependance and power relations between men and women.
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Subject: OUT-OF-OFFICE
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Dear person reading this:
Summer is slitting my heart like a rusty razor. They said this was the season of love, but it can also be the season of heartbreak. The season of jealousy, of reproach, of the mismatched and violent sex of two people who have just met through Bumble, two people who ticked the "I don't know" option in the "what are you looking for" section. I've never had a summer heartbreak before.
In some full clickbait article I read that the cells of two people who love each other end up imitating each other; mirror cells, they call them. I don't want to check if this is true or not. All in awe, I like to think that my cells have to learn to stop looking at themselves in the polished glass of that other person with whom I have been living for the last five years. We are lucky: it's summer and the heat makes us malleable.
If you too are leaving someone, if you too are feeling that your chest has been blown up like a bomb, that a bag of cement has been strapped to the top of your spine and is pulling you down to the floor, you have to know, my love, you have to know that you are not alone. After the quarantine came the pandemic of lovelessness.
Kisses,
Your little sentimental putita
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(You are free to take this message from Andrea Abreu and use it as your own out-of-office message, stating: © Andrea Abreu, for Passa Porta, International House of Literature, Brussels, 2022.)
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