I have never told this to anyone but I carry an unresolved love on my back. A silent and private love that no longer exists and that no one knew existed. A love that I did not finish, that did not end for me. Sometimes I feel like crying for her and I can’t. I have tried to do it for something else, whatever: for a movie, a song, for my mother’s pain, for that YouTube video in which a boyfriend proposes to marry a comparsa to the rhythm of a Bruno Mars song, by the photo of a dead cat. But it doesn’t work. I do not cry. I don’t cry for her and I have a feeling that it’s a bad sign, that the tears will accumulate vertiginously, hiding in some part of my body, perhaps in my elbow or little toe. Perhaps in the middle of a memory or on top of the sum of all my pain. Maybe one day, when I hurt my elbow on a door or when the corner of the bed bursts against my little toe I will cry like there is no tomorrow, I will throw myself on the floor to finally hurt her, without being able to get up from there for an hour, two hours , five hours and a half. Sometimes I think that if I never cry for her, I will never forget her or wash her name off her body. And sometimes, most of the time, I want it to never happen. May she stay here forever, even if she becomes a pain in the elbow.
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to write about it without success. The words bump into each other and fail to exist outside of me.
I don’t want to name her because loving is naming and what I feel for her is not the opposite of love but it’s not close to love either. It’s a foreign feeling. Rage and gratitude. I can’t write her name without burning my hand or think of her body without regret. I wish it weren’t like that and say that everything happened for a reason, that maybe that story was part of my being/essence/voice that has always spoken to you, but it’s false. I am not able to speak of the many ways in which he broke me forever. I am not able to explain how after her it was hard for me to understand that love is not necessarily the first love. That falling in love is and will always be what happened to me next to her, but that loving is better. It is in what I do not write about her that I keep some of my deepest pains: what it feels like when love is not able to touch the other, the part of the body where rejection hurts, the taste that remains in the mouth when you see the person you love kissing someone else. I am not able to talk about her because to talk about her would be to talk about me.
I once dreamed that a woman approached my face and, instead of giving me a kiss, sucked all my words out of my mouth. The words weren’t coming from my internal organs, they were on my skin, and as she sucked, they piled on top of each other to make their way from my legs to my lips, sweeping away everything in their path. At the end of the dream I could speak perfectly but I could never say what I really wanted, I was only able to enunciate wrong versions of my thoughts. Stealing someone’s words is the best revenge, I thought when I woke up.
I didn’t realize it, he told me, now that you mention it I can see it but I didn’t realize it. How could it be her? The signs were all there, they invaded the air, you had to push them with your hands to be able to cross the place. You had to move them to get from the living room to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the kitchen and, by the time you felt like going back to any space in this tiny house, they had already crowded together again and were growing faster and bigger. violence than the insatiable weed in the tight and forgotten jungles of Guiana or any other invisible country. The air was heavy. When she slept, if she could, she felt a tightness in her chest. It’s asthma, I thought.
It’s the anxiety. It’s the job. It’s just that many days have passed without me writing anything worthwhile and when that happens I start to feel half dead inside. Now I remember that Wednesday perfectly. The sheets on the bed, A’s mom’s necklace hanging around her neck, and the spoon she had used to mix the coffee lying on the floor. She slipped out of his hands and left her there. It was our invisibilities that brought us to that place, the little deaths, the succession of little deaths, the things we didn’t say, the things we didn’t know how to say, the feelings that were there but we didn’t know how to conjure up. It wasn’t a sum of things, it was the space between those things. It wasn’t the things we lost, it was not knowing that we were losing them.