12

AFTER THE RETREAT, I woke up with calm in my body and a series of resolutions that over the course of a few days slowed and were completed late, poorly, or never. I started by making a list of my husband’s things that I had to immediately get out of the house. But the list was long, and everything got mixed up. I made the most of going to Guayaquil for a few work matters and sent him a text saying come get your things. Even though I regularly went to Guayaquil, not only for work but also because my half sister lived there, I always went by car because I did not get on airplanes. That time I rode in a van with five other passengers, among them a woman who wouldn’t stop talking about esoteric things. The woman was a witch and said I’ll do a tarot reading or magnet session for you, and when I accepted the former, she swore, looking me in the eye, that in his will to survive, the Arcana archetype of my psyche is the Fool. She said you need to cut the umbilical cord for your luck around love to change. She told me this while the car hugged a curve in which I saw the abyss swallow us all. I only managed to answer with one thing: when I get naked, I love myself. She asked if I’d ever seen my father without clothes. The whole matter made me laugh, but I quickly told her no. I once saw him peeing and another time, only once, we slept in the same bed, and I told her that when he hugged me, I was assaulted by an unfamiliar, unusual calm. I don’t understand why I told her that, but she said I needed to do something about it. There’s nothing I can do, it’s more complicated than that, and love has always been too much for me (the love for that stranger who was my dad). I also thought that reading everything in esoteric terms, as fate that was also my karma, always ended up being easier, just as simple as the psychoanalytic responses I’d supplied since I was little but that still help me make some sense of things, mostly my ineptitude.