Then she asks what I miss most. And I answer, again, with the first thing that comes into my head: what each of us was next to the other. Or how he was able to put together all that scatter that I am—all the pieces came together around him. And I continue, already a little drunk and carried away: the strange sisterhood in which I sensed incest like a remote, exuberant force, capable of anything, like finding a lost affect, the primordial, like a permeability or an internal magnetization that was only possible with his gaze (poor sentimental education of mine, full of telenovelas). In the center of that love, beyond disturbance, was an error. And what makes his absence unbearable is the imprint of that mistake, I say. The vestige of what he put together and that’s now lost again. When you open a drawer and find your pencil. Or when you grab your backpack and, in one of the pockets, you find a piece of paper and boom, your handwriting. Or you grab a book and there’s a note. A note marking an important line. And you read the line that says when the truly beautiful are together and wonder why you underlined it and put two check marks next to it, a signal it was doubly meaningful. Then you go back to being pieces of a broken world. That now broken world endures in me like remains that move slowly, awkwardly. The parts try to go back to the place they occupied before us, but now they fly, lost; they’ve strayed from the door of some house, of some place, of all the places we were and that I now dream about. The dreams about him are the worst, I tell María, returning to the task of packing up his things. Dreams are mirrors, they’re animals, again they’re holes, and they’re the two of us telling each other it’s always a relief to be together, the loss has been unbearable. Getting up after those dreams is impossible. I keep inhabiting them and find myself saying now I understand how people tolerate death or discomfort or fetidness or mistakes because it’s all better than dreaming we’ll be together again only to wake up and suddenly feel the pain of reality. They’re spaces, I say, and start another list. María watches me, fascinated.

They’re advisers,

they’re departments,

they’re forests and earth,

they’re four planes,

they’re nights,

and it’s also water,

it’s another country,

they’re hotel rooms,

they’re cars,

they’re beds,

they’re fields, and

they’re restaurants, and

they’re bookstores

it’s a solitary tree in front of our window that drops its leaves while we, naked, recite the sadnesses of our orphanhood to each other

it’s an open horizon that can be a park or a garden or the surrounding areas of a lake or a cemetery, we both walk and see a deer, we’re paralyzed before the beauty and before the cruelty of that animal that eats another animal and we watch its bewilderment and we grab each other’s frozen hands, I tell him I buried my brother here, and he cries with me, even though we know we’re crossing a foreign land, far from everything we know and that holding hands is the only possibility for survival (holding hands is humankind’s best invention, fucking hell).