We’ve been together in places. The places exist, I feel the pores of my skin become Styrofoam pellets and say we no longer exist, how the hell did that happen, María, and the trypophobia triggers a morbid curiosity about the image. And I quicken the pace of my packing. His things go in boxes, and María, now somewhat drunk, packs what I hatefully throw on the floor, wanting it to be swallowed up by the emptiness around which this rage exists.

17

I WALK AROUND the city, I don’t want to drive anymore, everything makes me nauseous. My body crosses a street and cars dodge me. I walk wanting to be the mare in the pasture next to my house, I’m moved by the ease with which she walks on four hooves, with which her eyes observe everything. I constantly lose my balance. I can no longer stand feeling the hole like an orbit, like a movement around nothing that makes me feel like vomiting all the time. Then I trip and fall and someone who sees asks can I help you? But I’ve already gotten up with a skinned knee and stopped a taxi and given the driver my address and, going around the 12 de Octubre roundabout, I see him crossing the street and want to throw myself out and want to cry and stop the taxi and tell him the days haven’t passed, we’re those two pedestrians meeting joyously, those shadows that walked bothered by the cold night madly searching for one another, lashing out at the darkness. I feel like I’m going crazy, I no longer know if it’s him or if I see him everywhere. We’re still them, I want to tell him. It’s him, I’m sure of it now. I see him walk around the roundabout and don’t get out, but I feel like I could attack his body or what’s still mine in that body, something blue. Later, I get home and know something of his must still be here, and I look for it first in the drawers, but I have a stomachache and I throw up and then I lie down on the white tiles and watch the shadows again, I watch his hand closing the door and grabbing my breasts. I watch his hand grabbing the book and the knife. His hand peeling garlic. His hand striking the match. Changing the gas valve. Pressing a key. Time flies there, in his computer keys that make time fly. His hands typing. His hands writing and me always wanting to make them mine. Possession isn’t fucking good for anything, I tell myself, luckily I no longer love like that. I make myself laugh. I no longer love, never loved, period. Because it was all wanting to have his hands. Now, free of that desire, free of that drama and the damned pretentiousness, I’m left with nothing but the protection of this bathroom. The cat walks on top of me, I’m still lying on the tiles thinking about his solitude, the roundabout, that cigarette, that bottle of liquor in the pocket of his green coat, I bite my lip with all my strength until I draw blood, ay, the pleasure of blood coming out of the cut in my lip. My bleeding lip, he, in the roundabout waiting for someone while the epic comes together, imagining scenarios in which his horse digs and cures, sews up wounds. Little hero executing the godparents, the usurpers, those who abandoned us, he does it with a care his heart knows, that’s so natural to him.And he turns to the bottle and hums a song and returns to the epic, the poem, any thought he manages to follow so the vertiginous madness makes him turn back to the alcohol and the poem and put together stories the keys will never see.