I’d only been in certain parts of the cave: the room with the enormous mattress, a bathroom the light didn’t reach, and the sense of a garden or forest with branches that shook at night. I’d been in the kitchen. Made wild with moss that morning, I decided to familiarize myself with this cavern, but then came a series of thoughts that filled me with fear, among them the proliferation of doors and my inability to decide which to go through. I think he noticed because he put on music that distracted me from the negative thoughts I’d gotten lost in. The music never stopped playing in the cave. I remember it now as isolated, sharp sounds; sometimes those sounds made me cry, other times they could become dirt or water like everything else; sometimes, like that morning, they showed me the path to follow. I saw a photo and asked about the strangeness of the colors in the image, and he said I was born in Russia, I lived in Yugoslavia, and we both laughed because everything suddenly made sense. Months had already passed with messages arriving on Wednesday or Thursday. Are you coming today? And I’d spring to my keyboard. Do you want me to come? Of course, I will. My body was always stiff because the darkness in my room swirled, trying to suffocate me, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that desolate late afternoon landscape, with that last sliver of sun. Get in the car, get on the highway, arrive, pass through the electric gate, past the mechanic, embrace him, allow the kisses to fill my empty body. Luckily, my room is so far away. Let his arms keep rubbing my skin, don’t let them touch, and then, my pussy pulsing from so much foreplay, I’ll say I want you to take me, penetrate me, please. Fragile little romantic clichés sliding down salivated holes. And encountering, of course, the image or the voice or the figure of my husband that appears to me, how could it not, in those substances or shapes formed between bodies. The betrayal or cynicism or satisfaction of vengeance made me laugh or made the caresses feel softer or sometimes, like the music, made me cry. Suddenly the tears would start falling, and the man from the cave would softly pull out, slowly emptying my pussy and, without saying a word, would hug me or stand up and, grabbing the bottle from the floor with his long arms, offer me a drink. A few times he cried with me. Remembering those few times and remembering the trypophobia, the morbid satisfaction that increased my pleasure upon picturing how his back—like the walls—was plagued with open pores I could stick my hands into until I touched the watery substance of his interior, I also remember the visions I constantly had. In one of them, I saw myself standing in front of all those doors. In another, bodies took shape and walked across the ground and through the walls. I remember how I dressed myself, how I undressed myself, how it could be days of dressing and undressing, moments when I saw how bodies opened up space, legs and thighs crossed through the walls and entered the room while we made love, and I was insanely turned on by that proliferation. Legions of bodies and body parts formed between us and in that moment, they were substances of love (damned sentimentality again). The path to follow, which the music showed me, had to be with flesh, with that scattered substance that struggled to enter the room those nights, that fell silent and also had to do with the moss that sprouted from my body and, obviously, with the image of my husband everywhere, like a ghost: an atrophy of the voice and spoken word so that everything I was, all the hatred of myself, all the silence from the sky about to fall would open up or collapse or explode. A portent the day I turned thirty-eight.