I say my grandmother caught me masturbating one day and told me the devil was going to appear if I kept touching myself like that, and I believed her, but I kept doing it until my mom also caught me and told me I’d go crazy. That’s when I stopped.

I say I went to the psychologist early; I think at ten years old, that was the norm for a daughter of divorced parents who masturbated. I cried frequently and without any apparent reason, in addition to how difficult it was to sleep, but that, I imagine, was because of my grandmother’s snoring.

I say my brother was always the person I loved most in the world, and he died. I was going to tell him the details of the burial, about how before the image of his coffin lowering into the earth, I felt like they were ripping out a body part—my thorax: that’s where the sensation of a wound under my breasts comes from. But I stay quiet and don’t say anything. It’s still something I can’t talk about, though I believe I did expound on some of it in my letters. The loss became the realization of what I feared most. I, fearful all my life, experienced the impossible loss with my broken flesh and the hope of recovering that safe love, embodied in some man as well as the certainty of the return of imminent tragedy (that I also don’t say).

I say the two people I grew up with are now dead.

I say my grandmother died squeezing my hand.

I say when my brother died, I started skating. I’ve never been able to get in the water, it’s always terrified me, but I loved navigating frozen, concrete water. I tell him: my first skates were a gift from my dad; they were white skates that I later exchanged for the red ones I still have.

I say still and the image of my skates in the closet comes and there’s a place for me and the thought calms me.

I say I loved the speeds I reached with the skates.

I say I then started skating on pavement and my best friends were those I met through skating. Including María.

I say I was happy when I made love for the first time—it was with a skater—but then the sadness that overcame me almost killed me.

I say ever since then I’ve had the certainty that pleasure is directly proportional to the unease of the moment in which the hole becomes empty again. And more than making love, what I like is what happens before and never what happens after. I talk about nakedness and about the enthusiasm I feel when I fall in love, the greatest enthusiasm I know.

I say when the skater broke up with me, I wanted to kill myself, but instead I offered to the immense painting of the Madonna that hung over my grandmother’s bed that I’d stop eating until the son of a bitch came back. The anorexia lasted a year, it didn’t kill me, but since then I’ve associated heartbreak with hunger.