3:33 a.m., March 17, 2024. My mother calls to tell me that you left.
I wake up one minute before the call, after a late night with a guy from Hinge; good sex, and very little intellectual connection. I refuse his invitation to stay over, somehow knowing that that night, you are going to die. I wake up abruptly, as if someone had lifted a weight off me. Just before that, I see a fox at Hermanplatz. An animal that will become our code for the mystical signs my mind has invented.
We had been expecting your death, let’s say for a couple of days already. You asked me to leave Chile, to continue with my life, and you promised we would see each other again.
*There is no deeper pain than that of promises that will never be kept*.
Your face repeats itself in my mind. Your laugh too. But I forget your smell. And I look for it on Sundays, in other people’s cigarettes that I barely know how to smoke. Nicotine was the poison and sometimes I find calm in your own poison.
Two years have passed and I still see you everywhere: in the books of Susan Sontag, in those of Walter Benjamin that I can barely manage to finish. And in my mother’s face. That’s where I see you the most. In that invisible space between her sad eyes that look at me while she smiles.I cannot quite grasp what it means to lose your only love. Your first kiss, your first sex, your only love, lover and best friend. Your political companion. The father of your daughters. Your only love. I cannot even imagine what is to have an only love (?).
In that space between her eyes and her smile my grief co-habit. An ambiguous grief. A grief that rises and falls, and falls more than it rises when I start writing. When does such a deep sorrow fade?
I wish I didn’t sound exaggerated. I wish I didn’t bore my friends and temporary lovers with the same subject again and again. It sometimes seems like I have nothing else to talk about except love, sex, and death. I’ve become a basic bitch in literature, but even the exodus is no longer the subject for me. Is your death.
I’ve spent two years talking about you. I’ve spent my whole life talking about you. And I’m living a grief that is anything but linear. I’ve spent my whole life talking about you. And this grief is quite schizophrenic, though not as much as my mother’s. I move from laughter to tears, remembering your best moments and those when you lost all dignity, unable even to go to the bathroom, to eat, to look into my eyes. Your screams asking for Morphine. Fucking cruel pain. When does such a deep sorrow fade?
What a shitty thing aging is. And here I am, 37 years old, acting like I’m 27, sleeping with 20 year-olds boys that I will not remember in a few weeks. thinking the mobility of my body and the speed of my ADHD brain will last forever. Age is a concept, I could repeat. I could even tattoo it. But the truth is that one day everyone reading this will die. We don’t want to talk about it, but is there. An elephant in a room.
Since you left, I’ve clung to life in an absurd way. I tattooed the hour of your death on my body, and I’ve become the queen of knowing how to let go in a calm way that I never experienced before. But the truth is that this pain barely fits inside an iPhone note. This pain is nothing like the death of grandparents, or divorces, or even the looming threat of war, though I won’t relativize that. This pain is as unique as your sermons, your scoldings, your way of seeing life through a lens. Like the notes I found this summer where, for the first time, you spoke about your absent father, where you said you felt like an orphan, and that you felt no love for someone who was absent. You were angry, as your death sometimes makes me feel. An absent father you became too.
On Sunday I started smoking with my friends. I found you on the way home, six glasses of wine deep, with the smell of nicotine in my mouth.I didn’t kiss anyone, but I laughed remembering how you used to scold me for being a teenager who kept losing all her phones. Today it feels tender. The grief is the same, and at the same time, different.I still see you everywhere.
I cried for you ten times in Algarrobo this summer. I still carry you in my neck, in what they called reliquary, a poetic way to hold some fragments of your body. A body that no longer exists, a body that no longer holds me, a body that is nothing but a memory
And although I am at peace, I still wonder if you read my letters when I’m awake at 3:33.
Miss you, love you, whenever you are. Whenever you are not.
