Memories

No one had ever taught me to desire myself. That morning, with the house empty and the light coming in through the window, I taught myself.

She got up angry because he was watching soccer and didn’t even notice her. She had no idea that bumping the table would ignite the whole afternoon.

The first night he slept at home, my mom’s moans came through the wall. At nineteen, I knew nothing would ever be the same.

The suitcases still unpacked and, under one of the beds, a stack of old magazines that none of the three siblings could stop staring at that hot afternoon.

Each mark the ropes leave on my skin brings me a little closer to the abyss. But it’s the only thing that silences his voice... the voice of the man I let die.

I met her on a reading app. Black-haired, tall, intimidating. I agreed to be her submissive because I never believed a woman like her would look at me twice.

I went back to the reunion for one unfinished high-school kiss. I never imagined that night, with the bottle spinning, would end with three of us in the same bed.

Two beeps, a lit screen, and his wife’s voice filling the garden: “Everything that’s happening to me… everyone needs to know this.”

You blocked me everywhere, so I’m writing by hand. I need you to know why I did it before I leave this city forever.

The first time he kissed me in that parking lot, I ran away. The second time, I didn’t make excuses: I let him corner me against the same block wall.

Midnight in the empty station. Iván leaned in to kiss me, and for a second the world was simple, until the ghost of the other voice returned to interfere.

That afternoon she came home in black, painted her lips in the mirror, and left saying she was sleeping at a friend’s place. It took years to learn where she was really going.

I thought she was telling me those stories to make me jealous. It took me a while to understand that what was turning me on was something far darker and harder to admit.

It started with private jokes and ended with screenshots neither of us should ever have shown the other. She liked girls; I liked her audacity.

When I felt my sleeping son’s body pressed against my back that dawn, I did not move away. Something older than me chose for me, and I knew I no longer wanted to stop it.

I’d spent two months pretending to go to the office while really wandering aimlessly around Barcelona. That night I dialed the only number that could save me.

When I held her fever-hot against my chest, I remembered the nights her mouth knew mine as if she’d been learning me for years.

I joked that she should sleep with me that night. I never imagined that after midnight, my bedroom door would actually open.

The first afternoon I went to help him, I thought I’d only be doing his exercises. I never imagined I’d end up discovering with him everything my home had denied me.

She knew he watched her too long, trying to hide it. And, as always, she decided not to let it go.