Memories

I arrived at his door carrying depression and one too many beers. I wasn’t looking for sex. I was looking for someone who understood why I couldn’t face the mirror anymore.

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.

When Camila closed the door with her suitcases, I never imagined that half an hour later a stranger would offer me his company and know so much about my wife.

Mariana was nursing the baby by the fire, unaware that Catalina was watching from the other side of the cabin, a new heat rising under her skin.

Dawn found their naked bodies on the tangled sheets. Mateo opened his eyes and tried to reconstruct, hour by hour, how that stranger had ended up in his bed.

Whenever he closed his eyes in that armchair, he returned to the harbor loft, to the hands of the only man before whom he stopped pretending to be someone else.

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.

I had told my mother and friends that Luca was my boyfriend. What I hadn’t expected was to end the night inside a park dragon while the storm drowned out our moans.

I recognized him on the platform after twenty years, and we boarded the same carriage. By the time we reached the third station, his hand was already where it shouldn’t be.

Half past three in the afternoon, no knickers, and a very clear plan in my head. What I didn’t account for was who would end up speaking to me through the door.

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.

The toy was still on the nightstand, staring at me like a witness. And my body remembered everything she’d taught me just hours before.

One random dawn I turned on the camera and, without knowing it, opened the door to the only woman who learned how to make me tremble from six hundred kilometers away.

On the first afternoon, she stepped onto the terrace with the towel hanging by two fingers. Below, there were people. Above, neighboring balconies. And she lit a cigarette without rushing.

We hadn’t spoken in six years when his message lit up my screen. That tent, that shared blanket, still makes me tremble.

A month went by without hearing from him. When he finally wrote, I knew that night I was going to give him something I’d never dared to give before.

I thought she wouldn’t come. But the doorbell rang, I looked out the window, and there she was, with that innocent face that had kept me up for years.