Memories

We went up to her room with our hearts racing, knowing her parents were asleep on the other side of the hallway and that any noise could ruin everything.

I used to go downstairs to comfort her when she cried. What I didn’t know was that her tears would lead me to her neck, her skin, and the realization that I wanted her differently.

Years had passed since I’d last seen her. When she sat across from me at that bar and placed her hand on my thigh, I knew the night wouldn’t end as my cousin imagined.

When the hallway lights went out, the moans started on the other side of the wall, and I knew I’d never forget that week at my aunt’s house.

For two days I had been lowering the curtains to hide what I was doing. That last morning I decided to leave them open, and the woman in uniform stayed planted on the other side of the courtyard.

When she kissed me in front of the car, I knew it wasn’t the alcohol. It was everything she’d kept quiet for ten years finally spilling out of her mouth.

Tomorrow marks eight years since that last night with him, and I still wonder whether I was brave or just selfish to ask him for that.

The doorbell rang after midnight and I opened it expecting pizza. It was a stranger with a bottle in his hand and the truth about my wife on his lips.

I bit the pillow when he said her name. And then everything I had hidden for years began to unravel between the sheets, blow by blow.

The tide brought me notebooks and pencils the same day everything I thought was solid between Tomás and me began to crumble. I had no idea what I would use them for.

I hadn’t seen her in two years when she came to my door broken, feverish, with a name that wasn’t mine on her lips.

When she leaned in to say goodbye at the door, her mouth found mine and everything I’d buried for years came rushing back.

We talked for weeks without sending each other a single photo, until she told me she wanted to be the first to do it to me, in person, in her bed.

I got out of the taxi without looking back. It was eleven at night, my wife was still screaming my name from the landing, and I only wanted to disappear from the world.

I started the diary because nothing was happening in my life and closed it because everything began to happen. Between signed hospital shifts and a boy who knew how to wait, I was never the same.

I thought nothing could be worse than letting him drive me home. Until he shut the apartment door and I put my bag on the couch.

I innocently asked whether I’d been her best lover. Her laugh was the first sign I shouldn’t have opened my mouth that night.

I kept their numbers in the drawer and knew I would never call. But I also knew my husband would never touch me the way he had before that night at sea.

I went up the stairs, opened the main bathroom door, and there she was, in the tub with the baby, barely covered by a thin layer of foam.