Memories

She knew she was alone in the flat. So when she took down the black box her friends had given her, she was no longer thinking about the notes waiting on the desk.

I got there forty minutes early, turned off the engine in the underground garage, and then the smell of that dawn came rushing back to me like a current.

I started with mirrors on the floor and ended up discovering my naked neighbor from my terrace. Each fleeting glimpse became a drug.

It took two days to arrive, and for those two days I could think of nothing else. When I finally opened the box, I knew that night I was going to know myself in a new way.

I waited for the house to go silent so I could turn off the light, open the drawer, and find out how far I could go on my own.

I promised myself I’d never miss him again. So why is my hand between my legs tonight, with his name stuck in my throat?

My roommate was asleep when he knocked with a bouquet of freesias. I opened the door in a sweater and barefoot. That night I promised myself I’d never let another man into my bed.

The drawer was jammed by a handwritten notebook. Inside were the most intimate pages of a stranger and his eight-year lover.

I was sixteen, the house was silent, and a word had sat in the margin of my notebook for months. That night, at last, I locked the door.

Her white nightgown with lavender flowers barely covered her thighs, and I knew that night I’d undo it all, button by button, in silence.

I never thought a scene in a game would ignite something between us, or that that same afternoon I’d have his taste in my mouth and his name looping in my head.

I pressed her shirt open against the wall in the vestibule, kissed her neck, and knew I wasn’t going to ask her to stay, even though I was dying to.

I was nineteen and had never dared to explore myself. That afternoon, with the house silent, I decided to imitate what I saw on the screen.

At sixty-four, I thought that part of me was dead forever. One phone call and a carrot were enough to prove how wrong I was.

I left them by the washing machine like just another garment, but the moment I brought them to my nose I knew that woman had planned everything from the start.

I’ve been sleeping alone for months. But when insomnia hits, I end up with her on top of me again, moaning my name like before everything fell apart.

It was ten in the morning, I was alone at home, and I could only think about his hands. Today, at last, we’d be alone, and I needed to calm what he’d awakened in me.

The son of a bitch had used her own body as inspiration, and now she was trembling in front of the screen, not knowing whether what she felt was anger or desire.

She thought about him all day. Now, under the sheets and with rain tapping the window, her hand begins to trace what her imagination had already promised.

I stepped into the shower to wash off the day’s exhaustion and ended up on the floor, the stream between my legs, calling your name under my breath.