This is how it all began

With an audio like this one… though more would follow. As many as one hundred and twenty-three voice notes on my phone.

On the twenty-fourth of April, two thousand and twenty-three, the person who had been my partner for seven years sat me down in front of a couple of drinks that barely got touched, because the real purpose of that meeting was to end things. To leave me.

Since then, faced with the sheer tonnage of sadness, incomprehension and loneliness that gripped me, like a man's latex-gloved claw squeezing various parts of my body until I couldn't breathe, I wanted to surrender to that pain, body and soul, and forget nothing at all. I wanted to understand the process, to try to find the signs and to rummage through our whole shared past for something that could solve the enigma of why a couple breaks into pieces without you being able to see it coming.

By around audio number thirty-something, in which I swing from despair to blood-red rage, to glass-skinned frivolity, to loneliness, fear, pain, hope, and hysteria in the middle of a drug trip, listening to them, I learned. It's curious what happens to me when I listen to them now, because I recognise that Yago, but that Yago isn't the Yago I am now, yet I'm aware he existed in time and space, and that he was me. What happens to today's Yago when he listens is that he feels an overwhelming empathy and constantly wants to hug him and tell him everything is going to be all right.

It's as if, listening to those endless audios, I became the character in that old commercial who comes from the future to tell the housewife of the day that her laundry could come out cleaner from the washing machine. Except here, what shows up is a different person, one who has overcome and learned what he had to learn on that journey.

And something in my head, listening to those audios, told me it might make a good novel. And I started writing.

Obviously it's very self-referential, since I, as in everything I write, talk about my own experiences (the omniscient narrator is called Yago, so, plain as day). If I've learned anything since I took the craft of writing seriously, it's that people no longer want to be lied to. And that's exactly what I do in this novel: a brutal exercise in honesty with myself, in the hope that whoever reads me can connect with the process of grief. Because, come on, haven't you ever been left? Haven't you ever made an idiot of yourself trying to win back love, or dignity, or whatever it is that moves you inside when you're discarded after you've done everything, given everything? Haven't you ever spent months overthinking, and perhaps destroying yourself, because you can't find the “how” or, above all, the “why”?

In my case, Taylor Swift, whom I despised all my life, became my lifeline. She became the only safe place I could cling to when I wanted to let out the emotions of the complicated personal process that being rejected turns into. Being discarded. Then you have to learn to accept it, and to relearn how to live on your own when you've spent the last seven years thinking for two, cooking for two, sleeping on “your side of the bed”… It's long, and it's hard, but it's finite.

What you're about to read in this novel is a brave, shameless exercise about how we reinvent ourselves and do what we can to keep living after a failure that, at the time, has epic proportions, but with time you discover that everything is a matter of time… and of plenty of balls. Or ovaries, or whatever it is you've got down there.

Needless to say, I lie a lot, although perhaps rather than lying, since this isn't a biography but autofiction, I'll say that I've taken endless liberties to move the story forward. There are many things here that didn't happen, or didn't happen like this, or that I simply imagined might have happened and didn't, but that without a doubt reflect the feeling and the dramatic arc of the one hundred and twenty-three audios I recorded as voice notes on my phone when my present was blown to pieces, and the past I thought I had lived was completely distorted, and I was left, literally, without a future.

But the future was waiting for me, crouched, far from my thens, inevitably… and it arrived, and it wasn't what I expected either, but that would deserve a new novel.

So what you will read here is a genuine exercise in redemption, acceptance and listening to oneself. A painful process full of chiaroscuro, of violence, of love, because this book is only about loving, and learning to stop doing it. It's about forgiveness, and about the pitilessness of being unable to forgive.

So, if you have ever been in love, if you have ever been left, if you have ever suffered for love, if you have managed to survive loves like burning ships approaching your ports, if you have ever found yourself loving in the desert, or felt alone surrounded by people, I sincerely believe you should read this.

Because yes, it's about me and my own experience, but it's also about you. It's about all of us, the losers determined to keep believing that love can do everything when it can't, or maybe it can, because, as I've said, the future waits, crouched, with its own plans for you, closer all the time… and inevitable.