Excerpt from "Agosto"

(...)

“What can I expect from now on?” I had asked him.

“I don't know. I just know we're not happy,” he answered. And he looked at his hands. He couldn't look me in the face as he said it.

All of this surprised me at first, then it comforted me, with the possibility of recognising a problem we had to solve together, but in some way I'm unable to explain, I felt it was over. I found myself in that terror I imagine people who have a car accident feel when they realise the end is right there: the swerve, the rolling over, the jolts. I imagine that despite the dread there must be some kind of resignation to death, but at the same time we cling to the possibility, however small, that something happens and, though badly wounded, we go on living after it.

“And what are we going to do about this? How do we fix it?” I tried to save us, clinging to that feeling of still being alive. Of still being together.

“I don't know. But I don't make you happy and you don't make me happy either,” he declared, not without effort, unable to look me directly in the eyes.

“Right, you've already said that,” I replied, refusing to accept it, but he was already far away. I was already alone then; I only realised this weeks later, because he had already made a decision that saved him from me, and left me facing the storm of the days and the hours. “But how do we sort this out?”

Then, for the first time since his sentence, he looked me in the eyes. He fell silent. He swallowed… and said absolutely nothing.

Something terrible happened in me then. An artificial dignity took hold of me and shouted, loud and clear:

“Yago, they're leaving you!! Don't you realise? Stories end like this, here. This is how lovers are murdered, how loves are murdered.”

And I turned violent, from a silence and a very cynical smile, trying to show that deep down I could handle it, that it wasn't that important, that it wasn't that painful.

“Lázaro, I get the feeling you're leaving me and you don't even have the guts to say it. Is that it?” My words were spears that wanted to wound the same way his silences were wounding me. I wasn't yet aware of the torrent of pain that would come afterwards. “Well, I'll make it easy for you. I'll even do this for you.”

And I said it. It came out like a gulp of bile, of stench, of lava, without having thought about it for even half a second, like someone walking down death row certain that they couldn't care less, like someone who keeps playing while the ship goes down.

“It's over,” I said.

And he started to cry… relieved, still hurting.

And Taylor Swift began to sing in my head.

(...)