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I listen to your heart tell me all its cares, and right from the start I fall into its snares. I now know why you frown and look at me with teary eyes, and why your voice breaks down asking for my advice, as if I were wise. Then you look the other way, to hide your shame, and, in a fit of despair, you mention his name. But, tell me, in all honesty, why shouldn’t I say good-bye? Why shouldn’t I leave you empty? After all, you are only a passer-by.
I sympathize and try to understand, but, as much as I agonize when you are in pain, I am really annoyed, and I can’t persist. I can’t defend your stand. I don’t want to hear his name. He might as well not exist. I don’t care about him; why should I? His love for you is only a game.
As you keep talking irrationally, seemingly from a remote place, you try to grab my hand, as if I were someone else. I shudder, pull it back, and recoil. I don’t want my passion languishing in a wasteland; I don’t want my feelings left in turmoil, by someone who is here only transiently.
When you finally acknowledge me, and ask me how I have been, with my mind filled with anarchy, over which I can’t possibly win, I lie, answering that I am all right.
But what you will never know is, that I stare at you in fear when you grin with glittering eyes; that I follow your hands everywhere, when they sweep across the air; that I can barely make out what you are saying; that I only watch your mouth and rejoice; that I am not really listening; that I am simply entranced by the uncanny inflection of your voice; that I know the texture of your skin, even though I have never touched you, and the wetness of your lips, though I have never kissed you.
I will never tell you about the sleepless nights; that I smile when I see your name in my inbox; that two weeks is a long fortnight, during which I hasten the clocks, until you walk again by my side, next to me, close to me.
Soon you will be done, like others who have come and gone, vanished from my life, without knowing what you did to me; that because of you, I learned to repress my dark side, and let the good one free.
No, I will never tell you these things. Why would I? After all, you are only a passer-by, a temporary life that briefly intersected with mine.
© Story and photograph: William Almonte Jiménez, 2012
