I knocked on his front door three times before he answered. He was always one to leave you waiting. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I always lingered.

He stood proud and lean against the doorframe. Pianist hands tucked inside his pockets, he left me wondering if he was still wearing the black ring he always carried in the forefinger of his left hand. His dark hair shut his eyes like a curtain blocking out the view. It had grown so long since the last time I had looked at it. I wondered how many nights clung to it already.

He looked surprised of having me standing outside his door one Saturday at five pm. I think it was the first time he was intrigued by something I had done.

He smiled mysteriously, in that secretive way only he could pull out without looking overdramatic.

I smiled back dubiously trying to decipher what lied behind that grin. In the two years I had known him I could never knew what he was thinking when he smiled at me in that way. Today it shouldn’t have been any different, but somehow, I didn’t know why, it was.

He took a step backwards and invited me inside.

I took a step forward, uncertain, unsure, scared. When it came to us, I was never the one to take the first step.

Being plastered right before his living room made me feel weird not because I had never before been inside but because, somehow, unexplainably, it felt like I had.

“I won’t take long” I was the first to speak up even if I had no idea what I was going to say next.

“It’s okay” he half-whispered, half-answered with that indescribable voice I could never really understood.

“Do you want some coffee?” he offered politely even I knew he couldn’t make a coffee for the life of him.

“I won’t take long” I repeated even if he had heard me the first time. I rephrased that sentence more to myself than to him. I needed to remember I was just passing by rapidly even if all the muscles in my body ached to remain attached to his living room forever.

I had told him I wouldn’t take long and yet I was taking my time in exposing the reasons I was there. I wanted to take it all in; the rusty couch, the crumbles of food in the table, the ashtrays with five burnt cigars. I wanted to gather as many fragments of his life as I could. And I couldn’t understand why even after all this time I still wanted so desperately to comprehend that world that was never meant to be mine.

He paced rhythmically against the carpet. He was always so goddamn coordinated.

I sighed dramatically against the air that smelt of cigarettes and summer.

“Do you want to sit?” I barely didn’t catch what he said, but that was nothing new. Every time he spoke it seemed as if he was speaking to someone else aside from me. As if he somehow was having a secret conversation with someone else.

I shook my head as I grasped the essence of the books leaning against the wooden shelf. Tracing my fingers around the corners of the paperbacks; Borges. Nietzsche. Voltaire. There was something so intimate about letting my fingers linger in between the pages of the novels he loved more than me. It was almost as romantic as making love to his philosopher’s soul. I had convinced myself that maybe if I touched them long enough I would be able to see through the pages of the covers the fire of his eyes that he never let me saw, or get to understand the softness of his fingers he never let me touched.

“We hadn’t talked in so long, how have you been?” I didn’t know why he always had this urge of being polite when he didn’t mean it. I knew as well that he knew I knew he didn’t care about what I had to say about the life he make so blatantly obvious he didn’t care to comprehend.

“I’ve been fine, thanks. How are things with Ayah?” I hated the name. I hated the name and everything it stood for. Every time I brought myself to voice it, it felt as if my gag reflex was going to turn on immediately. I hated her. She was, in a great part, the biggest reason why he had drifted apart, which explained why he had picked her over me.

“Fine. We’re fine” was I really that selfish for hoping for them to break up? Was I really that cruel for wishing he was choking in his own misery? But life was not a cliché and I was not the princess who was to save him. It was never in my cards to be the one who changed his life.

“I came to bring you this” I said, obliging myself to retreat from the corners in my mind I had put so much effort into blocking.

He knew what it was before he even saw it. He knew what it was because it was the only thing he ever expected from me, the only promise I had offered of the other many promises I had left unsaid. He accepted the gift without hesitations and I wasn’t surprised he had nothing for me. Being left with my hands empty and my heart swollen had stopped hurting longer ago than he would have guessed.

“Thank you”

“You’re welcome”

Silence enveloped us whole as the constant threat that defined our relationship. It shouldn’t have been awkward seeing as it had been there from the start. It shouldn’t have stung. It wasn’t that we had nothing to say that hurt, but, on the contrary, the fact that we had so much to say to one another that we couldn’t bring ourselves to speak. Silence, for us, was a harsh hush of unspoken words of lost wishes of wasted years. And just there, in the mist of that fleeting moment of realization, with the weight of the silence against my shoulders I became aware for the first time there were so many things I should have said to him when I had the chance. Maybe it would have made a difference after all, but one cannot live life of assumptions. Memories are not built of maybes just as reality is not built of dreams. We were still waiting to be born. An in that instant there was nothing I wanted more in my life than for us to be born. So for the first time in my life I spoke “I liked you.”

Silence

“I liked you, and you knew.”

Nod.

“Everyone knew”

He shrugged, it was the first time I had seen him speechless.

“I liked you too”

I almost had to laugh. I wanted to laugh so hard until there were tears in my eyes. I wanted to laugh until my throat was sore and bleeding. I wanted to laugh until every organ in my body hurt. I wanted to laugh in order to collapse.

Instead I remained silent.

“You didn’t fight for me” it was him this time. His voice was like a murmur inside the roaring sound inside my head.

“No, I didn’t” I admitted dignified. At least I still had that left.

“Why?”

“I’m a coward”

“Yes, you are” somehow, funnily it didn’t sting the honesty in which he said it. He had never been rude to me before which made it all the more difficult for me to hate him. I realized I wanted him to be rude to me, I wanted him to tear me apart this time consciously. I needed a reason to hate him in order to stop loving him.

“Yes, you are, and now look where we are”

I was getting angrier by the second “But we are nowhere! We don’t even exist!”

“We could have had!”

“But we didn’t Marcus, we still don’t, after all these years.”

I don’t know why he did it. Maybe it was because he didn’t know what to say to that. Maybe it was because he didn’t have an answer and he was too proud to ever accept he was lost. Maybe it was because of that, that he held my hands in his. They were warm like a fire burn.

“Can you feel me?”

But I couldn’t.

When I didn’t answer, he ventured to look deep inside my eyes for the first time. He was inviting me inside his soul at last. It was all I had wanted for so long that now that I had the chance it scared me what I would encounter. I had imagined this scene so many times in my head already; picture the black tone of his pupils, grasping the softness of his hands. Looking deep down his bones, scraping into his deepest fibers. Only in that mirage, it had been different. In that mirage what I had seen was the tormented mind of someone who was so lonely and was praying for me to save him. But right there, in reality, all I could see when I looked inside his irises was my own reflection.

“Do you see me?”

But I didn’t.