The farewell of two sad minds - [Short Story]

You know, it was very clear that everything was going to fail. We both knew it. However, something very deep pushed us to ignore the obvious, and we continued to consummate that failed love. I was sure this "something" was the deception produced by the temptation of reunion. I didn’t care, I was drunk with all the feelings from my past.

That is why I kissed her. That is why I hid her between my arms, and traveled every corner of that body which could not lie. My lips stole her breath and my caresses followed an invisible path that awakened her moans.

I didn’t want to stop.

She was there, vulnerable. At the mercy of my growing ambition to enjoy a past that I did not understand anymore. That ambition did not understand the consequences or pains, oblivious to all reasoning, it preferred to turn away from reality. However, in my mind was born a contradiction. One part of me enjoyed every action, every moan and sigh, but in parallel I also felt terrible. We were cheating ourselves. I was willing to love her for one night and wake up feeling nothing, but... what about her? Could she do the same? No, I was sure she couldn’t. Her body could not lie to me.

I stopped.

Disgusted by my contradictions and with a great effort, I stopped. Our lips were at a minimum distance, and my breath bathed her face when I asked:

“Tomorrow, when you get up, will you be able to forget everything?”.

There was a pause, an almost tangible silence, of less than a couple seconds.

“Will you?” she answered.

And now that silence lasted almost forever.

Our bodies were still linked under the sheets, like the roots of a tree, while the silence destroyed everything by giving us time to think. A dark sky, without stars and with the moon hidden by clouds, peeked through the window of that dark room. A room where we played with the fibers of a forgotten love. I could not see her eyes, but I knew she was looking at me; I could not listen to her voice, but I knew that in her insides she screamed. She felt uneasy, betrayed, but everything was done.

There was no need for words, we both knew what was happening. Our bodies tasted of deception, our lips of lies. Little by little, as if the drunkenness suddenly disappeared in the middle of the delirium, our bodies separated and became rigid. Among us emerged a deep and invisible abyss that promised to plunge us into the emptiness of madness if we tried to get cross it.

We knew it.

“You know we cannot be together. You know, true?" I told her in a desperate attempt to solve things.

She stayed there, sitting on the bed, with her chin resting on her knees, her arms hugging her legs and looking who knows where.

“My heart feels bigger, as if it were swollen. Why can’t we go back to this? I really want to feel like this again”.

I felt her eyes fixed on me. I knew he was smiling, but I tried not to think about it: I had made a mistake.

I was one step away from hurting her. She had changed a little but she still loved me, I... I just wasn’t feeling the same. I did not love her, I did not feel anything when kissing her, when touching her, when hearing her voice. Nothing. I only saw one body that I wanted to possess, or maybe...

... maybe it was not the body. Maybe it what I was really looking for was the memory. Yes. I wanted to go back to that memory from the past, to our world that no longer existed, to the man that I was in a long past day. Something in me needed to enjoy that one last time and then disappear. I was a different person now, I did not love her, but without looking for her, I had lost myself in that game.

That game represented the last dice, a blind bet to get what he thought was asleep but had never managed to forget.

After so much time, after mistakes of the past, and after my lack of ability to connect the facts, she loved me. I was afraid, for a long time I did not feel. I was afraid of awakening that feeling in anyone but more so in her, that I wanted her. I did not love her, and by not doing it we could both be saved. She didn’t want to save herself trough, she just wanted to win.

Why did she still love me? I didn’t understand. Why would she love me if I barely remembered half of the five years we were together? If in all that time I never looked for it and treated with such contempt our past trying to destroy this image of my memory... why? why? why?

The moon emerged through the clouds, shooting arrows of silver directed to the naked body of her. I could only sigh to see her there, looking at me, like a woundend lion. Immersed in the silence of death, with fine tears rolling down her cheeks.

She gave me a smile and then turned her face towards the moon, the window... the world we left behind at that moment.

We both lost that night, in this absurd game. The silence was our farewell, a farewell that came a year and a half late, but, finally, it arrived. I got up and opened the door and before leaving forever, I studied her for the last time.

Her hair danced in the breeze, her body was curled into a ball, and her curves could be seen under the sheets. How much I loved her in the past, but, I couldn't keep doing it.

The shadows began to grow more and more dark, the clouds conquering the moon until the light became tenuous. Finally when it was completely consumed, I disappeared forever.