I had to wait before writing these first lines, I waited the way you do before you make love to the one you want. That first time after you’ve drawn out the wait, because waiting is as sweet as the first touch. Because waiting is a pleasure, painful and alluring.

I flirted with the words, I watched as ideas gently flickered. I let desire grow, I let it swell and take over everything, the space of the desire I had for you and which I thought I would never get over, one night, at the beginning, paralyzed and with only tears to soothe me.

I wanted to hit the computer keys the way I kissed you, the way I nipped at your face, because nothing could satisfy my need for you, making love to you as though my life depended on it, giving myself to your body, slipping under your skin. When nothing else, or almost nothing, existed. When I lived only to be in your arms. Time stopped moving. It was dense and thick, it wove a cocoon around me, a cotton cradle. I was drugged, abducted by aliens, a member of a cult.

When you left my life, I wondered what parts of you remained inside me, what memories, words, treasures, and trophies. In ancient Rome, soldiers displayed the fruit of their battles. A sword. A helmet. A shield. A severed head.

I wanted to rip out your tongue, cut off your legs, handcuff you. I wanted you to cry out for mercy, I wanted to see you fall on your knees and beg my forgiveness as you cried all the tears you had, I wanted to put out your eyes so you could see again, slap you so you’d finally feel my touch. I wanted to tie you up and gag you and make you listen to everything you had refused to hear, fatal poison pouring into your ears. I wanted to make a martyr of you like in the days of Caesar and his empire, bury you alive beneath my words, inside a mausoleum. I hated you with a passion for making me get over you. I’ll hate you for the rest of my days for making my stomach turn every time I come across a novel you told me to read, a film you told me to see, a section of reality I hadn’t known about until you. I’ll never forgive you for not being the one I loved.

Our love story turned into a tragedy, and only Rome could contain the ruins. Rome, where I fled in mid-summer to perform my exorcism. Rome, the city that has seen it all and lived through everything, suffered every indignity, the crucible of all that humanity could devise in its imagination. Rome, where all pasts and all futures appear on a street corner, in a hidden piazza, with the stray cats in the Colosseum. Rome, the eternal city where I would tell the story of this love I stayed faithful to as long as I could, continuing to love the man I had met, the one I glimpsed and dreamed would continue to live under the layers of suffering, behind the curtains of contempt and salvos of anger, among the ghosts that haunted him and shared our bed. This man was poisonous graffiti, a mad gladiator, an ambitious senator, an amphora filled to the brim with dangerous elixir. This man I left because it was either that or surrender my life to him.

I travelled to Rome to write you this last letter. The longest and most painful letter. The fall of your empire. Our D-Day.