In my memories of all the sad nights of my life, that’s the one that hurts the most. I knew sometimes you have to break up with someone when you still love them, but I wasn’t prepared to mutually decide that love wouldn’t be enough after feeling it so deeply. We were robbed of the chance. It was weird, but…when someone tells you they love you enough to let you go, it’s because they can’t give you what you need.
We arranged our life like it was a bulletin board, and we drew the lines so we wouldn’t hurt ourselves. We accepted that it’s not always enough to feel butterflies, and I realized, behind closed doors, what I already suspected in Greece: magic doesn’t exist if nobody believes in it.
We wouldn’t look for each other. We wouldn’t message each other. We couldn’t be friends. We couldn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. “We” no longer existed.
And although my disappointment weighed heavily and I didn’t have enough hands to take on his too, I have to be fair and admit that when we said goodbye, he was more broken than me. What once united us, a mutual recognition of the two saddest eyes in a bar, now became almost like the last wink of our farewell because…among all the people saying goodbye on that sidewalk in front of Atocha station, we were the saddest. We were never going to see each other again.
Sorry if I’m telling it wrong. But we’re often unable to tell the stories of what we love most the way they deserve. Let me try again.
He says he loves me but he can’t make me happy; ergo he already made a decision.
When I realized all the possible lives he was saying no to, I was crushed. It was so curious; they were all a disaster in some way, but I wanted them. I wanted them all. It’s surprising that, in the midst of his postadolescent drama, David had made a relatively mature decision, even if it was for the wrong reasons: we weren’t ready for a relationship. We hadn’t even taken the first step of getting over our last ones.
We spent the night together, though nothing happened the way it had been happening since he first kissed me. We lay facing each other and promised not to hurt each other. Then, we remembered. We recited all the beautiful things that we would keep like a gift between us and treasure until the end.
There’s nothing more beautiful than the time you can no longer reach.
When I woke up the next day, he wasn’t there. When I went down to the kitchen, one of his friends smiled and told me David had already announced that something had come up and we had to leave early.
“No worries. As soon as Jose wakes up, you can go with him.”
“Let me help you clean up,” was the only thing I managed to say.
David was at his parents’ house, they told me as we mopped. It was crystal clear that he wanted it to be swift, to create some distance so we wouldn’t have the chance to regret it, and…I thought that was fine.
We cleaned. We said goodbye. I listened to all the plans his friends were counting me in for and nodded along, knowing I would never see them again. They were trying to be sweet and attentive, but they just made the whole scene even bleaker, and unfortunately, it didn’t dissipate when I got into the car.
David and I made the journey back in silence. David was in the passenger seat, resting his forehead against the glass, and I was in the seat behind the driver, pretending to sleep.
“Where should I drop you guys?” Jose asked halfway through the trip.
David glanced back to check that I was “still sleeping.”
“At Atocha if that works for you. We can figure it out from there.”
I opened my eyes twenty minutes before we arrived, but I didn’t talk until the car stopped. We got out at Atocha as planned. I remembered, just like he remembered, that we had agreed to do this on neutral territory, in a place that wouldn’t remind us of each other and we wouldn’t need to go to that often. Atocha train station. I could’ve told him that I take trains all the time, but we had already broken every promise we had made, what did one more matter?
When Jose’s car disappeared, David swung his bag onto his shoulder and smiled at me.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “Don’t smile. You know your eyes are too loud.”
“Fuck, Margot,” he mumbled. “Even at first sight, you already knew me better than everyone else.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe we don’t need to be so harsh? What if we let some time pass and…? We could be friends.”
I think I was about to falter until he said that last part. I couldn’t be his friend, for fuck’s sake. I had fallen in love with him, and being friends would never cancel that out.
“Goodbye,” I said, stuffing down my tears, and a ridiculous little voice eked out of me, halfway between a sob and a plea.
“Don’t cry, please.”
“I just don’t want to miss you.”
“Me either. Listen, Margot, let’s let it be, let it all pass a little,” he insisted. “Let’s take a breather for a few days and I’ll call you in a month. A month and a half if you need.”
“If we don’t do this right, it’ll be a disaster.”
“It can’t be forever,” he said, very seriously.
“It wouldn’t work.”
“I know.” He pressed his lips together and swallowed. “We wouldn’t work.”
“So?”
“We can be friends.”
“No. We can’t. If you stay my friend, you’ll really hurt me.”
“Fuck.”
“We wouldn’t work, and I can’t be your friend. Getting some distance is the only solution I can think of.”
“Well, I’m not going to ask you to wait for me. Your wings are yours, sad eyes. Only yours.”
I wiped away a tear before I turned and nodded.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he shook his head nervously. His eyes were welling up, but he was hiding it well. “Get my shit together. Find out why the hell I’ve done so many stupid things that I ended up living on a couch is a good place to start.”
“You’re going to leave Madrid.”
He didn’t answer. He kicked the ground with the toe of the Converse I gave him.
“Thank you, Margot.”
“I don’t need to be thanked for sex.” I smiled, trying to be funny.
“No. Not for the sex.” He pressed his lips together. “Thank you for the trip of a lifetime.”
“You’ll travel more and go to more beautiful places.”
“But not with you.”
I hung my head and silently dried my tears.
“Another promise goes to hell,” he said. “You see, Margot? I don’t know how to do it better. But thank you, really, for bringing me back to the real world. It’s not always beautiful, but it has its own appeal.” Finally, his lips curved into a smile. “I’ve been really happy with you. Ours might be the shortest love story never told, but I think it’s also the most beautiful. Beautiful in the way the tiniest things can be beautiful.”
I wanted to tell him it made me furious thinking about him falling in love again and forgetting this tiny love story, but I couldn’t because he didn’t deserve it.
“What about you? What are you gonna do?” he asked.
“Well…” I took a deep breath. “Go back to work. Break up with Filippo. Stop giving explanations and trying to prove things to the rest of the world. Maybe sell my house.”
“It was never our time,” he muttered. “I feel like a little kid. I wish we had met a few years from now.”
“In a few years, I’ll run into you strolling along holding hands with the good girl you wanted to meet.”
“Or someone will say they saw us selling coconuts on a beach, very far away.”
“If I flee, should I look you up?”
“You’ll never flee, Margarita Ortega.” He smiled and pushed a lock of hair behind my ear. “We’ll find each other again.”
We’ll find each other again. Another lie.
“Tell me one thing…I scare you, right? My last name, my job…”
“No. What scares me is not having anything to match your love. Loving you a lot and badly is the thing that really scares me.”
We looked around us.
“We were so lucky to meet each other out of all these people,” he murmured, coming closer. “It didn’t last long, but it was real. We can hold on to that.”
I grabbed his waist. He grabbed mine. We pressed our foreheads together.
“Goodbye, Margot,” I heard him say. “I hope life smiles on you.”
“That’s it?”
“I hope someone loves you the way I didn’t know how. That the whole world’s yours. That you never remember me again. But keep the songs, okay? And if you can…forgive me because this love was too big for me.”
“Goodbye.”
“I don’t want to leave,” he confessed, his voice hoarse, and his nose brushed mine. “But I’m going, okay?”
“Okay.”
We stared at each other for a few more seconds before we melted into a hug. It was just a hug, but we locked away the life we would never have in it so that each of us could carry part of it away.
“Fuck…” I heard him say. “How is it possible that someone invented electricity and I can’t even figure out how to do this differently?”
“If only love were science.”
“Don’t change your number, sad eyes. In a few years, I might have to tell you that I never forgot you.”
David took a step back. I did too. We took a few more. A few people cut through the space we had left between us, and we turned back to walk in different directions. “We” were over; at least we followed one of the rules we had set in Santorini. At least we knew how to respect the most important one.
We turned back to find each other through the crowd at least five more times, but that gesture, far from meaning anything, was just the precursor to the final goodbye. Until we disappeared.
We disappeared.
Us.