That Year
I want to write about the year we don't talk about. It's more important than the credit we give it. I think that year full of uncontrolled insanity is the basis of all our disembowelment. Once in a while I go back in my emails and read the messages we used to send each other back then. You traveled a lot for work, months at a time. I was left behind in the apartment that your father lent us, alone with few friends and only a few hours of classes a week. I was not a full time mother like I had been for four years before, I had time, I had passion, I had needs, I had a heart full of wounds that wanted to be filled. Unfortunately you couldn't fill them all, neither could the entire city of Buenos Aires.
I sat on the bathroom floor one morning, with the blinds closed and my head pounding. You were calling from some tropical island where you were traveling with a group of 14 dutch girls between the ages of 19 and 22. There was a girl in our bed, still asleep with her black hair around her face and I told you. In a tiny hungover voice, I told you. There´s a girl in our bed. You sighed. I don't remember anything else about that conversation, only the guilt.
I doubt I told you everything, I was scared, ashamed, spent. It didn't matter because four years later you read all my journals, probably because I couldn't open up to you. There was so much shame that year, so much confusion and excitement and free time I didn`t know how to spend. I would have liked to be a calm and centered person with you and while you were gone but that didn't happen, that's not who I was.
There are things that year that got stuck in the luggage of life as the years passed and when they finally came out, it was the greatest fight of all time. It lasted for months, about as long as my stupid affair had lasted. The lamest and most uncomfortable illegal relationship I've ever been in. It was a waste of time and emotion. A few months ago a friend sent me a promotional video of new restaurants in Lima, halfway through he pops up talkin about his new seafood restaurant in his crispy white chefs uniform. I hadn't seen or heard from him since the night 11 years ago when he had threatened to tell you everything if I didn't do it first. He told you everything anyway, with dates and conversations had. Not only had I betrayed you, I had been betrayed by him as well.
When his stupid fish talking face popped up in my screen I gasped, I choked, I went to the bathroom to throw up and stopped watching the video altogether. My disgust lasted for a week, It was a horrible week. I wanted to die, again.
That year full of after parties, and drugs, and a destroyed apartment was the only thing that gave me enough experience to work as a makeup artist for the next ten years but it is also the curse to our backbone. It left wounds that I think are still not healed, neither for you nor for me.
