sic finit (so it ends)

… our story, which I would like to tell you is as much a creation of the imagination as it is a half-remembered happening. It starts in Barcelona, I believe, behind the wooden green persianas of an apartment room on the edge of Eixample, and settles on the scuffed floor tiles, off-white and beige and deep, deep maroon. In the mornings through the bathroom door flung fiercely open I see you leaning toward the mirror, sink edge cutting a fine pink line into your palm, faucet running crooked, greedy, reaching for your droopy sleeve hems as I never did. In increments, then, the rest of the morning comes: the grating familiarity of someone dragging a wooden chair across the rooftop for clothes-drying, and then the smell of pan, and finally the sound of the sea with the muted accuracy of a conch held to the ear. The rinse cup has fallen again, you call to me in mock irritation, and I pretend to still be asleep in bed, to have not been woken already by the blinding gray rays of dappled dawn through the persianas. The sheets draped over our balcony swell from the wind like bloody lips. I know coffee is ready precisely three minutes after you leave the bathroom, and that you stir the milk five times with the little silver spoon you keep in the drawer by the fridge. And when I finally get up from bed you are halfway out the door and we pass each other in the kitchen like train passengers mid-transfer, no hola and no adiós because the city waiting for you outside never cared for that fleeting assurance of permanence. Then you will be gone, and I will sit alone at the kitchen counter on a stool with uneven legs, rocking myself like a mother would her child, and by early noon the walls will groan with unshed summer heat. I know you understand I am a lover who never asks if you'll come back, and you are a lover who never asks if I’ll stay until you do. I would like to tell you that what happened in that room was a beginning. But I am no ingenua, no fool. What happened in that room was el fin. There was no kiss, no leaving, nothing to love and nothing to leave. And now as I remember the soft, colorless tremble of light between the slats of the persianas, I would like to tell you that our story could well have been nothing more than something born, wretchedly, along the fine line between the real and the imagined, something born from falling in love with love and nursed quietly to life by the aching nostalgia that follows an unlived dream.