Dri's voice in my head told me I couldn't betray a dead person. I knew he was right. If anything, I'd betrayed the young man by taking advantage of him.
"I love you, so much, that some days I can't even breathe because of how much I miss you. I can't stand being in the house knowing you're never going to come through the door again, and at the same time, I'm terrified of leaving because that would mean putting you behind me. I'm so scared."
I jumped when a hand touched my shoulder.
"It's only me, son." I looked up to see a concerned Sebastião.
"I didn't mean to overhear, but I was walking past to see my Margarida and saw you crying. Do you want to talk?"
I got up from the ground, placing the daisy I had in my hand next to the rest of the bouquet.
"Come on, let's go for a walk," he said.
I followed Sebastião as he led me out of the cemetery toward the Luís I bridge over the river Douro. I smiled as he stopped in the middle. On one side we had the colorful houses on the Porto riverfront and on the other side scattered across the hill of Gaia we could see the many Port wine caves with their big signs.
"You're smiling. I see the walk has already done you good."
"This is where Rodrigo proposed to me. He said that on one side we had the city that was our forever home and on the other, we had the Port caves, meaning our love, like Port wine, would only get better with age. He was right. Every day with him was better than the day before."
"That's not true, is it?"
There was no malice in his voice as he questioned my statement.
"No. Some days he was downright difficult to be around. He thought he was always right and couldn't stand when he was challenged. Not even when that came from me. But damn, I loved how he stuck to his beliefs regardless of what anyone thought. He had such presence, and man did he ever fill out a suit nicely."
"Margarida was very intelligent, but she was a terrible cook. She wanted to be a teacher, but her parents thought the place of a woman was in the kitchen. When we were married, she went back to school, and whenever our parents came over for dinner, I did all the cooking. Till the day the last one of them died, no one ever found out that it wasn't my Margarida cooking dinner."
The glittery water of the river framed by the buildings around it was mesmerizing. I'd never get tired of this view.
"I thought we still had a long time together," I confessed. "He was my first boyfriend, my best friend. How do I carry on without him? I accepted a job in Lisbon, and I'm not sure I can do it now."
"I can't tell you how to grieve, Vítor. God only knows, some days I think I can hear the sewing machine in the spare room where she used to make the costumes for the student plays. But I can tell you that keeping still is no life for anyone. If you carry on and cross the bridge, you might just find that things from the other side look just as nice. Sometimes there's enough time in our life to live on both sides of the bridge."
Sebastião patted my back and smiled.
"I will look after him until you can visit again. And that young man that visits him every day. Leave him to me."
I was speechless as Sebastião walked away from me in the direction we had come from. Had Mateus visited his dad's grave? Was he doing it on a daily basis? Maybe there was still hope that he'd one day forgive his dad for what he’d done.
The other side of the bridge was calling for me, so with Sebastião's words in my head, I decided to go for a walk. Maybe things wouldn't be so bad after all.
