“You know you and I would make the perfect couple,” I murmured.
“We already are the perfect couple, dummy.”
“We should make one of those promises to each other like they do in the movies: that if in ten years, you haven’t met the man of your dreams and I’m still going out with the same dickheads, we can get married and grow old together.”
“Sounds good. What about sex, though?” he asked.
“Sex is overrated.”
“Only a person who’s never been laid properly would say that.”
I narrowed my brows and smacked him on the chest, and he broke out laughing and pulled me in close. I loved his laughter, I loved his arms around me. He was my little boy, my refuge.
People walked past us.
The world kept turning.
Time advanced inexorably.
The immensity of the universe enveloped us, and in that infinite space, my problems and I were nothing more than an invisible dot.
It was terrifying, feeling so insignificant.
6
The next day, my grandmother changed her torture strategy and decided to ignore me, pretending I didn’t exist and taking it so far that at midday, she didn’t even set a place for me at lunch.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt.
Matías had told me before that what Olga did with me could be considered abuse. But I never wanted to listen. That sounded repulsive to me. Sure, my grandmother had been harsh, but she did it to motivate me. She pushed me to work hard because the world was competitive and if you wanted to make a name for yourself, you couldn’t settle for being just good.
The problems arose when I started to have dreams of my own. Wishes that were different from hers and that I ended up sacrificing for her sake. She always ended up getting what she wanted, and I just went along with her to avoid arguments.
Maybe from inertia.
Maybe from force of habit.
Maybe because Matías was right and I had always been afraid of her.
My grandparents were the only family I was close to, the people I had grown up with. When I was born, my two uncles, my mother’solder brothers, had already moved out of Madrid and only visited for the holidays. I was never close to them or their families.
All I had was my grandparents, and the possibility of losing them had terrified me since I was little. If it had been so easy for my mother to leave me, wasn’t it possible they could do the same? But now that fear was lessening, and my dignity, my pride was taking over. I knew I didn’t deserve to be humiliated. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and for six months now, my grandmother had made my life a hell of reproaches and nasty comments.
From the dining room table, Carmen watched me with pity in her eyes as I helped my grandfather eat. I smiled at her: I didn’t want her to worry about me. I went to my room, feeling an immense emptiness creeping in through all my pores. I turned on my phone and the notifications rolled in.
I was surprised to find a few messages from Sofía, which I erased without reading. It was too late for her to try to act like we were sisters.
An unknown number had written me dozens of times. I opened my messages and immediately got a bitter taste in my mouth. Antoine. I erased all of them and blocked that number, too.
I saw several missed calls from Natalia that made my heart race, and I sent her a message asking if we could meet that afternoon. She said yes, and we agreed to see each other at six at the company building. I needed to talk with her as soon as possible and let her know that, despite what we’d both hoped, I wasn’t going to get better. No more projects. No more plans. Or not with me, anyway.
I lay in bed, put on my headphones, and turned on Spotify, closing my eyes. A song played, then another, and I let the music fill me, losing myself in the notes, in the melody, and standing and moving to the rhythm without even realizing it.
Without being self-conscious.
Without worrying.
I let myself go, and I flew. I rose higher and higher and my arms shook and my body twisted. My heart quaked and my lungs contracted.
