“Maya!”
I turned. The worker stood in front of Lucas when he tried toreach me, telling him, “I apologize, but you can’t come any further without a ticket.”
“I’m sorry, Maya. I just…” He stopped, realizing he was just going to try to justify himself one more time, and that this showed that everything I’d said to him was true.
“Don’t go,” he said.
“I have to.”
“Please, please…don’t break up with me.”
“I’m not breaking up with you, Lucas,” I said.
“No?” he asked, clearly confused.
“We’ve never truly been together. All we’ve done is go with the flow. There never was an us. I never knew you wanted there to be.”
“I do, though, Maya. Of course I do.”
They announced my train’s departure.
I took my bag off the belt when it emerged from the machine and looked at Lucas, whose expression was lost, powerless. Nothing has ever made me as sad as that image of his face. But I forced myself to take a breath.
“Stay,” he said again. And I tried to smile, though inside I was breaking into tiny pieces. It hurt: every word, every glance, everything that came between us. Everything that wouldn’t be. My top lip separated from my bottom one, and I could feel it forming in my throat, rising, sliding off of my tongue. A single word.
A word that meant a world.
A word he couldn’t mistake the meaning of.
“Goodbye.”
And then I left him behind.
62
We spend our lives wanting things. Some pointless. Others grand. Some that are simply impossible.
And there are many other things we try to forget.
But the only thing we ever truly forget is the fact that we only have one life. One life that we let pass by, doing nothing but wanting, desiring, as if our thoughts were a magic wand that could just make all our wishes magically come true while we stand there with our arms crossed.
And we take this life that’s been given to us and turn it into an endless wait where nothing happens, because the things that really matter are things you have to create on your own. Yearning doesn’t make them happen, whining doesn’t make them happen, and self-pity, cowardice, and passivity sure as hell don’t. Life owes us nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I was like that all those years, waiting, despairing. Always standing in front of a door waiting for someone to invite me in. Tiptoeing around, trying not to make any noise. Not understanding that there are doors that you just have to knock down, that sometimes you have to trespass. That you can’t expect doors to open for you just because you’ve shown up.
It’s not enough to want to change things. You have to move them, turn them around, transform them into what you need them to be. Realizing that no matter what you do, the world keeps turning. It’s not a carousel you can get on and off of whenever you feel like it. But you can choose which horse to ride.
And you know what? When you change, everything else seems to change, too. That’s the truth. But once you set out on your path, you shouldn’t stop until you figure out who you are. Until you’ve accepted your contradictions, your fears, your desires. Until you’ve admitted that not everything makes sense. But when it doesn’t, you can always dance. I’m serious. Dance. Giving up is the easy thing, but dancing…dancing requires you to stand up.
I don’t remember when I started to change. When I took the first step. And it wasn’t so much steps as it was little glimmers of clarity that opened my eyes like a camera flash and slowly awakened me. I started to belong more to myself and less to others. I became my own superhero and understood no one could save me. I had to do that myself.
Defending myself is my responsibility.
63
I leaned my head on the cold window and watched the drops fall on the glass, spreading out into a thin film as the train left Madrid behind. It ached terribly to think of Lucas, and remorse consumed me inside. We deserved better than the goodbye we’d shared, but it was too late to change it.
What’s done is done.
