SHE

She

She adjusted her long, beautiful, straight, brown hair. Nothing seemed to bother her, yet deep within her gaze lay a bitter pain she still hadn't fully swallowed, the death of her father. This pain was reflected in the temperature of her hands, in those times she allowed me to caress them. The temperature of her fingers when she was sad was different; she asked me to hold her, she asked me to love her, but she could never say it with her voice. I loved her so much that she appeared in every reflection, so much that there was no hiding place, no refuge in my thoughts. "Why do you love me?" she once asked me, her voice frank. The reasons were so vast that my thoughts clouded; I didn't even know myself. I had to be reductionist: I simply love you, and that's it. There's no need to explain; that is, no word, phrase, book, or treatise exists or ever will exist that can truly pinpoint why one loves. Hormones, chemistry, programs, pasts, memories, theories, laws—finally, in the face of all this, love shakes your life and leaves you on the periphery of what you once believed yourself to be. And when you want to return to yourself, to what you knew, everything is in ruins. That is the feat of loving: it allows you to see yourself diluted, erratic, vulnerable, and it allows you to build yourself in a larger, new, refreshing space. Loving gives you the chance to choose to be born again, it opens a path to an abyss, to a void, which mysteriously offers you a new world, a new timeline. You left, and you left me in a completely different world, one I am still getting to know. I kept your gazes, and you kept my sketches; I kept loving everything, and you kept all my moments. You left.

Enrique Zervin