OUT-OF-TIME LOVES
‘Don’t say anything! Here and now! You don’t know how the story will unfold. And we, as humans, we’re bond to change and make mistakes.’
I made a mistake, that’s for sure, but what was it? I did it, I – the one who’ll never learn from her mistakes. Is this the moment I should really stop? Stop and promise myself I’ll never make another mistake again? Oh, but I’ve tried this before! Total failure!…
As for him… Oh, so many mistakes… How long am I going to fail with him? And, most importantly, why? Why do I keep failing with him? The eternal, philosophical, (apparently) simple WHY.
Why, I mean really, why? Why I keep doing the same mistake over and over again when it comes to him? What was wrong with our friendship, our complicated relationship, our declarations, our pathetic, teen dramas, weren’t’ they anything else but a huge mistake?
What exactly made me come back to him? Why was it that the first thing which came into my mind in the morning was his name? What kind of a power was he taming me with? And why was I so helplessly tormented by the miseries of this relationship?
Strange muse for an afternoon spent in a food court, while waiting for a friend to finish her trip to the observation deck in Burj Khalifa. I’d done it twice, that’s why I chose to wait for her over a coffee. To the right, a grinning couple were sharing some chicken and fries.
The food court was full of women in black. As if they were all mourning my stupidity and my weakness. So, if they’re in mourning, I must give them a reason to be in mourning, and bury this mistake of loving him. It’s been lasting for too long. My friends were sick and tired of my telling its story. I have to do it now, otherwise I’d be a forever pitiful, pathetic, old-fashioned masochist.
He entered me and I didn’t say anything. As if it was the last time I’d felt something, and by keeping quiet I could hold that feeling within me forever. But I smiled. Cause I had a vague feeling that happiness was real. As real as a bubble in a glass of whiskey. Or a throb in a vagina waiting for a fuck for all eternity.
My heart skipped a beat for a second. A second while epidermis mingle, humors become one, blood passes the sheets, the mattress, the floor, the concrete, to the ground floor, through the underground parking, and even deeper, through the layers of the earth, as far as the other side of the globe. Sour smell, of life pouring backwards, from startle to immobility, hold your breath for a moment… a moment as long as an eternity.
We went to Fujeirah and we spent a beautiful afternoon. It felt we had gone back in time. David and I shared a beer on a terrace, while listening to Modern Talking. And I hadn’t thought of him but once. I remembered him all immobile, after all his blood had left his body and not a single drop had remained to flow from him carotid. That infinitesimal moment when the razor shone and cut… Playfully! And I didn’t think of him. I was just wondering and hoping he wouldn’t start to stink from the back boot of the car.
It had been a week. One week ago we had made love. For the first and the last time. I had been waiting for that moment for six month, can’t remember how many days and nobody cares how many minutes.
The terrace was close to the sea. And it was so peaceful there, with a chill breeze surrounding me like two loving arms. So quiet…
We finished the beer and we drove back. David drives carefully, some nice music pours from the speakers, it’s warm and electrifying, and I don’t want the drive to end.
At one point, we got tricked by a sign and took a wrong exit. It’s dark, Desert to the right, Desert to the left…
David keeps driving, on the right a sign warns him that the road will end, still he keeps driving, as if he’d want to enter a new dimension, and with all the dark around us this really feels like twilight zone.
We reach the end of the road. David stops the car in the sand, and for a moment I worry we won’t be able to get the car out of the Desert.
‘Come, take the shovel’, speaks David with a black voice.
We dig in turns, and the sand is stubborn, black and quiet. As if it agrees. Who’s asking it, anyway?
His body is heavy. And black. And quiet. To me it’s nothing else but 200 pounds of betrayal and temporal misunderstandings. You loved me when I didn’t love you. You loved me when you loved another woman too. I stopped loving you after I have cut your throat. Details.
I start crying violently. For no reason, if you ask me. I crumble down in the sand, and the sand invades me, it enters my eyes, my soul, my panties…
David is very punctilious, it flattens the sand and it looks as if it has never been a hole there.
He picks me up, he cleans the sand off my clothes and my soul, puts me in the car and he drives back on the twilight road.
It’s warm in the car, my elbow touches David’s and it’s comforting. Stopped by the Desert, other cars with their lights on. Other bodies to be buried in the sand. Other out of time loves…
TranslatingRitaSophie 