Love After Love

Prologue

Fifty-six nights ago, I met my ruin on the top of a twenty stories tall building. After graduating, your heart fills up with the need to live your life, now that nothing restricts you from drinking or even smoking. I have never been one of those, but I knew my friends and I would be parting for different colleges soon, and with passing time it would be even harder to get them together, and so I decided to attend the rooftop party, as everyone referred to it.

I had barely arrived and was looking for my two friends who possibly and probably were already drunk, when I stopped for a second to admire the stars on this clear summer night. It was then when he appeared, claiming I looked beautiful under the moonlight, saying I eclipsed the very stars. He was tall, and he looked like that young poet we all have dreamt of at some point. I was naive, and took in all his beautiful words without knowing he had memorized them from other poets, without knowing they were not produced by his admiration toward me like he claimed.

When being with him, I forgot all about my friends who surely needed someone to look after them. I forgot about time, about the party, about everything around me. I was only interested in listening to him talk, and I swear I could have listened to him for hours. Maybe I did. The only moment when we stopped talking was when we decided to go get some coconut water, since neither of us felt any interest in drinking alcohol that night. By the end of the night, right before the men in blue came to stop this disaster, we exchanged pone numbers and agreed to go out someday.

When the police arrived, those of us who could escape did. Even if we were clean, we could get arrested just for coming to the party. I remember seeing him as I ran down the stairs; I remember seeing his stormy blue eyes framed by those square glasses briefly. I remember too how that gave me the impulse I needed to run the last flight of stairs, which ended in the back door of the building. I reached the place where I had parked my car and drove quietly back home, although the thoughts swarming my mind were anything but quiet. I could not stop thinking about those eyes, or about that deep yet melodic voice. It was hard to believe he had only lived seventeen years by the way he talked, as if he had lived a million years.

I guess it is easy to imagine what happened after; it is a cliché love story after all. He went on complimenting me on my supposed beauty, my gaze, my smile. I started falling in love with him, although maybe I only fell in love with his words. Well, it is often said the ending is the worst part of a story, and this is no exception. 

Forty-eight nights after the rooftop party, I was in my kitchen preparing myself my favorite summer drink, coconut water. In the middle of august, it doesn't really get more refreshing than that. It was then that I had the brilliant idea to take a walk around the park behind my house, and maybe it was the universe that wanted me to do it, because what can a girl want more tan to admire the stars in a warm, clear night when she is in love? And then I saw him. Oh, I have wished so many times to erase that memory. I found the man who had just hours before talked endlessly about my hair reflecting the sunset's colors kissing another girl who clearly wasn't me. She was prettier, taller, the stereotype of the perfect cheerleader, though I never cared about who she was. She wasn't me. 

For an instant, it felt like there was no oxygen left in the world, therefore when I tried to take a breath they noted my presence. I could not take it for a second more, and so I ran back to my house, directly to my room. He tried to follow me, and I closed the kitchen's glass doors right in his face. I cried for days and nights, trying to make me feel better be thinking how empty she must have been inside, even thought the one feeling empty was me. The thought that would not leave my head was the one all those who have been cheated on have, "What did I do wrong? Why was I not enough? Why her?"