Hold onto my hands
I feel I’m sinking, sinking without you
And to my mind, everything’s stinking
Stinking without you

And in the night, I could be helpless
I could be lonely, sleeping without you
And in the day, everything’s complex
There’s nothing simple when I’m not around you

And I miss you when you’re gone
That is what I do
Ba-ba-by
And it’s going to carry on
That is what I knew
Ba-ba-by

The Cranberries — When You’re Gone

A lot of time passed through a tiny crack in my every wall. I hadn’t slept for two days, so I didn’t knew the color or taste of my favorite dreams anymore; the senses that governed my recognition of the world were completely drenched in fear, like a mariner in a sinking ship, devoted to (so, fearful of) the water that bled as final air. For more than two days, I had only two tablets of a chocolate bar and half of a burger patty, and barely any water; the mariner was stranded without food in a deserted island, with only memories and wind and a violent ocean. I had not taken my pills, but throughout all of the absences of the human necessity, I had no heart to beat anymore. I had hurt the love of my life, so my loveless life had no energy in its dizzy legs, and I hated my any words and my any bodies, like a sandcastle so fragile and weak that a breeze might take it.

More time passed. I said some words to her, saying I’d be willing to think about her offer, the one I stormed out on. I didn’t want to feel like I was building a sandcastle with her again, even if leaving for her best was an option from the beginning; i wanted to build a strong house for our feelings. I suppose that, for her, I am a person that leaves. In the mirror of that, any feeling means nothing if you’re eager to leave it behind. If you’re easy to walk away from someone after going through so much, why would she trust that you wouldn’t do it if you were together? Why would she trust that what you felt was genuine?

I asked my sister to buy my medication the previous day, but she was feeling unwell and overslept, and I was a mess, so I had to endure it for a new day. The next day, I felt like going outside would make me feel a little bit better. I was waiting on a response from her, and that would leave me anxious throughout the whole day. So, I went outside to buy my medication.

It was cold outside. The breeze was pretty nice. I took a bus to a drugstore a bit further away from my house, so it was a nice moment to listen to some music on the bus. But I just couldn’t really listen to what I had listened to through these last days.

A day before, on a colder morning, I was up in my terrace, playing and replaying When You’re Gone by the Cranberries, while crying uncontrollably. Dolores’s voice breaking in my ear, that sad melody weaving my body. But the worst part was the lyrics. They felt like something she’d write about me. Well, back when she loved me. I was unsure if that was the case still, which made it worse to listen to them. Dolores delivers such a kind type of sadness, such graciousness in her misery, it reminded me of the kindest of persons, and what I did to make her cry again. The same could be said about I Don’t Want to Talk About It, a song by the band Crazy Horse: Painful words out of her mouth, another song she wrote for me.

So the trip was sort of silent. People around me were watching the French match against Senegal in the World Cup. Everything out of the window was grayer than gray, and the company of the strangers felt as if it was stealing my breath. I got there, I bought my medication and left. I was feeling a bit better in the real world, so I decided to take a walk to a McDonald’s near me. I was still without much food in my body, so maybe I could get some fries.

My body was starting to get really weak near the McDonald’s, as memories started to come back. I was in a McDonald’s about a week before with her. I remembered the way her eyes seemed like they were shining because of the Sun in her face. I remembered feeling a bit more courageous on that day, but still, her face was so intimidatingly beautiful. And I would tell jokes and she would laugh while looking at me, and I would be sure that there was no happier vessel of perception brought from any being in the world than anyone being looked by her. And as for my eyes, I remembered I had to fight to keep them on her as I spoke to her, because she made me incredibly shy. I told her the previous day that a friend scolded me because I kept eye contact for too long with him, and then with her I couldn’t look in her eyes for long without blushing and looking away. She was making me so weak. As I told any friend ever since it happened, there is no doubt: those days were some of the happiest days of my entire life. The space her smile would create inside my heart would always grow as an empty hole as I spent time watching it, as I knew I would have to leave in a few days. But to be there in the presence of her happiness. I felt like it was my life duty to always keep that smile up, no matter what happened, no matter what I had to give up. I failed.

So it hurt to go to that McDonald’s then, and sit there in a table alone, without her to look at me. I decided to buy just an ice cream cone and go my way back to some trees in the back of the restaurant. As I was ordering, she answered me. She told me she made up her mind, and didn’t wanted to go forward with that feeling. It was all because I treated her poorly when she was opening up to me. As she was telling me the ways in which we could work in the future, I was so upset I became an angry mess. She just couldn’t be by the side of someone like this, not at this sensible moment in her life.

That moment made me remember a whole lifetime.

A friend once told me that he feels incredibly bad that he “turned into a person” only after his girlfriend appeared in his life. Because of her influence in his life, he started to become “decent”, he figured out who he was and found himself. I said to him that I believe that every man needs a woman in his life (sometimes, many women) to make him a fully fledged human, while a woman has to walk through that path on her own, developing her stronger sense of self while evading men who are looking for her to feel complete. I just never met a man who was as strong and independent as the women in my life.

Everyone I met or developed a stronger relationship after my mom passed away tells me that it’s impossible to imagine me angry or mad. That was not the truth before that. I used to be an incredibly angry child. I would fight with anyone. I had so much anger inside of me, that every time that I was mad like this I would start to cry, because I was flooded with a feeling so intense it couldn’t get out of my little body. As I became a teenager, something shifted while staying the same: I would always fight and hurt with my words. In my old internet group chat, I was famous because I was the only person in there who had fights with everyone in the group chat that were so intense that made them leave. I was increasingly upset because of my mother’s disease and my teenage love life flailing its wings, so I would take it out on anyone who would appear in there.

After my mom passed away (and I started to take medications a month later), I became a much more passive person. I was always calm, passive and pacient, but before it seemed like there was an agitation in my soul that couldn’t share space with other people. Now, things were trying to be stabilized. I always had all the traits people praise me for today back then, but there was this anger in me that made me hate me for the things it would watch me do, and I would hate myself and my mind.

And then I met her. She was definitely the person that made me figure out who I was, as was the girlfriend of my friend. Everything I am and aim to be, everything I praise in other people, everything I look for in a person, everything that I consider good in myself, everything that I know to love… Everything passed through what I saw in her. The reason I love kindness in people, the reason why the most important aspect in a lover to me has to be how interesting she is… It was all after I met her. I failed in the moment that I didn’t make it clear to her that anything she would ever praise me for was always something that was born out of meeting her — strong was her impact in my life.

And then, she saw that angry kid in that one night. She discovered why I can never call myself kind, why it took me so long to start tolerating my existence. Because I’m always so deathly afraid that that angry kid is still there, just one lack of medication away. Because I can’t control what I think sometimes, and I judge harshly what comes out on the other end. Because I hurt the people I love the most. That’s just what I do sometimes. And I bet she was an angry kid as well. But she never hurt me like this. She was never unkind to me. That is why she is kind, and I’m not.

As I received her message, I sat in the table outside of the McDonald’s. I let the wind wash me, and the rain that was threatening to pour could hide any tears I could give. I went back to my house, as I had some final words I wanted to say to her.

I felt like it was 2024 again. I was crying a lot while writing a goodbye letter to her, crying while writing about the wonderful moments we spent together on the trip. As soon as I was finished, I wrote to my sister, too. She was in the other room, but I had to write to her because I was too teary to speak. I apologized to her again, because a similar situation happened at the beginning of the year, when we stopped talking for a while. I apologized for having her tolerate the mess my feelings were all these years, and I told her what I should’ve said a lot sooner: that I also thought she was incredibly kind, and she also deserves people to be kind to her. She appeared in my room after reading my messages, and I asked her to hug me. We didn’t grew up hugging each other a lot; it’s a relatively new thing for us. But when she did, I just started crying. And she held me closer. And I needed that.

I apologized to my brother, even though he probably got confused by it. I apologized to my close friends from the group chat mentioned earlier. I think that the hardest part was realizing that something like this could happen again in the future, and these words will just be meaningless. It sort of makes you want to keep everything still in a picture. I still have her picture with me by the side of my computer, and I glance her smile every few seconds while writing this text. She will never know how happy she made me, and I will never know how hurtful she felt. I told her I was always love any secret part of her being. I told her to open up to me. And I was weak and I was mean. I was unrecognizable to her, as I treated her being as incomprehensible.

She answered me a few hours later. She seemed upset, still, but at the end, she seemed a bit more forgiving. That is just a tiny fraction of her kindness to me, which I will never, ever deserve or ask. I said some final words and went to bed.

When I woke up this morning, my grandmother looked at me as I opened the door to my room. She looked so upset. I just opened my arms and gave her an air kiss, while asking for a hug. She opened the biggest smile ever. That’s another side of my unkindness, that I made an old lady so incredibly kind so incredibly sad because I wasn’t sleeping or eating for days. We held each other and I kissed her head. She didn’t knew how I was feeling, but she had an intuition that I was better, which was right.

As I sit here writing this, many memories come. I remember one day where some teacher from my school told my parents I was very peaceful. I remember having a fight with my mother on her last year on Earth, and making her so upset she told me I would not cry at her funeral. I remember her anger sometimes, but I also remember how I could get angry with her in moments where she was kind to me. I remember my lack of patience, but I also remember my patience. I remember long queues and thoughtless winters. I remember asking for an ice cream cone in a little shack in front of a church we used to go to where my mother was born. I remember watching a movie with this one girl and all I could think was “when is it time to grab her hand?” I remember how soft her hand was, and how she could never give me an ounce of her grasp, to not hurt me. I remember her soft lips, and us laughing when our teeth would clash in a kiss. I remember that the girl I had my first kiss with told me I was kissing too fast, and that kisses should be slower. But then, I remember this girl and our first kiss, and while I was thinking “I have to be slow, or she won’t like it”, she kissed me with a passion that brought a certain speed as a spice, because she was wanting to do that for a long time, which made me threw all I knew off the window, since I also wanted to kiss her forever in that passion heat. I remember the look she gave me after every kiss. So serious. I remember what I would tell her every time we would end a kiss. I remember that, for some reasons, in moments of intense feelings for me, my mind blurts out something without me noticing, and if the moment lasts long enough, my mind just makes me say it all the time. I remember that, in my first kiss, what I said was “I’m scared”, and that made me notice a fear of commitment I didn’t knew I had. I remember when my mom died, and all I could do was cry and repeat “this is so strange”. “This is very, very strange”. I remember that being all I could say while crying on that day. But I remember kissing this one girl over and over again and all my mind could think of saying was “what a view”. Those moments are my most genuine moments of expression. When my mind does this, it’s the most sincere thing you could ever get out of me. So all I could think of was wanting to say that, because I couldn’t believe the person I was sharing the bed with. “You are a dream”, I would say, too. “You are magical”, I said twice. And I remember saying that and she would not be able to look at me afterwards, since it made her so shy. And I remember that smile she gave me. I remember everything twice in every second. And I will remember her until I can’t remember anything else. For a while, she made me the happiest man on Earth. And all I could do to thank her was to hurt her in a period of her life where she was already suffering. Oh, tears. Stop coming. Oh, skies. Promise me I will see her again. Promise me that I can make her laugh again. Promise me that kiss with teeth. Promise me I can have the best sleep of my life by her side. Promise to me that the time will come where she will feel safe around me again, and no one’s going to hurt her anymore. Promise me she will take care. Eat well, sleep well. But promise me her love. And all we built to be as endless as she is. I hadn’t had a chance to remember every corner of her body and spirit, so let me have this memory in the end. She deserves happiness. She deserves flowers. She deserves kindness.

I can tell by your eyes
That you’ve probably been cryin’ forever
And the stars in the sky don’t mean nothin’ to you
They’re a mirror

I don’t wanna talk about it
How you broke my heart
If I stay here just a little bit longer
If I stay here, won’t you listen to my heart?

Crazy Horse — I Don’t Want to Talk About it

About the text: May’s playlist post will either be complete at the end of this month and posted alongside June’s, or in the next days. I was contemplating on never posting on this site again after the events of the last days, but I think this place helped me understand and blurt out a lot of the complicated feelings I felt the last time this happened. We’ll either have a lot of posts in the next days or none at all. I feel better since I think she doesn’t hate me a lot now. I have a lot to say, which will have to be said here if we never speak again. I have healing to do, and I’m sure she has as well. But sometimes I wish I could just text her and pretend I didn’t push her away. Just tell her I miss her. Just tell some jokes again. I need some time to think. But here’s the problem. I always think better when I’m with her. I don’t want to lose her ever again; that’s what I knew, but couldn’t understand. She deserves a love that stays with her not through words, but actions. I don’t know what to do now, with this love that will never go away. With this feeling that she felt that she’s easy to abandon, after a love that was so strong. I can’t stop the world from turning, now. All I wish is a signal from her, once again, that things are fine. All I wish is to be the happiest man in the world again.