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“Sorry for calling you at this hour.”
“It doesn’t matter, you had to tell me. What were you all doing? Trying to save the world, as always?”
“Trying to save me, if you believe that,” I confessed.
“Don’t be silly. You’re perfect the way you are, Axel Nguyen.” She softened up and pinched my cheek. “Someday you’ll realize it, and then you’ll accept all your defects and let in someone else, and they will too.”
“Sounds very nice,” I said ironically.
“It will be.” She looked at me with bright eyes, then I looked away, uncomfortable, because I had the sense that she knew something about me I couldn’t figure out, and that was a strange and irritating sensation.
“We should wake him up.”
Rose nodded, and the two of us managed to get Douglas into the passenger seat of the car. She gave me a kiss on the cheek.
Later I started picking up all my paintings, drawings, and art material scattered all over the floor of the living room. When I finished, I took it all to the bedroom and looked for a ladder. I left the things on top of the wooden wardrobe, not worrying about the dust they’d gather. It was relief. Happiness. Peace.
I went back out on the porch feeling lighter, without that weight on my back. I lit a cigarette and took a sip from the bottle of rum. I decided I would start the next day doing the thing I liked most in the world: getting lost in the waves. I knew that I would try and be happy from then on, that I would take all the things I wanted from life, the things that fulfilled me, and discard the rest, and I wouldn’t feel guilty for it.
And that was how I started a new stage.
89
_________
Leah
I was still painting when the first rays of sunlight appeared on the horizon. I was about to fall over from exhaustion, but I couldn’t stop. Every time I finished a line, I needed to start the next one; every time I added another tone, I needed to mix more…
I turned around when I heard a noise behind me.
Axel was there, his hair unkempt, so handsome that I went breathless when I saw his eyes had focused on the piece of paper on the floor of his living room. I couldn’t have deciphered his expression in a million years. It was full and, at the same time, desolately empty.
“Axel.” I stood up slowly.
“Don’t say a word,” he whispered and walked over to me in two long steps. He grabbed my cheeks and kissed me. A slow, soft, eternal kiss.
He pulled me into his chest while he contemplated the drawing: the explosion of color, the delicate but firm lines, the whole.
It was him. His heart. His heart full of vivid colors, vibrating in the center of the paper. Stars shot from one of the arteries shining on the upper part. Lower down was the water where it floated. And there were glimmers of light and splatters on each side.
“It’s for you.” I looked up.
I hugged him tighter when I felt him tremble.
90
_________
Axel
I said goodbye to her for the last week of the month with my heart shrunken, as though I feared she would never return. Because that wasn’t an option anymore. There are things you can choose at a certain moment, and then they’re no longer in your hands; you’ve crossed a point of no return. She was one. If I turned back, I would find a wall.
But not turning back was complicated too.
Oliver. Every time I thought of him, I suffocated a little more. Maybe that’s why I avoided him. I did it at the end of August and I followed the same formula at the end of September. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to fuck my life up even more. I rejected every plan he proposed, offering a million excuses, and I spent the week shut up in the house, in the sea, cutting through the webs of sorrow Leah had left in her absence. A person can change your perception of situations no matter how used to them you are. The things I liked before now seemed to be missing something.
I should have known it was a bad idea not going to family lunch and claiming I was sick, because, obviously, my mom showed up at my house that morning with an arsenal of food and a bag from the drugstore.
