You know what...

i've stopped begging for light to the off lamps in your eyes. I got tired of being the fire that warmed your winters while you were learning to call it smoke. I was a barefoot tree offering you nests, shade, fruits, roots. And you passed through my branches like autumn passes: beautiful, inevitable, ripping everything off. I loved you. My God, how I loved thee. I loved you with the blind faith of shipwrecks confusing a lightning bolt with the promise of a shore. I loved you with the old-fashioned madness of who opens windows in the middle of a storm just to hear a name. And now I look at my hands. They still have soil to bury and dig you up from my memories. Because forgetting you has been digging a grave in the same place I wanted to build a house. Sometimes I think love doesn't look like fire. The fire at least consumes and ends. Love is more like a thorn of glass: it remains hidden, silent, and only a caress of memory is enough to bleed again. There are nights when your absence feels in front of me. He doesn't say anything. There is no need. He has your voice saved in his pockets, your perfume hidden between your fingers, and the perfect cruelty of the one who no longer loves. Then the room was filled with ghosts. I see the chair where I imagined your returns. The window where I waited for your footsteps. The pillow where the shadow of your hair still sleeps. And I understand that loneliness is not being alone. Loneliness is continuing to put a plate on the table for someone who will never dine with you again. Loneliness is listening to a song and finding out half its notes are still pronouncing your name. Loneliness is to survive the person who still lives inside you. What a sad fate of mine. Be an ocean and die of thirst. Being a shelter and being homeless. Be a poem to someone who never learned to read me. Because you never knew everything my silences kept silent. You never saw the wars I fought every night so I wouldn't come running to find you. You never heard the walls cry when I spoke your name in the dark. You never knew there were whole sunrises holding my chest so my heart wouldn't fall to the ground. And yet... if tonight you would knock on my door, if you would bring in your eyes a single naked truth, if you would drop pride like a tired leaf falls on the river, maybe I'd break again. Because there are cursed loves that learn to live hidden in the wounds. Like sleeping wolves. Like knives underwater. Like broken bells that keep ringing in the memory. And it hurts. It hurts with the weight of trains not returning. With the sadness of empty seasons. With the slowness of letters arriving when it's too late. It hurts like it hurts to rip a piece of soul out and find out it was shaped like you. But the most terrible thing... the truly terrible ... is that after all this collapses, after so much winter , after so much ruin, there is still a part of me that when I hear your name, Lift up your head, spread the wounded wings and believe, for a moment, that heaven could come back. Ana Ocaña