Ria, The Beloved

I am twenty-seven and she is worth eleven years of my life. By the time I hit thirty-two, she will be half of who I am, and from that day onward she will mean more.

And more.

Expanding. Like the universe, which is probably the size of my heart. Until, perhaps, I can no longer remember. After all, old age is the only cure for this affliction called memory. Of her. Of who she was. Of who she still is to me, even when — especially when — the days are unkind and the nights more so.

I guess it is true: I loved her since the first day I met her, and that was a long time ago.

I do not know if she will love me if I was someone else. Sometimes I wish I was Paolo Coelho so that I can understand how it feels to sit by the River Piedra and weep. I wish I was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, too, at least for a day, so that I may know the unshakable weight of a hundred years of solitude. Or I wish I was Plato so that I might convince the girl that she is the missing half of my body and soul, or that we are the ones we have been waiting for all our lives, and that we should have stopped searching the day we met, though some nights I wish I was her and she was me. By then, she might finally understand.

But I am just another dreamer, and god knows she has been in my dreams like a fixture. Always there. Never going anywhere. Because maybe that is where she rightfully belongs — a place where I find myself in when I close my eyes and leave the restless world. Sometimes I wish I’d just close my eyes forever.

The hardest part of waking up is realizing that she is probably in love with someone else. And here I am, bleeding the words from some kind of wound that might never heal.