I Had To Put A Continent Between Us

Aiah & Luis

“You’ve never even been there!”
“I don’t have to go there. Everyone knows it’s cold there! At least you’re rich and you can afford it. The gas bill must be sky high.”
“It’s not like it wasn’t cold here. It’s still cold here.”
“It’s not Chicago cold. And I remember how cold it was here thank you. You know what I mean anyway.”
“And I’m not rich either. And don’t say that you’re like you’re poor or something.”
“What are you talking about, I’m barely making it? Between the guber, my mum, baba, and my surprise sister, I barely have enough money for netflix and more than two nights out a month.”
“You don’t even go out.”
“Yes, I do!”
“No you don’t!”
“I do go out. I have, I have some friends still.”
“You haven’t managed to alienate everyone?”
“I keep trying, but they all keep hanging on. I can’t shake em off.”
“Isn’t the guber in the states too?”
“Ha!”
“‘Ha’ what? What’s the ‘ha’ for?”
“Henriette, spoiled him. Her and Dolores. He’s dropped out of uni, full scholarship to study in that sinking ship, and he quit talking about, ‘I realised when I got there… yeah, I’m just not a school person’. Figure that out when you have the diploma in your hand, then you can say ‘fuck you’ to academia for the rest of your life. Now he’s back with Baba and they’re ‘making music’ or whatever, and he’s got some, some local boy, that’s what Henriette said, in plain sight. Baba doesn’t care. He let’s them come home, he welcomes it. Says it’s better for them and their friends to come to the compound where they’re safe. I can’t believe it! Twenty something years he didn’t speak to me! Twenty plus years and he only talked to me because, because of the guber.”
“That was the first ‘incident’, I guess.”
“‘Incident’?”
“Yeah. The first thing we, the first really hard thing was with you and your dad before we moved here.”
“The first of many. I can’t believe we’re back, back here.”
“I almost don’t recognise it. Where did everyone… nevermind.”
“So how is he doing?”
“I really try, I work so hard not to bring him up in our messages and now being here face to face...”
“And I work so hard to, to include him when I can. He’s a part of your life. So we have to talk about him because it’s more awkward if we don’t.”
“He told me to… to say hello if I, if it felt like I could do that.”
“Well hello Job. Hello. What?”
“Nothing.”
“Spill it.”
“Sigh. It just feels bittersweet.”
“Oh! I haven’t got any tissue on me.”
“At least I can count on things changing, but one thing will always be the same, you’re unrelenting.”
“I am here Aiah. I should should get credit for that.”
“Well it’s nice to finally hear your voice again, it’s nice to see you.”
“It’s ‘nice’, is it? Sigh. Yeah, that’ll do. It’s difficult to see you. I’m gonna be honest. It’s really fucking hard to see you, but then it was impossible not to come here and see you today.”
“I know… I mean I think I, I think I know what you mean.”
“Then I feel really selfish. I ask myself if I’m, if I’m not being… If there’s something wrong with me and something flawed maybe, out order, and just wrong about my love for him because I never… phew… I never got over this. No matter how good things are with him, I never got over us.”
“Even talking about it, watching you, you still look like you… you still look like it happened yesterday.”
“If that’s the truth, it’s because I still feel like there’s a knife in my back and you put it there. I thought if I saw you, I could see that everything is… hm… it just hurts more, even more but I don’t wanna leave either. Now that I’m here, I wanna, I wanna finish even I feel like I’m kinda dying.”
“All I can say is, I’m glad you’re here. I’m… I couldn’t wait to… well it’s not that, it’s also selfish. Selfish of me. I can’t tell you if you’re being selfish about Kweku. That’s not what I’m trying to say. It’s, it’s selfish because I wanted so desperately to look you in the eye and to tell you I’m sorry. I’m always gonna be sorry. Sorry for what I did to you.”
“Hm. Hm. What should I say to that?”
“You don’t have to say anything. I know I’m selfish for wanting this, but I kept hoping, I kept telling myself that it might mean something to you. One day it might mean something. Maybe you feel it too, where we are now, this stage, it’s easier to, to accept things, sometimes. At least that’s how I feel when I look back.”
“Seeing all of these people cycling, it reminds me I haven’t been on a bike for… I don’t know how long.”
“Sometimes… sometimes we cycle, when we’re not afraid of dying. I should say me, I’m the one who’s always afraid for my life. Job’s not afraid of anything.”
“Yeah he doesn’t strike as being anything less than brazen. I never thought of him as having any fears, whatsoever. How old is he now?”
“We just celebrated his fiftieth birthday, or ‘halfway to a hundred’, as he likes to call it.”
“I’m sure he’ll make it to a hundred.”
“I hope so but I know I won’t be there to see it if he does. I guess I won’t.”
“You might be. I mean who knew when we met him at the park that night that you’d see him turn fifty? I didn’t. I guess stranger things have happened!”
“Haha, wow! Yeah they have. But um, tell me how you really feel. I got to get, I gotta remember how you do that. How you have your ways.”
”My ways huh? My ways…”
”I…”
”Don’t put your foot in your mouth. We were doing so well. I mean we’re spiralling but… try and recover. The ball’s in your court.”
“When was the last you were here in ‘our city’?”
“‘Our city’... ha! I never looked back. I never came back. I treated it like it was something no longer real, but just in my, a part of my memory.”
“I see.”
“What about you?”
“I… I had to come back because of…”
“Job.”
“Yeah. To see his family and, for holidays and…”
“That’s nice! That’s what’s nice. ‘Nice’, is the word for that.”
“I know it’s hard for you but, do you have to do that? You know what, I, I can’t say anything about it can I?”
“No. No, you’re right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve spent the last, almost a decade with someone who would never do what you did to us. Someone who, who I’m lying to. Someone who doesn’t know that I love him, but I crave you. That even if I spend the rest of my life with him, I’ll never stop wanting to be with you. I have it so good! I have it so good but all I think about, if I had one wish, if I had to give up possibly everything, I would wish to be with you. That’s the only thing that I want. It’s you. I put a continent between us. I never got over you. I fucked I don’t know how many men, hoping to forget, to get over you. I was waiting, I was thinking that one day he would, or you would.. that it would finally be over. And I didn’t care how, I just thought about me and you and another chance, and I would say yes. I see myself, I practice, I say yes and I see everything else, I see everyone else disappointed in me for tearing it all down and you know what? I’m not bothered by it all. Isn’t that mad? It has to be right? It’s mad, but it’s all I think about.”
“Sigh.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care if it’s too much. I don’t care if I look like a fool. I don’t care that i’m fighting dirty. When you left you broke me.”
“I… I didn’t leave you! You found out and you, you left! You disappeared! You were gone. We didn’t get… I didn’t have a chance to talk to you, and then he stayed. He waited. Things didn’t just happen. I don’t know what you, what you think sometimes but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a relationship. It ended up turning into one yes, but it wasn’t to begin with. But you left. I just, I just need to say that be… because it’s not like I knew this was gonna happen. It wasn’t… something other than what it was, and then you were gone!”
“Really? So, let me make sure I understand because I really want to get this. This is my, this is all my fault for leaving? That’s what you’re saying?”
“No, that’s not what I said. What I’m trying to say is… sigh, it’s not your fault, it’s… I didn’t think any of this was gonna happen, I didn’t plan this, and I wish that you had been there, I wish you didn’t leave like that. I was waiting all this time, I’ve been waiting all of this time to hear from you.”
“It doesn’t work that way Aiah.”
“I’m just telling you what it was, what it was like and I’m also trying to tell you that I’m sorry. I’m not, not telling you that I was in the wrong. I was in the wrong. I destroyed what we had and we… I know that what we had was, phew… I know what it was. I know that I made one of the worst mistakes ever, that I’ve ever made.”
“Why are we here? Seriously? As much as I’m not getting anything out of hearing you say you’re sorry, I’m feeling like it was really stupid of me to find you, and even dumber for to agree to meet you here of all places. You say that everything’s so different, but I still see us cycling through this city. I still see us in that squat, two runaways who came to the place where all of the other runaways flocked to like it was mecca. I see our ghosts and I know that they live here, even if the names and the, the facades have changed, what we were is still lives here.”
“Luis I am sorry.”
“Don’t, don’t start cry.”
“I know I’m selfish, I know I’ve been selfish, but I did want to see you and tell you that I’m so, I’m so very sorry for what I, what I did. I’ve never not been sorry, I’ve never just woken up in a different life without you and not thought about what I did. Phew!”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have… come here?”
“I don’t know if I did the right thing. When you wrote to me and you told where you were, and when I had to be so close to you, it just made sense. I had to, to try to see if you would even think about meeting, about seeing me.”
“We did it. Ha! We did it. I am… seeing you and you’re seeing me.”
“Yeah. We did do it. We are here.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“I never just, just let you go. I know I broke your heart. I, I knew if you found out that I could lose you but… I wasn’t thinking. I knew that and… sigh… but at the same time I was, I was just thinking about myself, I wasn’t thinking, and I wasn’t thinking about us.”
“Can we do… can we do something about it now? Is it really gone? Is it gone and we’re never gonna get it back?”
“I don’t know? What do you mean? You have Kweku. I have Job. It’s impossible. What could we do?”
“We came here once to start over a long time ago. We have the time that we have here. Come back to the hotel with me. Come with me and be with me, like it used to be. At least we can, we can have that.”
“I can’t do that. You can’t do that Kweku.”
“This is our city. We can do whatever we want. You did what you did here with Job. I’m not worried about him. I’m not. He knows you’re here. He knows that this could happen. I’m not worried about Kweku either, because the only reason why he’s in my life is because I’m not in yours. I already told you, and I might be the one making the greatest mistake of my life, but I told you I would give up everything. One more night with you… for that I’ll give it all away and if I have, if leave here regrets… I’ll leave here with this night and I take that with me, regrets if I have them and everything else.”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021