You are mistaken. Some stories remain suspended in the air, with their good and their bad.

You want to flee and withdraw like a darkness afraid of its own shadow. Yet I tried to tell you: you have no shadow to fear, nor did we share a closeness capable of crossing oceans. In the middle of absence, you defined an “ending” and convinced yourself of this fabricated script. But our story—so clearly not meant to continue—did not need an ending.

On the threshold of the orange door, I asked you why you were pulling away. You said you were standing alone in a dead-end street, that you had only turned your back on me. And you added: “Nothing has changed.” Even when I know how a film ends, I still like to watch it. But you, it seems, are one of those who lose their appetite the moment they hear a spoiler.

You leapt out of bed and slipped a yellow sock onto your hand. Had I understood that you were trying so helplessly to hide yourself, I would have turned my head and not looked at you. That night, I would not have whispered the stirrings of my heart into your ear. I would not have let my respect for you grow because of your so-called courage. And yet, in your room with its darkened mirrors, I thought you loved the reflection of yourself in my eyes.

We made love in the cool shade of the green banana tree that sheltered us from the heat of the day. An hour earlier, you had been wavering in your love; now, on the edge of an impossible future that worried you, you renounced me altogether. Yet if we set aside the distant future you feared, I would not even have been there in the near one. The absence of a future cost us a bright, sunlit day we could have enjoyed.

In the brown-floored room, you said angrily, “Why are you moving? Just stay still! The virtue of stillness and so on…” You muttered something. But I am not like you. I live with excitement and keep moving. Was that what frightened you? Will you take out the pain of feelings you cannot control by hurting me?

I am wrong. You did not want to define an “ending”; fleeing the “end” lying on our bedside, you abandoned our dance before the tanda was over.

And yet, I would have liked to hold you and say goodbye with a kiss. In our final tanda, we could have embraced as we did on the first day and completed together the journey we began.

So be it.

Our story is too high for us to reach, too transparent for us to rest in its shadow. Later, it drifts into our palm like a feather torn from rare times that will never return. Perhaps you will blow on it gently and watch it rise, defying gravity. Or perhaps you will brush it roughly from your palm and continue on your way. As you wish.