There is no need to say goodbye. Neither you nor I listen to the song where we first met anymore. On a Sunday when we can wake without the anxiety of seizing the day, I hold you one last time. In these four songs, I search for the clown I met recently. Where are you?

On the day we met, you called me “the woman who embraces beautifully.” So here I am, to embrace you. Remember me, remember us, remember our orange nights. Soften your heart in my arms, part the gray curtain you have drawn over your eyes. Look at me again as if I were the most beautiful woman in the world.

I reach out to hold you. But you have not come. Your body is in my arms, yet you are not… My arms cannot remain suspended in your permeable body; they fall through. I tighten them more, as if that might help! The palm that comes to unfold across your back returns empty. As I call out to you helplessly, my voice drowns in the void. I pull away from the plastic arms you borrowed from a lifeless mannequin and attached to your body, and I look into your eyes—but I cannot see them. They have retreated into their hollows, hiding from me. For two songs, I ask after you, in case someone has seen you.

There is a stone weight on my chest. Even if you are plastic, it is painfully clear that this mass is not you. In the hopeless gravity of the black hole your absence has created, it grows heavier and harder to carry. I think perhaps I could break it apart in my arms and be free. The pieces crush my feet as they follow your hollow shoes. Bruised and wounded, for the sake of the song, I take my steps toward you. Out of courtesy, a pointless corner chase begins. You are so afraid that I might look for you that you placed that black hole there yourself, and now you are hurting me. By the third song, I understand—you have already left our dance.

For the sake of the dreams we shared as children, the feelings we were swept into as adolescents—at this threshold, at least in the final song, I wait, thinking perhaps you will come to bid me farewell.
Were the nights when I buried myself in your arms, when I felt your breath in my hair and sweated against your body, false? Were the eyes in whose darkness you placed my face like a star false? Was the body that wrapped me tight, as if to pull me into your chest, burning with desire—was it false? Was the wetness your lips left on my skin while praising my beauty false? The song ends…

Our parting is more honest and real than the smiling “Hello” you offered me on a warm Buenos Aires evening, extending a tonic-fernet.