I’ve lost count of how many things I’ve written about you, about me, or about us—but I do know this: there’s something we do exceptionally well. We pause ourselves for years, only to press “play” again and continue as if nothing had happened, as if everything had.
We were just twelve-year-old kids, remember? Twenty years have gone by, and with them… what, fifteen pauses? But fate is what it is, and we can’t escape it.
In this pause, there are days when flashbacks of our last “play” come rushing back to me—of that night at the wedding. I remember you telling me that with the dress I chose, I could ask you for anything I wanted. But I didn’t. And you didn’t do much to keep me either. That night, I was yours—read and interpret that however you like.
We went together to a public event without caring about anything, as if we had never paused, as if we had never left each other, as if we had never broken apart. And then, with a few drinks in us, we ended up spending the night together, leaving clothes scattered wherever we went, and me, of course, sleeping in a T-shirt from your university and a pair of your pants that were way too big on me.
Your brother found us asleep the next morning—me on your favorite pillow, you holding me, playing with my hair. The three of us burst out laughing and had breakfast together, like family, like in the old days.
Twenty years later, people still remember us together. Even though I’m married, even though you live with someone. How long has it been now? Seven, eight years? I’m not lying when I say that even in this pause—which I know will be a longer one—we’ve stayed in touch. You still reply to my stories, and I know I shouldn’t respond to those messages—who knows who might see them. And when I’m in trouble, I still call you, pretending to be a client, and you fix whatever’s going on in that moment—only for us to go back to pretending we’re strangers.
I won’t have the nerve to betray the person I live with—but I do have the nerve to deceive myself when I say I don’t think about you anymore, or that I don’t feel you anymore. I don’t fantasize about fairy tales or about us finding each other again, but I do often wonder what it was we did to always end up meeting again. I think about how the distance I’ve tried to put between us has never been enough, and above all, I think about the answer to this: why do we always, always choose to come back?
We were never toxic—there were no fights, no disrespect, no violence. But I don’t know how healthy it is to always return to you, and you to me. I’m consumed by the question of what we were, because people see us pause and continue, pause and continue, and they join in as if time had never moved forward.
At night, I’m haunted by nightmares, thinking that maybe this wasn’t a pause, but a real ending—but deep down, I refuse to believe it. There’s only one thing I’m sure of: only we have ever been capable of pausing fate.
Photography by Edgar Rocha
