How much loneliness did it cost us?

There’s a story I still don’t dare to write. It’s a time so dark that I had forgotten the feeling of constant loneliness on the road: how the cold seeped into my bones all the way to my heart, chilling desire, life, dreams.

I remember sleeping so many times far from home, almost anywhere, brushing skin with people who have surely forgotten me, because I too have already forgotten them. I remember those days were made of night; I rarely saw the light. I remember eating in different places and not a single day when I felt accompanied. Most people reminded me of those gray parts of buildings that aren’t finished; of incomplete structures; of dry rivers polluted with things that serve no purpose.

In those days, I remember surrendering to the idea that what would bring me back home, close to my family, was music; but I never felt heard. On the contrary, I felt I needed to help the people around me and, somehow, heal a little of myself.

I don’t know what I was missing. Life looked gray in the nighttime reflection of passing cars anywhere in the country. It was the time in my life when I traveled the most: more than ten states in a year, and in each one everything felt the same. Alone, cold, without motive, listening to the same songs, talking about the same things with different people, missing better times when there wasn’t so much road, when there was only one home and me.

When I slept accompanied, when I believed I hadn’t been entirely wrong, when arriving at a house felt like seeing the sea for the first time after a long while. I sailed a sea full of silver coins and cups I didn’t drink from, but offered. I slept on different mattresses, with different blankets, using different bathrooms, trying to imagine the future routine in those places. Nowhere did my toothbrush ever stay; the towels were borrowed and the bodies too.

There were people who longed for me to stay a lifetime. They made promises, dreaming in the fantasy that we would always sail smoothly, that we would walk hand in hand along illuminated paths. I refused to believe that was possible; I didn’t have the imagination or the faith to take their words seriously. So the next day I would shower with cold water, buy a hot coffee on the highway, and distance myself from all those longings as quickly as I could. I’d smoke a cigarette to rid myself of the taste, the breath of people, to rid myself of their dreams, to snatch away the possibility. I was a traveler in search of a warm dwelling to heat my heart, to ignite, at least for that night, my soul.

How many stories stayed within four walls? How many laughs? How many songs were heard? How many orgasms? How many feigned words? How much emptiness was left in all those places? How much loneliness did it cost us?

Photography by Issac Moroni Cordero Escobedo