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If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

---

On my train ride back from work,
Inside an eggshell-white passenger car,
Slumped with weariness in a plasticky seat
As if my muscles and bones sought to dissolve,
Lethargy pulled down my eyelids
While I fought to remain awake.
At my stop, I exited dragging mutinous feet,
Then trudged my way to a purported refuge.

In the past, after the workday had drained me
And I returned to my parents’ apartment,
I ensconced myself in my childhood bedroom.
Many such afternoons, I dropped onto bed,
Where, as white noise coursed through my limbs,
I slipped into daydreams or hallucinations.
Now, when I opened my apartment’s door
To the smell of home-cooked food
Mingled with those of baby powder and cigarettes,
I faced my lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom,
Who looked pale and jittery, stimulated by a cocktail
Of caffeine, nicotine, and food-derived boosters.
She unloaded her day’s frustrations onto me,
Her patient listener and supportive husband,
Who could barely string coherent sentences.

I yearned to collapse onto the couch
And indulge in the oblivion of mindless shows,
But my wife had waited for the chance to escape
And puff on her damnable sticks in the balcony,
So I, as if prodded by a cattle farmer’s pole,
Was thrust into a chain of duties.

I tended to our baby, who spent his waking life
Cooing, babbling, crying, and pooping.
I changed his diapers, bottle-fed him formula,
Wiped the trickle of milk dripping from his chin,
Played with him until his squeals fizzled out,
And struggled to soothe his colicky self.

I went out on evening errands
Such as buying snacks or cigarettes,
Fetching prescriptions from the pharmacy,
Or perusing supermarket aisles for deals.
I held plastic-wrapped packages of meats
While the fluorescent tubes overhead
Bounced reflections off the polished tiles.

As if the apartment wanted to fall apart,
I had to replace burned-out bulbs,
Repair leaky faucets,
Unclog slow-draining pipes;
Tasks that I, who had grown up drawing,
Should have known by instinct how to do.

I didn’t complain against an adult’s fate,
That of ants, termites, or bees,
Perpetually teeming.
Besides, I received the orders from my wife,
Who had sought me out and witnessed me.
I had become a vessel for her hope,
And I didn’t dare discard it.

In the amber glow of the nursery lamp,
I rocked our baby in my arms
And crooned “Brahms’ Lullaby”
As I paced under the gaze of a plush giraffe.
Sleep is a realm, or a void,
Into which one eagerly dives and drowns.
Why would a baby fight the descent?
What better way to spend one’s time,
What lovelier gift could anyone hope for
Than a momentary reprieve from consciousness?

After my baby’s eyelids drifted shut
And his drowsy coos trailed off,
With him cradled in his crib,
I snuck into the master bedroom
And slid under the covers
Beside my wife’s warmth.
As I lay like a bruised, spent sailor
Whose ship had battled tempests,
Finally left alone, I sank
Into the ocean of the subconscious,
From whose murk you emerged,
Gliding through the viscous tides,
Your caramel locks billowing,
Arms extended toward me.
Tangled and embraced, we swam
Out of reach from the surface.

Through a gap in the bathroom door, I glimpsed
My topless, teary-eyed wife’s reflection.
She was grimacing bitterly at her midriff:
Over the waistband of her panties, which pressed
Into the softened roundness of her lower belly,
The overhead light accentuated, deepened,
A cluster of stretch marks surrounding the navel
In patterns of silvery and flesh-toned scratches.
With a fingertip, she traced the striae
That reminded her of the burden taken on,
And the toll it had exacted.

He lay cocooned in a blue woolen onesie,
His chubby fists curled near his cheeks,
His pacifier abandoned in a corner
Like a bone of a half-consumed victim.
From his barrel-shaped chest,
The ribs rose and fell rhythmically
As his small lungs expanded and contracted,
Preparing to spew volcanic ash.
Overlooking this dormant bundle of rage,
This little tyrant from a hostile planet,
I, his caretaker, or slave, stood motionless,
Dreading that the alien would awaken
And, while thrashing his tiny limbs,
Erupt in an incandescent wail
That would pierce my eardrums
And ripple through my bones,
Shattering my sanity.

The shower’s scorching jets
Steamed as they scoured my skin,
Streaming down my hunched spine.
I clawed at my skull;
Another goddamn Monday morning
Of a suffocating cycle
That would last lifetimes.
What was I holding out for?
That your ghost would burst in
And whisk me away from this cage
To resume where we had left off
A decade ago?

Cloistered within steam,
Under the drumming of water,
I whispered “Izar, Izar, Izar,”
A plea for help, an invocation.
The hooks were carving deeper,
And trickles of blood
Were dragged down the drain.

In a weekday evening, crumpled on the couch,
I had drifted off only to jolt awake.
A cartoon flickered on the TV screen,
Mingling its colors with the apartment’s lights.
At the edge of my blurred vision,
My son’s toddling form loomed
As he, clad in dinosaur pajamas,
Dragging a stuffed plush puppy,
Explored the living room
In a quest for the limits of the known,
Or anything to gum and drool on.
His clumsy fingers seized the remote,
That he shook experimentally.
The TV blackened.

---

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Author’s note: today’s song is “La puerta de al lado” by Los Rodríguez.

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.

• Previous part (7)
• Next part (9)

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

---

When I worked a nine-to-five at Zuatzu Business Park,
I spent the lunch breaks on a bench sanctuary
Nestled under a verdant canopy that provided shade.
I read technical books on website design and development,
Immersing myself in technique and precise logic
As I nourished my body with vending machine sandwiches.

A pair of stockinged legs halted next to my bench.
The woman offered a smile like a business card,
Radiating the composed confidence of an adult,
Though most people seemed older to me,
Whose clock had frozen in nineteen ninety-nine.

“Mind if I sit down?” she asked
As she claimed the space beside me.
I wondered where I knew her from,
But I didn’t; she worked as a legal advisor,
Negotiating contracts and handling disputes
At one of the legal firms housed in the business park.
During lunch breaks, her gaze had sought me out,
Perhaps drawn by the cold flame of my brooding,
A contrast to her life’s rigid rhythms.
Unprompted, she offered personal advice.
Upon discovering our shared roots in Irún,
She grinned as if that were a fact to celebrate.

Should I describe this woman in detail?
I will share with you, Izar, what she lacked:
Your cascade of caramel waves;
Your eyes, twin pools of chocolate;
Your crooked front teeth that flashed
Whenever your bubbly laughter burst forth;
Your restless passion.
Unlike you, she didn’t shine the brightest
Before the dark, shapeless backdrop.

Sharing that bench became a daily ritual.
She brought her homemade lunches:
Plastic containers stuffed with quinoa salad
Enriched by grilled chicken and chickpeas.
Cross-legged, she would puff on cigarettes
As she dissected headline legal battles,
Ranging from corporate scandals to civil rights,
To point out how she would have handled them.
She named and described her coworkers
So I could picture them like fictional characters.

She took advantage of crowded train rides
To gobble up the novels everybody recommended.
Eager to discuss their finer details with someone,
She coaxed me from the refuge of technical texts,
Challenging me to explore popular narratives
Like The Alchemist and The Da Vinci Code.
Apart from fiction, she consumed self-help books,
Seeking to strengthen her mindset
Cultivating virtues and combating vices.

Nobody else allowed her to ramble on,
And she felt her every word sank into me
Like pebbles rippling a pond.
She admitted that recently, in her free time,
After coming across an intriguing article,
She had yearned to share it with me.

She invited me to grab coffee the coming Saturday.
In Constitution Square, we sat at an outdoor café
Packed with patrons enjoying their leisure.
The glossy metal tables glistened in the sunlight,
That also glinted off the wrought-iron balconies
Of the apartment buildings enclosing the square.
The robust stone archways cast elongated shadows
Onto the tiled pavement of the arcade.

Immersed in the hum of overlapping conversations
Broken by bursts of laughter from nearby youths,
I sipped my café con leche, and bit into a croissant,
As I stared at her opaque sunglasses,
At that face aglow in the sun’s warmth,
At those strands of hair lit like fine gold.

To meet me, she had donned a pleated skirt,
A crisp white blouse, and a burgundy jacket
That matched her glossed lips.
I wondered what they would taste like.
Later that evening, I found out:
They tasted of cigarette.

Those soft lips, our tongues probing each other,
They bestowed on me a respite,
A detachment from reality and grief,
As if resuscitated from a surgery’s anesthesia.
But a few breaths later, the truth awaiting
At the periphery of consciousness
Flooded back in like tons of icy water
Through a dam’s drain hole.

Izar, I felt the shape of your body in my arms,
The scent of your hair tickling my nose,
As if we were lying on your childhood bed
Like in days long gone, when the sun’s rays
Still warmed and nourished our skins,
When we imagined the foreign sights
We would behold together.
Those sensations, stored in my neurons
Away from conscious recollection,
Vanished again like a dream upon waking,
Despite my struggling to cling to them.

I boarded the train bound for our hometown
With this woman whose saliva I had tasted.
She sat beside me, and grabbed my hand.
“This feels right, doesn’t it?”
The tracks clacked steadily,
The landscape blurred past.
Her breath brushing against my ear,
She kept whispering to her patient listener
As I slipped deeper and deeper
Down the well of my mind.

In Irún, after she and I parted ways,
I was ascending the sloping Pintor Berrueta Street,
Trudging in the gloom under overhanging stories,
When my internal stasis cracked.
I found myself holding onto the rusted security grille
Of a closed storefront, a bankrupt shop,
While my gut writhed, twisted, and churned
With an acidic, gnawing guilt.

The duty of preserving your memory,
Alongside the promises made,
Had convinced me to keep breathing.
Yet, I tainted these lips that had kissed yours
By smearing them with someone else’s molecules.
Didn’t I know that any contact with another
Would corrupt, contaminate, and diminish
The fading traces of you?

During lunch breaks, occupying that bench,
Hadn’t I looked abandoned and broken?
Couldn’t this woman tell, at a single glance,
That I only contained undigested pain?

Like a stray dog, I had wagged my tail
At the first hand offering kindness,
At a stranger that had become invested
In a damaged boy unable to care for himself.
Her warmth was akin to a camping lantern
Illuminating a spot in a pitch-black forest
Where I could huddle and wait for dawn.
Izar, a part of me yearned to trust,
To let my defenses crumble.
I couldn’t stomach a whole life doomed to be
A sun-starved seedling trapped in concrete.

Five minutes away from La Concha Beach,
At a one-star hotel: two single beds pushed together,
Draped in pristine white linens,
The pillows patterned with white roses.

I hoped to disappear in ecstasy,
But once, I had ventured too near a star,
Leaving my skin blistered, my soul charred.
After that woman and I fucked,
With my sperm confined inside a condom,
She padded to the bathroom for a smoke,
And I wet the white roses with tears.

Alone in my childhood bedroom,
I flipped my sketchbook swiftly to a blank page.
Armed with my collection of colored pencils,
I focused on scraping the virgin sheet with graphite
To render a facsimile of my memory:
A halo of sunlight bathed her tousled locks.
The reflective surfaces of her sunglasses,
Mirroring the expanse of Constitution Square,
Concealed the sharp, analytical gaze beneath.
Her tender lips, slightly parted in contemplation,
Were embellished with burgundy lipstick.
She wore a white blouse, the first button undone,
And a jacket that draped elegantly off her shoulders.
Hunched over, I drew and shaded every crease.

The following Monday, on that secluded bench,
As she grumbled, vexed about a colleague’s errors
That forced her, yet again, to pick up the slack,
I kept thumbing the elastic strap of the file folder
Cradling, along with the portrait I had drawn,
Comic strips, relics of happier days with you.
When a pause beckoned, I cleared my throat.
“Listen, have you ever been into comics?”
She glanced sideways, took a drag of her cigarette,
And with a practiced flick, cast off the ash.
“What’s that about comics now? Please,
I’ve outgrown childish nonsense.”

My blood cooled abruptly.
I lowered the file folder beside me.
I had been chosen, indeed, by a prim lady
Fitting of her role in this world.

One afternoon, when I returned home from work,
I collapsed onto my bed, eager to recover from the toll
That forced smiles and hollow exchanges had exacted.
As my every fiber trembled, undone by exhaustion,
My cellphone vibrated in its pocket,
Its chirrup evoking dread.
This woman wanted to listen to my voice,
Chatter about trivial stuff, or bore me with legal jargon,
Even though I yearned for nothing more
Than to be left alone.

Izar, had I ever resented your presence?
Ours was a shared solitude:
As we nurtured our private language,
We played games we both enjoyed,
We read stories that entertained us both,
We encouraged each other’s dreams.
Now, in the lawyer’s gaze, I felt evaluated,
As if she catalogued my screw-ups,
Every flaw, every deficiency,
Storing them away for future indictment.
After mere hours in her company,
I required some leeway to breathe fully.
Still, I appreciated her more than anyone
Ever since you rode away for the last time.

Raindrops drummed on my umbrella
While the woman and I strolled arm-in-arm
Along a rain-soaked, glistening promenade.
Under a heavy, slate-colored sky,
White-capped waves of the restless sea
Crashed relentlessly against the breakwater.
On the opposite shore, past a line of buildings,
Rose the tree-covered Mount Igueldo,
Capped by the tower of its amusement park.
I smelled fresh rain, salt, and seaweed.

Rainy days thinned the membrane
Separating me from that final ride
To which my dreams hurled me
Whenever I needed to repent.
I felt an echo of that wet, frigid wind
That had etched itself into my bones.

To my regret, to my resentment, I opened up:
I confided in this lawyer about you, my Izar,
Who on a rainy night had crashed her Aprilia
And bled out on a lonely slope by the highway.
I confessed to squandering a year as a recluse,
That ever since, I struggled to relate to others
And their delusions of a just and ordered world.
I spoke of the weight of each day
Like an endless march up a steep incline.
To survive, I had erected a fortress of barbwire,
Encircling the raw viscera of my grief.

How many times have I berated myself
For voicing my pain aloud?
Did I hope this woman would encourage me
To guard and cherish your memories?
You know, Izar, you had spoiled me:
Whenever I handed over my pain,
You had cradled it against your chest.

This woman’s thoughts were filtered,
And those deemed offbeat, discarded.
But who else could I blame except myself?
I had accepted a simulacrum of love,
One lacking the fire of passion, of dreams,
And the sense that we were meant to be,
Like a Macedonian general leading his troops,
Knowing that a glorious destiny awaited
At the fringes of the known world.

Those locks whipped by the stiff breeze,
That profile fixated on the heaving sea.
She asked if I had attended therapy,
As if I could want anybody to exorcise you.
I swallowed the taste of bile.
“I cannot be fixed.”

Unlike those who dispense their hearts freely,
Unburdened by ties and promises,
If anybody shared their core with me,
I would preserve an echo of its beats.
I was a miser hoarding bits and pieces
Of what used to make me whole,
But I had grown tired; I couldn’t stand alone.
That lawyer, a level-headed lady,
Had invested in a lost teenager, an invalid.
Yet, I never loved her. How could I have?
My patched-up heart treasured the frozen fire
Of my girlfriend, whom I would never see again.
We had promised to love each other forever,
And I will.

The woman approached my secluded bench
With her earlobes and lips bare,
With her hair tied back in a hurried ponytail,
Loose strands escaping the bond.
She wore a pale-blue, wrinkled blouse that clashed
With her earthy-green skirt of textured cotton.
The odor of cigarette clung to her.

Beside me, slumped on the bench,
She toyed with her purse’s clasp,
Her gaze darting away to avoid mine.
I pressed her, “What’s wrong?”
Guessing that she intended to break up.
Instead, she pulled out a pregnancy test.

My eyes glazed at that pair of blue lines.
For how long had I known her? A year?
She asked, stripped of pretense,
“If I decide to keep the baby,
Are you going to leave?”
With all the resolve I could muster,
I hugged her to my chest.
“No, I won’t leave you.”
“Do you actually love me?”
“Yes, I do.”

Ropes, chains, shackles, zip-ties,
Meat hooks impaled into my flesh;
A child would anchor me away
From razor blades, pill bottles,
Bridges, cliffs, and incoming trains,
From the urge to leap into the dark
And find you there.

---

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Same Thing” by Islands, “17” by Youth Lagoon, and “Todavía una canción de amor” by Los Rodríguez (also this live version).

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.

• Previous part (6)
• Next part (8)

If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this short story (or novella) from the beginning (link here).

---

I worked my first entry-level gig designing websites
In Gros, at an apartment converted into office space.
Multiple workstations with CRT monitors
Set along both sides of a long, narrow room.
Bulky radiators beneath the windows,
Worn hardwood flooring that creaked.
I spent my mornings developing interfaces,
Coding their layout using HTML and CSS,
To advertise the services of companies
Such as a patisserie and an antique store.

Apart from the greetings I mumbled,
I only spoke with our project manager.
I dodged gazes as if they could look inside me
And spot the congealed mass of scars.

Once, a guy whose face I hadn’t retained
Told me to follow him, and I obeyed,
Believing we would discuss a work-related issue.
I found myself amidst a coffee shop’s hubbub,
Seated at a table with other team members
While two of them chattered about a ski trip.
I felt as if I had been strapped to a chair
And forced to endure a documentary
About a foreign culture I didn’t want to visit.

I was a feral creature thrown into captivity,
A cancerous blight at the core of a tree.
The merest social interaction drained me.

Sometimes, as I typed,
Flashbacks of us assailed me
Like a hail of buckshot.
I hunched over, rested my elbows on the table,
And pressed my palms against my eyes
Until I hoisted myself out of the abyss.

I was reading up on the quality of wines
For an online shop we were developing,
When I got to meet my first HR professional.
Wielding an apologetic smile, she asked
If I thought I would work well in a team,
A euphemism for “You don’t belong here.”
My manager had praised my work,
But, I admit, I was a silent wreck.

When I exited that apartment building
For the last time,
My lungs loosened in relief.

At my second job, more PC towers
Emitted a cacophony of whirrs
That blended with the din of typing,
The intermittent squeak of chairs,
And colleagues’ humdrum prattle.
Cables snaked across the floor,
Leading to servers, routers, printers.
I wore down those morning hours tainted
By the burnt-plastic smell of CRTs,
So I could soon return to solitude.

I got dragged daily into meetings
That often devolved into venomous griping
Over coworkers whose oddities
Were but a tiny fraction of my own.
I kept my head down; by then I understood
That neither effort nor proven skills
Would anchor me within office walls
If my presence unsettled some higher-up.
After they closed the door on me,
My contract left unrenewed,
I savored an entire Monday morning
In bed.

To fit into society, I needed to behave
As though I hadn’t died when you did.
I needed to lie in a million ways
To the world and myself.
Izar, through sheer will, I clawed a foothold,
I pieced together a patchwork self
Stitched from the shredded remnants
Of the boy who, in your light, once dreamed.

A constant vigilance to hide my damage
Made each second tick by agonizingly.
As a reward for my efforts,
Coworkers ambushed me with small talk.
While kids in their mid-twenties rambled on
About whatever the hell they talked about,
I would rearrange my mask into smiles.

However, my coworkers intuited
That a vital chunk of me had perished
As if blood flow had been cut off.
At times, they treated me like a stray cat,
Fearing I might suddenly claw at the eyes
Of whoever extended an unsolicited hand.

During a break, I stood at the rooftop balcony
With my project manager and a programmer.
Our breaths lingered in the morning chill
While a steaming cup warmed my hands.
The programmer, garbed in skinny jeans
And a graphic tee bought from Threadless,
Stopped describing T-shirt designs
To inquire why I seemed so gloomy sometimes.
On impulse, I blurted, “My girlfriend died.”
A shocked silence, a shuffling of shoes.
“Shit, dude. Sorry.”

Seated around a break room table
With the team of developers,
As we listened in acquiescence
To our supervisor prattle on about her guinea pig,
I realized that I yearned to be anyone else,
Or to disappear entirely.

I had ventured into the wild and survived,
But my heart remained broken.
Day by day, I witnessed my body, a stranger’s,
Push forward through the unending grind:
Eat, piss, shit, work, sleep, repeat.
Stripped of meaning, drained of colors,
Life had morphed into a grayscale smear,
A murky, polluted expanse of sea.

The relentless thrum of machinery
Melded into a mechanical chant:
“Stay complacent. Stay ignorant. Stay docile.
Bow to the inevitable end.
All fades into the abyss unfathomed:
Your name, your knowledge, your works.”
What was the goal of this journey?
So I could afford the down payment for a home
That would demand sacrifices from then on?

The weight of decades ahead
Felt like a collapsing skyscraper,
Its rubble crushing me to paste.
You were gone, so why bother?
Instead of fueling a bleak routine
Set on a loop till retirement,
Was it not better to surrender
And let the anguish devour me?

Two sets of railway tracks vanished
Into the tunnel of an underground station.
From the depths of that kilometric gullet,
An end-times rush of wind approached.

As the tunnel entrance brightened,
A stark-white light glided along the inner walls,
Revealing the rough texture of concrete,
And reflected off the veering rails.
From the curve emerged a metallic serpent,
Its headlights piercing the dimness,
Its row of windows glowing amber
As if its innards were filled with a lazy fire.

In the abyss, the abhorrent question:
“Didn’t you love Izar enough
To join her in the grave?”

I shut my eyes tight, I held my breath.
I locked my muscles in place.
The train’s heavy rumble reverberated
As its brakes screeched against the rails.
With a dying whine and a series of hisses,
The would-be reaper slowed to a stop.

---

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Author’s note: today’s song is “I Bleed” by Pixies.

If you enjoy my free verse poetry, I have three books worth of it yet to be self-published. Check it out.