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You can read this novella from the beginning through this link.

---

For days, I slipped in and out of lucidity.
I recall flashes of the waste collection center,
Of standing in the nearby landfills I had located,
Immersed in the stench of rotting organic matter.
I pleaded with employees wearing hard hats
And bright, reflective vests,
Begging them to let me access the collected trash.
I struggled to understand their replies;
My fogged mind registered their words as noise
Mingled with the caws of scavenging birds
And the sporadic rumble and beeps
Of lumbering trucks as they unloaded debris.

I wanted to collapse at the sight of endless trash:
Humanity unmasked as a blight upon nature.
I was tainted, a corrupting force spreading rot
To everything I needed to protect.

Workers denied my requests, citing policy,
But an employee in her fifties must have pitied me,
Because she allowed me to realize for myself
In the volume of compacted refuse
That my mementos of you no longer existed.

I dreamt you were calling me on a psychic link,
Begging me to find you
As a hill of trash slowly crushed you,
Suffocated you.
I heard your ribcage creaking, ready to collapse.

I dreamt of a colossal trash truck
Whose jagged teeth, like a predator’s jaws,
Closed around your body, pulverizing you
In a deafening cacophony of screeching metal
And the dull pop of bones breaking.
As you struggled against the mechanical jaws,
Leaking tears, mucus, and blood,
Your wide, terrified eyes met mine.
I heard your anguished voice, accusing,
“You knew how this would end.
Why didn’t you save me?”

On the couch where I slept, I awoke in a cold sweat,
Heart hammering, tears streaming down my face.
I thought I had survived the worst of my grief,
But it hadn’t immunized me against its return.

I took a medical leave from work that nearly got me fired,
And I spent those days encased in lead.
Among my family, I roamed like a black, silent fire,
So unhinged that my wife didn’t dare to chastise me.

At night, as my family slept, I stared into the darkness.
I listened to the whoosh of blood in my veins,
Life churning onward like the filthy waves
Of a sewer canal clogged with decaying memories.

Izar, two decades had passed since you died,
So why did your absence pulsate in my brain
Like the pain of a needle embedded deep?
Why did every hour still remind me
That you were no longer here to hold my hand?
I would never again talk with you,
Lean into you, breathe you in.
A crash against a guardrail had killed you,
The consequence of your choice to live dangerously.
I would never know if you’d have grown bored of me,
If our love would have faded or endured.

Once I clawed my way out of the black pit
And I recognized my wife as a human being again,
Every glance at her made me grimace.
I lived with a criminal that had escaped punishment
On account of our children’s well-being,
And we interacted like snakes
Forced to share a cramped vivarium.

I yearned to listen to your voice damn near daily,
And when I thought of those treasured tapes
That had contained our mock radio shows,
I couldn’t trust myself to stay in my wife’s presence.
But the loss of those recordings, I could have prevented it;
I knew that magnetic tapes degrade,
That oxygen was eating away at our young voices.
Although I had planned to digitize them,
I had kept postponing the task,
Thinking there would be another day.

Whenever I could, for sanity’s sake,
I escaped my home
And took long walks along the wooded lane
Where your memorial stone stands.
That narrow, mossy path ran parallel to the road,
Bordered by yellow-green grasses and leaves.
The sunlight streamed through skeletal branches
Stark against the background of rolling hills.
The breeze tickled my nose with the scents
Of moist soil, decaying vegetation, and pastures,
And the silence was interrupted only
By birdsong,
The breeze rustling leaves,
The bleating of grazing sheep,
And the sporadic whoosh of a passing vehicle.
In my mind, I spoke to you,
Recounting everyday moments from my kids’ lives,
Seeking your opinion on how to parent them
So they wouldn’t grow up bitter and miserable.

I had gone to check on our toddler,
And found my wife kneeling in the living room
In front of the coffee table and a cup,
As she wrote on a pocket notebook.
Beside her, our daughter babbled to a doll.
Standing still, I observed them
As if through an exhibit glass.
Our daughter approached the table
To mess around with the cup of coffee.
By the time my wife noticed,
The drink had already spilled.
“Look what you did!” she snapped.
Once our toddler returned her attention to the doll,
My wife hunched over, her shoulders shaking,
And she covered her face with both hands.

The thought of consoling her crossed my mind.
I should at least have taken our daughter away.
But I didn’t want to deal with human beings,
With their demands and expectations I couldn’t meet,
With their vindictiveness and their calculated cruelty.
Instead, I crept to the bathroom as quietly as possible,
Where I let the roar of water from the shower drown out
The world’s meaningless noise.

During my solitary walks,
I replayed our pretend radio shows in my head,
Recalling our repartee as if it were song lyrics,
But with age and the limitations of my brain,
I encountered gaps in my memory
Where I questioned if I was inventing your lines.

I adopted the habit of sitting on a bench
Opposite a slope tangled with brambles
To transcribe the echoes of our teenage voices,
Haunted by the need to immortalize you
In this universe that insisted on erasing you.

Once I ran out of the words we had shared,
I wrote letters to you,
Elaborating on my impressions and pains.
From those days onward,
My notebooks became like dumpsters
In the grimy alleyway behind a busy restaurant,
Waiting to receive the daily effluvia of my mind.

We took the kids on a family outing
To a destination my wife had picked:
Mount Arburu.
The cool air carried the scent of pine trees.
I found myself staring at a view
That you and I had relished:
The rising, rounded peaks of Aiako Harria,
Rugged and patched with dense forest.
Gray clouds tended a titanic shadow
Over my sprawling hometown of Irún,
Extending to Hondarribia and the Txingudi Bay.

Two decades ago, I sat pillion on your Suzuki RM125,
My arms wrapped tightly around your waist,
The bike rumbling through my bones,
As you slalomed between the thorny shrubs
Scattered across this slope,
And flung joyful laughs to the wind.
Unhindered, nature cares little for two decades;
Here, only the unbreachable wall of time
Separated me from riding with you again.

I dreamt you and I held a funeral
For your wrecked Aprilia Red Rose.
We laid the mechanical beast to rest
Wrapped in bandages and duct tape,
On a bed of dead grass and dried leaves.
With our hands clutched in grief,
You wearing your motorcycle helmet,
We knelt and prayed before the bike,
Murmuring the kind of heartfelt goodbye
Reserved for lost loved ones.

At the front door of our apartment,
I was shrugging into my coat
When I felt a gaze on my face.
My wife, seated on the sofa, was leaning forward,
Wearing a loose blouse that exposed her breasts
To the hungry tug of gravity.
From the cigarette pinched between two fingers,
A thin ribbon of smoke swirled upward.

How many times had I envisioned confrontations
In which my wife’s mouth would spill venom,
Recriminating every aspect of our marriage?
I imagined her calling me a selfish asshole,
And I shot back, labeling her a heartless psychopath
That had enjoyed destroying my mementos of you
While knowing how much they meant to me.

But my wife’s gaze was tender,
Her eyebrows raised in the middle.
“The dead, they no longer love us,
And they certainly don’t suffer.
They don’t regret the lost opportunity
To spend more time together.
From what you shared about her,
She would have been horrified
By how much she ruined your life.”

I fumbled for words to refute her,
But my throat had constricted.
My eyes welled up.
In a daze, I swung open the door
And hurried down the stairs.

---

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Author’s note: the songs for today are “Should Have Known Better” and “The Only Thing,” both by Sufjan Stevens, and “Like a Stone” by Audioslave.

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You can read this novella from the beginning through this link.

---

In the chiaroscuro of the ultrasound image,
The thick, dark uterine wall encircled life within:
An oval head attached to a bean-shaped torso.
The fetus rocked softly, suspended in space-time,
Untouched by the chaos of the outside world.

In the shadowed profile of its face,
Gentle rises hinted at the forming eyes,
A nose, a budding mouth.
Trailing from the head, a line of vertebrae
Resembled a delicate string of pearls.
Under the insistent thump-thumping
That pulsed through the amniotic fluid,
A certainty branded itself on my mind:
This is my daughter.

I hovered near the ceiling of a delivery room,
Watching like a detached stranger
My wife’s sweat-sheened face,
Hair plastered to her clammy forehead,
Her chapped lips bared in a grimace.
From between the former lawyer’s thighs,
A midwife coaxed out our bloody offspring,
The seed that had germinated
From a lump of cells into a human
Destined one day to venture beyond my reach.

I paced our postnatal room
While I supported my daughter’s head.
A pink blanket swaddled her snugly.
Her skin, fresh off the factory,
Blazed with a rosy tint.
She smelled powdery and pure.
This baby resembled you, Izar:
She inherited your caramel-colored hair,
Your chocolate eyes, your carefree smile
That lightened the weight of the world.
Life still contained wondrous surprises.

In the master bedroom, while our baby slumbered,
I was drinking the sight of her flawless skin
When my aging brain craved the drug of pain.
I needed to stray out of this mundane refuge
Into the infinite darkness,
So I could resume speaking with the dead.
I slid the wardrobe door open,
Its rollers grinding against the track,
But the garments whose hems once draped
Over the moving box holding your remains
Now hung unimpeded.

I shifted aside T-shirts, shirts, and sweaters,
And found myself staring at an empty corner.

Could I have heaved the box out
Only to forget to put it back?
No, not once in all these years.
Frantically, I rummaged through the items
That could hide a moving box:
Unused bags, backpacks, travel suitcases.
I emptied the upper shelves,
Tossing aside old blankets and extra pillows.

I found my wife on the balcony,
Seated on a bistro-style chair,
Scrolling through her smartphone,
And taking a drag from her cigarette.
“Where is she?” I demanded to know.
Instead of chewing me out for my tone,
She kept her gaze glued to the screen.
The dying sun tinted her smoke blood-orange.
“Where’s who?” she asked dryly.
“You know well what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
My heartbeat rammed my ribcage.
“The box.”
“Box, what box.”
“The box containing what’s left of Izar.
The box you kept complaining about,
Arguing that it took up too much space.
The box you clearly hated.
Where the fuck is it?”

After my wife confessed,
The Earth halted its spin.
The distorted echoes of her voice
Resonated through my mind’s cavern:
“I dumped it all in the trash.”

Panic burrowed into my brain and bones.
I rushed out of the apartment,
Down the stairs onto the street,
And straight to the array of recycling bins.
No traces of you among the discarded:
A worn-out stool, a broken microwave,
And disassembled furniture.
The stench of rotting organic waste mingled
With the scents of hot dust and cardboard,
And the bins’ heavy lids clanked loud,
As I peered again and again into the gloom,
Desperatedly searching for a tape or a photograph.

“It’s useless,” my wife said.
She stood with her arms crossed,
But when our gazes met, hers flinched.
She spoke again, her voice wavering.
“I did it two days ago.”

Sharp pangs struck my racing heart,
And spread along my veins and arteries.
I staggered away from the recycling bins
As I struggled to breathe.

My wife’s caustic tone poured on my wounds.
“You’re not bringing that girl back to life.
You should have gotten rid of her stuff years ago
And allowed yourself to move on,
But it seems you derive sick pleasure
From self-flagellation.
It’s time to stop living in the past.
Focus on what truly matters, what’s real:
Your wife, your son, and your baby daughter.
I won’t stand by and watch you neglect us.”

My last vestiges of you, my Izar,
Still carrying the scent of a fallen star:
Figurines, comic strips I drew for you,
Handwritten letters, your motorcycle gloves,
Photographs, cassette tapes with our shows,
A T-shirt stained dark with your blood,
Teeth, bone shards, scraps of flesh,
Your foot severed at the ankle.

I would never hear your laughter again.

A silent bomb had exploded inside me,
Hollowing out a vast space in my core.
My knees hit the grimy pavement.
I clawed at my scalp as spasms rocked me.
“You’re gone,” my mind repeated again and again,
An alarm blaring against the bruised gray matter
Of a broken brain.

I don’t know how long it took
For me to hoist myself up,
Soaked through with cold sweat,
But now, a riot raged in my skull,
A cacophony of furious voices.
At the doorway of the nearby estate agent,
Next to its window flaunting dreams of elsewhere,
A young woman’s brow furrowed with concern.
Other stares pierced the back of my head;
In front of the mechanic shop,
Beside a car with its hood raised,
Two grease-stained men gawked at me,
The stranger unraveling in public.

If I abandoned my wife like she deserved,
I wouldn’t just break my son’s heart,
But also rob my baby daughter of a father.

Tears traced paths down my wife’s cheeks,
Leaving shimmering trails.
She controlled her outburst of genuine emotion
Behind the taut muscles of her face.
That glare alone was a silent rebuke
For managing to wring tears from her,
But I didn’t give a shit;
Whatever goodwill I had accumulated
Over years of a weary coexistence
Had switched off in an instant.
I wished I had never met her.

Despite my wife’s cracking voice,
Her words tore through the air like daggers.
“You’ve grieved for her longer than she even lived.
From the moment you first told me about that girl,
I knew I wasn’t the one you truly loved,
But I stupidly hoped I would be enough.
After all, I’m the one who stuck around,
Who gave birth to your children.
No matter how hard I tried to make you happy,
Nothing ever pleased you.
It’s always been about Izar, Izar, Izar,
That immature, reckless brat
With no care for the future,
Driven only by selfish whims.
You know it was the bitch’s own fault,
Speeding through the rain.
If she hadn’t gotten on that bike,
She’d still be alive,
Bumming off some poor sap,
And you’d have forgotten her by now.”

My body had flash-cooled
As if dunked in a tank of liquid nitrogen.
I struggled to process my wife’s words,
To believe she had uttered them.
I saw myself grabbing the abandoned stool,
And swinging it down on her forehead.
I pictured the shock in her eyes,
But before she could defend herself,
Before any onlooker could intervene,
Her skull would have cracked open,
Spraying splatters of blood and cerebral tissue.
Then I would have run, run, run away,
Fleeing from this rotten city to the nearest highway,
Where some truck wouldn’t slow down in time.

But no remnant of you existed anymore
Except in the molecules of my brain.

---

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Shine a Light” by Spiritualized.

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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 novella from the beginning (link here).

---

My wife unclasped her bra and peeled it off.
Her twin globes of fatty tissue
Draped, swayed, and settled.
My mouth watered and my crotch tingled
With the beastly urge to grab that flesh,
Making it spill through my parted fingers.
I needed to feel those nipples hardening
Under the swirling tip of my tongue.

My intense gaze met my wife’s,
That narrowed in anticipation
Of another verbal brawl.
Her guarded posture loosened.
“See, you can still lust.
You’re not a zombie after all.”
As she tugged down her panties,
Her silken curls flashed a glimpse
Of her slit’s pink promise.

Although we resented each other,
We both needed to escape
From our exhausting existence.
Naked save for our wedding rings,
We immersed ourselves in carnal delights
To drown our frustrations,
Exploiting the mechanisms crafted by nature
To convince its slaves wordlessly,
From humans to the most cretinous creatures,
That their lives should revolve around sex,
Sex, and more sex, lest the species perish.

Instead of making love,
We tangled, grappled, and clawed
Like starved dogs devouring a meal,
Both reduced to incoherent strings
Of grunts, gasps, and cusswords.
Flesh smacking against flesh,
Neck biting, hair pulling,
Nails raking across my back,
A hand tightening around her throat.

Once we achieved our release,
We lay on fevered, rumpled sheets
Coated in the sour smell of sweat.
My mind was bleached blank.
As my wife drew deeply on a cigarette,
I surrendered to the afterglow,
Letting it slide me into sleep.

My wife suggested a family outing
To a self-serve Chinese buffet in Oiartzun,
On a whim, I thought, without ulterior motives.
The chilled air around the food counters
Smelled of herbs and spices from meat marinades,
Complemented by the briny scent of fresh seafood.

Amidst the din of hungry patrons’ conversations
And a pop tune piping through speakers,
I fished my meal out of gastronorm containers:
Skewered meats coated with a paprika marinade,
Slices of pink chicken, fatty cuts of beef,
Squid with their tentacles entwined.

Life itself dished out pain like a relentless rain,
So we drugged ourselves with our bodies’ rewards
For stuffing nutrients into our gullets,
And yielding to the innate urge to procreate.

As my son poured soy sauce over his sushi,
My wife rested her elbows on the table.
“Haven’t you two wondered why we’re here?”
My son and I, both chewing, glanced at each other.
She smiled, and pointed at him with chopsticks.
“Little man, you’re gonna become a big brother.”

I choked on a bolus of beef,
And gulped water until I stopped coughing.
While my eyes had teared up,
Hers, hard chunks of obsidian,
Drilled into me expectantly.

I always made sure to wrap it up,
Leaving the slim chance of an accident,
Or the prick of a needle.
Regardless, my wife’s aging womb held within
A new life destined for this ruined world.

“I-Is it a boy or a girl?” my son asked.
“Too early to tell.”
“So, like, I’ll have to share my room?”
“We’ll see. Dad, any thoughts?
Are you going to congratulate us?”
I stared back in stunned disbelief
As cold panic bubbled in my bowels.
She pinched a rice ball with her chopsticks.
“I’m keeping the baby.
You can either stick around or leave.”

---

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Angel” by Massive Attack.

In case you have missed this story (although I doubt many are reading it), you may have noticed that I’ve been busy making songs. As an obsessive, single-minded maniac, once I sink my claws into something, it’s very hard for me to focus on anything else, even my own survival. However, I’ve made sure to progress daily on the story, and I fully intend to finish it. Besides, the AI service that allows me to produce studio-quality songs has a monthly limit that I’m about to hit, so I’ll have no choice but to return to writing fulltime something other than silly songs.

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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 novella from the beginning (link here).

---

My wife’s accusatory glare and weaponized tongue,
Carrying years of racked-up bitterness,
Jabbed, punched, kicked, stabbed.
She flayed me inch by excruciating inch.

You’re a grown man. Stop moping around.
Get off the fucking pity wagon.
Since the beginning, did you have zero intention
Of being fully committed to this marriage?
I gave up law to be a housewife. Am I not enough?
Oh, forgive me for interrupting your endless reveries.
While you’re busy mourning your teenage sweetheart,
I’m here, flesh and blood,
Holding together the family you keep forgetting.
Are you satisfied tormenting me and our child
Because you refuse to let that girl go?
Why do I need to measure up to an idealized teenager?
How is it possible that someone you dated
Fifteen fucking years ago,
Who doesn’t even exist anymore,
Matters more to you than your wife,
The mother of your own fucking kid?

My lovely wife had a lawyer’s soul:
She saw every argument as a chance
To uncover flaws in logic,
To chip away at the opponent’s stance,
To claim the victor’s glory.
As for me, beaten and battered,
I had become a ragdoll
Growing threadbare by the day.

Whenever I anticipated the acidic talk,
I cowered inside my besieged mind,
Clutching at the crumbling battlements,
Lacking the strength to yell at her, or beg her,
To shut the fuck up.
My wife, along with her vindictive glare,
Elbowed her way into my memories of you
To contaminate that sanctuary,
And every time she brought you up,
A pang rippled through my scar tissues,
Echoing, “You’re dead, you’re dead.”

Getting married, sharing an apartment,
Should have provided a traveling companion
With whom to endure this lonesome life.
Instead, I spent my energies erecting walls
To shield my gangrenous heart,
And to muffle any human utterance
Until it became incomprehensible noise.
I felt like I had invested my adulthood
Anticipating a visit to a luminous city,
Saving up and planning meticulously,
Only to arrive at a filthy, ruinous dump
Infested with vermin.

I had surrendered control
Of my meat-and-bones vessel
To someone who didn’t respect me,
Who exploited and mistreated me.
I wished a yawning chasm
Would swallow my wife,
My apartment, this city,
But the mirror of time showed
My stooped figure decades older:
A stammering, browbeaten coward
Just like my father.

My wife was loading the dishwasher
When she casually spewed an attack
That I recognized by its acidic tone,
Even though I had blocked the content.
This time, instead of keeping quiet,
I told her to turn around and listen.
She froze, then straightened up,
Closed the dishwasher with her hip,
And faced me, arms folded,
Her gaze fixed upon me
Like the muzzle of a revolver.

“Each morning since April 27, 1999,
I wake up to the absence of the person
Who made living worthwhile.
You’ve never lost anyone dear,
So you cannot possibly grasp
This grief that has eroded me daily.
You’re frustrated because I have failed
To measure up to your ideal husband,
But I’m the man that remains,
And though I stumble, I’m here,
Doing the best I can with what’s left.
Countless times I’ve wanted to die,
But I chose to keep going for you,
And for our son, who deserves a father.”

“Stop neglecting our family by prioritizing
Your unhealthy fixation with that girl.”
“Do you think I have a choice?”
“Get a fucking therapist. Take antidepressants.”
“Should I erase her, then? Pay to have her scrubbed?”
“You act as if she were the love of your life,
Even though she ruined you.”

Her words had shotgunned my ribcage.
I breathed slowly to quell the shaking rage.
“Maybe love and ruin are interchangeable.
You know, when I agreed to marry you,
I had hoped for a lifelong partner
Who would inspire and encourage me,
Who wouldn’t insist on harassing me
Over the most traumatic event of my life,
Who would provide even a fraction of the joy
That Izar gifted me by simply existing.”

On the opposite side of the kitchen island,
The skin around my wife’s eyes tightened
As her lawyerly mind analyzed my words
For openings, inconsistencies, weaknesses.
Amid the tension, an out-of-place noise:
The creak of our son’s bedroom door.
Drowning out my wife’s bitter tirade,
I imagined his small heart pounding.
Behind that door, a wary creature
Hoped to escape notice.

That evening, I ventured into his bedroom,
Whose walls were a galaxy of space paraphernalia.
My son, reclined against the pillows,
As the glow of the bedside lamp
Illuminated his focused features,
Lost himself in a novel titled “Ender’s Game.”

He tilted his face upward at me as if I were a sun
Failing to warm his frozen planet.
Those glasses magnified deep-set eyes
Whose gaze held mine warily.
“I read that one back in middle school,” I said,
“And I remember enjoying it quite a bit.”
“It’s good,” he said,
Then refocused on the page.

How could I, a ruined man, improve my son’s life?
Instead of training him to carry on into the future,
To survive despite crushing unhappiness,
Perhaps I should abandon him,
Let his resilient mother forge ahead
Without the burden of my misery.

Izar, if this child had belonged to us,
How would you have nurtured him?
You, the sun I revolved around.
You, who had taught me what it meant
To make the best of a crumbling world.

My son and I rode on leg-powered bikes
Past the ruins of Roman furnaces.
Our pedals and chains clicked rhythmically.
On the muddy path beneath our tires,
Gravel crunched and stray twigs snapped.
Puddles from recent rainfall mirrored
The dove-gray cloud cover
And arching, naked branches.
A blanket of fallen leaves blurred
The boundaries of the unpaved path
Flanked on our left by an ancient wall:
A mosaic of weathered, moss-daubed stones.
The mist that hung in the air cooled my lungs.

We reached a fork in the trail
Where a slope would force us to dismount
And push our mountain bikes uphill
While seeking purchase on exposed stones.
“Let’s head up there,” I said.
My son, as he readjusted his helmet,
Shot me a skeptical look.
“Where does it lead?”
I got off my bike.
“I don’t know.”

A meandering dirt path, worn by footsteps
But now reclaimed by nature,
Opened to a clearing of greens and browns
Where square, one-story buildings stood,
Their once-white walls aged, stained,
And half-conquered by creeping ivy.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” my son said.
I stopped and listened to the chirping birds,
To the distant creaking of branches,
But no one had claimed these ruins.
“Let’s explore,” I said.

We were rolling our bikes through the garden
Of a family gone for decades.
An anonymous hand had gathered stones
To form the sinuous banks of a stream.
Water rippled, reflecting dapples of sunlight.
Wide-leafed plants, unique in these woods,
Still blossomed white, bell-like flowers.
Beside the stream, on a filthy, pitted wall,
An intact grill guarded a window opening
That gaped like a hollow eye.

My son followed cautiously.
“How old do you think this place is?”
“It belongs to the Roman era.”
“C’mon, dad. Romans lived, like,
A thousand years ago.”
“More like two thousand.”
“Mom would scold us if she saw us
Wandering around abandoned places.”
“No doubt. But she doesn’t have to know.”
“Imagine if we owned this secret space,
And transformed it into a hideout.”
“These days? They would take it from us.”
“What if zombies attacked now?”
“We should have brought baseball bats.”
“I bet if I had a machine gun,
I’d blast every last one of them.”
“Good luck convincing mom to buy that.”

We let the bikes fall into a patch of tall grass,
Then we entered the roofless, derelict house.
Its floor was carpeted with dried leaves
That crackled under our sneakers.
Against the inner walls and their peeling paint,
Someone had arranged piles of chipped bricks,
Remnants of moss-cloaked furniture,
Rusted mattress springs.
Logs lay scattered, their bark mottled.
Weeds had sprung up all around,
Thriving amid the detritus.
I inhaled the scent of moist soil and tetanus.

At the end of the garden stood a woodshed
Stacked with logs shrouded in grimy cobwebs
Like antediluvian bones in a catacomb.
Decades ago, the owner picked these logs,
Hand-chopped them, and stored them as fuel
For fires that would never come.

---

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Author’s note: the songs for today are “Swan Dive” by Waxahatchee, and “Cosmic Love” by Florence + the Machine.

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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).

---

Lunch break at last, I sat in the shade
Beneath broadleaved guardians.
My Izar, I’m here once again.
Come join me, hold my hand.
The world’s jagged edges softened
As your gentle light enveloped me.
Did your day treat you well?
Anything you want to share?
You’ve gotten hooked on a new manga?
Oh, I’d love to hear all about it.

On my commute home from work,
My eyes closed to shut the world out,
As I swayed to the train’s rhythm,
And the song of rain and thunder
Poured in through my headphones,
I felt your fingers caressing mine,
Tracing my knuckles and creases.

The morning light streaming
Through my bedroom window
Spilled into the open wardrobe,
Gilding the hanging garments,
Ranging from T-shirts to sweaters,
Whose hems were draped over the lid
Of the sturdy moving box
That enshrined your remains.

I caressed the rough, corrugated cardboard
That had cradled you for more than a decade.
With my family out to play at the park,
I heaved the box onto the marital bed.
When I peeled back the lid, you grinned
Through photos taken in the nineties.
I held hands with your motorcycle gloves.
As I listened to our pretend radio shows,
I laughed, and tears streaked my cheeks.

Izar, the things that bind us,
They are the only lasting truths.
Although your body turned to ashes,
Your name remains carved within me,
Inscribed inside my organs,
Scratched on my bones,
With every cell echoing it.
Once we are stripped of our shells,
Love is all we will carry.

On a stormy night, the beddings’ warmth
Had coaxed my wife into a snore-heavy sleep.
The wind battered the windows,
And raindrops tap-tapped incessantly.
I lay on the opposite side of the bed,
But in my mind I had returned to my old room,
Whose bed you and I had shared.
As we clung to each other,
And my fingertips skated up and down
The ladder rungs of your vertebral bumps,
I buried my face in the crook of your neck,
Where I sniffed your aroma:
Sunshine, cinnamon, motor oil.
We had woven our way into each other
By learning one another’s shapes,
What each vocalization meant,
What brought pleasure or pain.

Your warm lips brushed my earlobe.
“I missed you so much, you know.”
Izar, tell me when you want to leave,
And I will follow you anywhere.
Just say the word.
“Hey, Cap’n. I wanna ask something.
How long would it take to die from drowning?”
Drowning? You mean falling into a river?
“No, like jumping off a cliff.
Is it true you can’t scream underwater?”

My wife had been avoiding me since that morning,
But I traced the stench of cigarette to the balcony,
Where I found her shrouded in her wool robe,
Seated with one bare leg crossed over the other,
Defiantly exposing her skin to the biting breeze.
A thread of smoke rose from the cigarette
Clenched between her index and middle fingers
As her gaze pierced through the landscape
To wander in some faraway place.

I asked her if anything was the matter.
She shot a sidelong glance at me.
The cigarette’s cherry flared orange
As she sucked on the foul stick’s vileness.
The taps of pedestrians five stories below,
Along with the hum of passing vehicles,
Accented the tension in her silence.
When I was about to insist,
She exhaled a grayish-white cloud,
Then said I had been talking in my sleep.

“You apologized to your teenage girlfriend,
And called her name over and over.
The other stuff, I don’t even want to bring up!”
I asked her if she also expected an apology.
My wife crushed the stub on the ashtray,
And demanded to be left alone.
What, should I repent for unconscious outbursts?
During my waking hours, around my wife and son,
I sealed my burbling depths with a hermetic lid,
And I behaved like a functional family man,
Or at least tried my damnedest;
In dreams, my subconscious probed the abyss,
Prodding, scratching, licking the scar tissue
For signs of fresh bleeding.

I still remembered the adult grace
With which my wife, then a legal advisor,
Dressed in blouses and thigh-length skirts,
Had approached the business park bench
Where I reminisced away my lunch break.
The first time her legs halted beside me,
I had wanted to peel off her stockings.
Contrast that with her now-slouched shoulders,
And her lips pressed into a thin line
Whenever her hardened gaze scrutinized
The guilty half of our legal arrangement,
Ready to dissect any sign of laziness; of failure;
Of straying toward you, the forbidden.

Why the hell did I choose for myself a life
In which an inspector could interrupt
My worship of you anytime,
And interrogate me about my devotion?
Since you died, I had yearned to return,
In flesh or spirit, to our teenage bubble,
When I could still smile,
And the time was ours to live.

My wife and I weren’t right for each other:
We had been forged in different furnaces,
Hammered into incompatible shapes.
When she had pursued my broken self,
I doubted my strength to endure
Decades of solitary penance.
I had craved someone to lean on,
Who might try to understand.
If only I had rejected her advances,
And remained the shell of a teenager,
I’d be living in a one-bedroom home
Furnished with a computer, a mattress,
And the moving box of your relics.
Your voice would play full-volume at all hours.

For the sake of our child,
Whom we had dragged into the harsh lights
Of this indifferent cosmos,
I would continue living a lie.

In the time between work and work,
Resting on my bench sanctuary
While the overhead leaves rustled,
Sketchbook perched on my knees,
Headphones clamped tight,
And your voice bleeding into my brain,
With a sharpened tip of graphite,
I etched the outline of your curves:
The slender breasts that fit in my palms,
The belly swollen with our baby,
And the thighs that loved to hug my face.
I shaded the heaven between them,
Where I had gladly lost my sense of self
Tasting the tang of sea salt,
Drowning in your intimate waves.

One night, after reading a tale to my son,
I entered the master bedroom to find my wife
Waiting for me at the foot of the bed,
Straight-backed and stiff-necked,
Naked except for black cotton lingerie
Embellished with lace embroidery;
Hands clasped in front of her navel
As if to conceal the tortuous stripes.
She instructed me to lock the door.

In the sultry dampness of her mouth,
My penis went flaccid.
She withdrew and gaped at my failure
Before wiping her glistening lips.
“What the hell is wrong?”
“I’m sorry. I’m tired.”
My wife rose swiftly.
With a voice edged in hurt,
She accused, “I disgust you, don’t I?”
Then stormed out, retreating to the bathroom.
As for me, slumped on the edge of the bed
With my limp, shriveled member exposed,
I rubbed the bridge of my nose.
A minute later, I slid under the covers,
Shoved earplugs in, and hoped for sleep.

To celebrate the anniversary of my first kiss with you,
That interrupted a playthrough of Resident Evil
And signaled the start of our romance,
I splurged on a bakery cake,
And, unbeknownst to my wife,
I took a personal day from work
So you and I could spend the whole morning together.

I cradled the cake box, my precious offering,
To the woodsy depths of the Meaka neighborhood,
Strolling along a narrow, cracked, cement path
Encroached on both sides by grass and weeds.
The fresh air smelled of pine, earth, and wildflowers.
The birds trilled, the leaves whispered, a creek babbled.
A butterfly chased its mate’s erratic trajectory.

I reached the spot next to the winding path:
A picnic grove canopied by verdant trees.
Sunlight cascaded through the webwork of branches
And spilled shimmering patches of gold
Upon my chosen picnic table, rugged and gritty,
That bore names, hearts, and curses
Carved by generations of lovers and drunks.
I settled at the wooden table, my back to the path.
As I breathed in peace, my heartbeat slowed;
Nobody would disturb this solitude
To chastise me for loving you.

I laid the cake box before me, and flipped the lid.
Chocolate layers emulated a muddy racetrack,
With ganache frosting mimicking earthtones,
And intricate icing recreating tire streaks.
On top stood an edible sculpture:
A fondant motocross bike painted yellow.
Wouldn’t you have gotten a kick out of my offering?
In your translucent likeness, seated opposite,
Sunlight shining through, I glimpsed a beaming grin.
“Dude, you’re awesome. This is, like, the coolest cake.”

“You know,” I said, “it’s the anniversary of our first kiss.
We played Resident Evil and, while you were cheering,
I kissed you by surprise. Do you remember?”
“Hell yeah, I do. You thought you were being smooth,
But I totally knew you’d kiss me, so I was ready.
I was dying to kiss you back.”
“Izar, if I went back in time and prevented your death,
What would you do?”
“Dude, I would kiss you until your lips bled.”

I lit a candle shaped like a number one,
And anchored it beside the fondant bike.
“Happy kiss anniversary, Izar.”
I cut a slice, then dug a forkful.
In the flickering light of that lone flame,
Chocolate and cream melted on my tongue.
I savored the blend of rich flavors
And delighted in the textures
Of velvety ganache, smooth frosting,
And the crumbly patches imitating dirt.

Another year with you, my thoughtless girl,
Who had tossed the die without regard
To what your demise might unleash,
Leaving the heart that adored you dead.
As for my wish, I hoped that both of us
Would plunge into a bottomless lake
And hold hands while we sank,
Until the weight of water crushed us,
And everything turned black.

---

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Sally Cinnamon” by The Stone Roses, and “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground.

You may be wondering if I have changed the title of this story. Nope, just a case of the Mandela effect. Now seriously, I did change the damn title for reasons that I probably shouldn’t bother explaining, but that for some reason will: while “Love of My Life” refers both to the song that sparked this story as well as to the unending grief that the narrator endures, that title didn’t capture the remaining oddity of this tale, from the unrealistic dream of Izar Lizarraga to the increasingly hallucinatory tone of the story. “Love of My Life” makes one picture a straight romance, while “Motocross Legend, Love of My Life” could make one stop and wonder about the strange pairing. You know, assuming anybody cares. Anyway, I just prefer it like this.

• Previous part (10)
• Next part (12)

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).

---

During my fifteen minutes of quiet,
A respite from scrubbing greasy dishes,
Folding laundry, tidying up toys,
And chasing after a toddler who found joy
In turning the apartment upside down,
I retreated to our fifth-floor balcony,
And tried to settle into the bistro-style chair.
A pair of seagulls whirled over the rooftops.
I took a deep breath of the afternoon chill,
Bracing myself to confront my scarred wounds.

On the table, I rested the old tape recorder,
Already obsolete by the late nineties.
I flipped my sketchbook to a blank page,
And beside it I lined up my graphite pencils.
I adjusted the headphones to eclipse the world,
Then dared to press play on the recorder,
Inviting you in.

Your brisk teenage voice, vibrant and infectious,
Hit my insides like a rock smashing
Through a frozen lake.
An ache surged, a relentless wave,
That threatened to ravage the shores of my self
With memories too potent to withstand.

“Welcome back, stellar listeners,
To another thrilling episode of ‘Izar’s Takeover.’
I’m Izar, your DJ and host, accompanied
By the one, the only, Captain of the Cosmos!”
“Hey, folks. Who do we have beaming in
For today’s intergalactic interview?”

My fingers reacquainted themselves
With the textures of the pencil,
An extension of my nervous system,
While the fifteen-year-old cassette
Hissed and crackled.

“Hold onto your space helmets!
Today, we’re delving deep into the psyche
Of the fierce, formidable Asuka Langley,
A.K.A. the Crimson Devil,
Ace pilot of Evangelion Unit-02,
And defender of the Tokyo-3 Geofront!
Let’s find out Asuka’s favorite color,
Whether she prefers coffee or beer,
And why she has no friends.”
My teenage self pulled back.
“W-wait, I’m doing Asuka?”
Your giggles rippled the channels of time.
“Yeah, come on, do the prime tsundere.
I’ve noticed the way you stare at her.”
“Don’t make me sound creepy.”

Now that your voice carried me,
My hand drifted of its own accord,
Combining graphite with paper
And fading daylight.

My teenage self deepened his voice.
“Favorite color? Blood-red, of course.
Drinks? Coffee, when it’s arabica;
Beer, if it’s brewed in Germany.”
Struggling not to crack up, you asked,
“And friends?”
“I’ll have you know, Izar-chan,
Everyone else is an inferior specimen
Unworthy of my company.”
“Asuka, are you a cat or a dog person?”
“Penguin. Duh.”
“How many nipples does Eva-02 have?”
“Uh… three? Maybe four?”

“Asuka, you’re famed across the cosmos
For your skill in a biomechatronic superweapon,
But what drives you to stand atop as the best?”
“I must be the best! If not, then who am I?
My strength is all I have.”
“Beneath that tsundere exterior,
Your heart cares deeply, doesn’t it?
What truly motivates the Crimson Devil?”
“I fight to protect pathetic losers
Like my family of plug-suited nimrods.
But deeper than that, I fight for a world
Worth existing in, worth loving,
One where nobody has to feel alone.”

I pushed the stop button,
Cutting off a teenage voice.
My aging hand holding the pencil trembled
As my heartbeat pounded in my ears.
On the page, the contour of your face,
Along with the shape of your eyes,
Your nose, and your parted lips
Smiling mischievously,
Had manifested
As if through a blinding whiteout.

What had we been, Izar?
A boy and a girl, alone together.
Too bright, too bold, too brave.
A nova, a celestial collision.
The blood in our veins
Had flowed in a single stream.

A gaze bored into me like a needle.
My wife, wrapped in a bathrobe,
Loomed in the balcony doorway.
I slid off the headphones, then stared back
Wrung dry, with my scars peeled open.

“Have you forgotten to buy cake mix?” she asked.
After recovering from the jarring intrusion,
I retrieved the crumpled grocery list from the garbage.
“Well, maybe I didn’t write it down,” she said,
“But I definitely told you about needing cake mix.
Run down to the store and get it, please.”
How come the moment I could finally rest,
Some chore sprung up, one that couldn’t wait?

In a dream, my lawyer-wife’s belly
Grew and shrunk in rapid cycles.
She carried her organs bundled in her arms:
A bloody tangle of intestines,
A pulsing brain,
A heart-shaped piece of coal.
Dream-her, scowling, rebuked me.
“You seem like a high school student
Posing as an adult,
Trying to take responsibility
For the mess you’ve created.”

Dream-her must have taken notes
From the ghost of my wife I conjured up
In daydreams, to build up my defenses
Against forthcoming arguments.
In the realm of matter, we merely coexisted:
Two planets orbiting a toddling star,
Exhausted by their revolutions.
Yet, both of them, my wife and son,
Demanded all my energy and focus,
As if the cramped quarters of my soul
Hadn’t been filled to capacity
By the specter of you.

Some days, I forgot you were dead;
Your laughter echoed through our home
To fade as a ringing in my ears.
Other days, a frigid wave of sorrow crashed
And drowned my surroundings in darkness,
Submerging me to a depth where time slowed,
And light could no longer penetrate.

The nocturnal breeze chilled my face
As I clutched the balcony railing.
To my left, a dark-gray road
Lined with bare-branched trees,
Their limbs stretching upward,
Sliced through apartment buildings
Toward Juncal Church, whose steeple,
Etched against Mount Jaizkibel,
Towered over the Roman museum.
The church’s clock face reflected
A sky punctuated by dazzling stars.

You stood in my periphery,
Hands jammed in your jacket pockets,
Your silhouette rimmed in starlight.
To succeed in our elopement
And fulfill the wish from a decade ago,
To flee this pain-burdened city
Where all I did was waste away,
I only needed to grab your warm hand,
And jump from this fifth-floor balcony
Into the hard asphalt below.
The world would vanish in a puff,
And we would drift upward and upward
To that ocean of forever,
Where we’d get to play among the stars.

I dreamt of our last moment together.
The amber glow of streetlights
Swirled like auroras in the rain-laced air.
You parked in front of the candy shop.
Drenched under the torrential barrage,
We clambered off and removed our helmets.
The taste of rain mingled with your saliva
While the Aprilia’s idling engine rattled
Like a hiker hopping from foot to foot,
Eager to move on.

We wished each other good night.
Thunder growled as you straddled
Your gleaming yellow-and-white bike.
You pulled on your helmet,
Gripped the handlebars,
Lifted the side stand with a kick,
Leaned forward, and twisted the throttle.
Your Aprilia roused with a throaty roar,
Then sped into the rain-engulfed night.

My chest strained with the weight
Of the countless combinations of words
I could have uttered back then
To save your life.

Had I insisted on accompanying you,
We might have woven ourselves into the night,
Resting in the refuge of your childhood bed,
Immersed in each other’s warmth.
Or we might have crashed on the highway,
Where we would have drawn rain-flecked gasps
Lying shattered on the bloodied grass
Amid scrap metal and broken glass.
Either way, I wouldn’t have left you alone.

At the Mount Igueldo amusement park,
A pine tree cast its dappled shade
Upon person-sized mushroom sculptures
With dot-speckled red caps,
And stout stems featuring cartoon faces.
Amid the mushrooms, fairy-tale gnomes
Stood brandishing shovels and pickaxes,
Caught in eternal toils.

Along the tracks, the train came crawling,
Its design imitating a bygone steam locomotive
Painted sky blue, sunny yellow, and candy red.
As the train passed in front of the mushrooms,
My wife, encapsulated in that vibrant world,
Leaned toward our son seated beside her.
“Look who it is, honey. Wave to daddy.”
My beaming boy recognized me as his father,
A beacon in this unfathomable universe,
And waved exuberantly.
A pang tore through me,
But I raised my hand to reciprocate
With a smile bolted onto my face.
If I were living the life intended for me,
I would have never met this family.

One Friday evening, in the living room,
Our toddler, sitting on a playmat
Amid a disarray of plastic blocks,
Replicated his giraffe plush toy
Drawing on a dry-erase board.
My wife and I, slumped on the couch,
Settled on the escape of fast food.
She suggested Chinese,
But in my mind, a hole had opened
Into the vault of memories,
And I remembered a scarlet polo shirt.
I insisted on ordering pizza,
Then looked up the number of that shop
Located downtown, beyond the bridge
That spanned the railroad tracks,
In the sloping Lope de Irigoyen Street,
Where you delivered pizzas
For money and adrenaline
Back when we were teens.

After placing the order, I couldn’t sit still.
I roamed the apartment,
Drank water only to drink more,
Splashed my face at the bathroom sink.
Anxiety built up in my chest,
Sweat beaded on my brow.
I saw you hanging out in front of the shop,
Chatting animatedly with the other drivers.
Once the cooks had finished baking,
You put on your scarlet cap,
Loaded the pizza into the cargo box,
Then rode the scooter across Irún,
Heading to my home.

The buzzer startled me.
I checked the monitor:
The building’s front door swung shut.
A minute later, the doorbell rang.
Heart lodged in my throat,
A foolish and fraying part of me
Hoped against everything I knew
That time would fold upon itself.
I stumbled to the entrance,
Paused, took a shaky breath,
And peered through the peephole.
There you stood, sixteen again,
Clad in the scarlet cap and polo shirt,
Balancing a pizza box on your palm.

My heart sputtered back to life,
And I threw the door open.

As I gazed into those chocolate eyes,
A wave of vertigo swept over me.
Your mouth stretched in a grin,
Exhibiting crooked front teeth.
“One family-size pepperoni pizza.”
Your youthful voice pierced my ribcage
And stirred the liquifying viscera.

You offered the hot cardboard box,
That smelled of burnt crust and grease.
I realized I held bills.
Your caramel ponytail swayed
As you fished into your fanny pack,
But when you extended the change,
I closed your fingers around the coins
With my larger, trembling hand.
“Oh, that’s my tip?” you chirped.

A lump welled up in my throat,
One I couldn’t swallow nor breathe past.
“Enjoy your pizza, sir,” you said,
Then tipped your cap as a goodbye,
And trotted down the stairs.

My lips quivered.
The back of my eyeballs burned.
The pizza box tilted downward
And thudded onto the floor.
I hunched over and covered my face.
The dam containing a lifetime’s laughter
Creaked, cracked, and burst.

---

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “K” by The Clientele, and “Diez años después” 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.