Pop! The sound came first, but it was the
smell, the familiar smell that surrounded her after the sonorous pop!, the one that took her flying from
the –not-as-uncomfortable-as-she-thought- bus where her bones have been resting
for the last couple of hours to her kitchen. Or was it his? It had these yellow
spots all over the wall she suspected were from splashed oil; she could
definitely remember that, so it should be hers, because his kitchen was sky blue and of a clean almost clinical. Scorching
toasts in the frying pan, not by choice, but because her toaster had suffered
the crowning accident of a totem built out of the washing machine, microwave, a
little oven and on the top of the sculpture, the toaster. He hated to cook at
her place, it had not space enough for both when he wanted to prepare
gin-tonics in the middle of the day, after spending the whole night watching Lost episodes one after another.
In the evening, around seven o'clock in the afternoon,
she used to hug him and in doing so she felt inside a Marvin Gaye and Tammi
Terrel song. To hear him mutter was like feeling the hum of the rhythm,
although she never knew Tammi and Marvin's lyrics by heart. He closed his eyes,
falling asleep a few inches from her face and the image always turned blurry in
spite of her trying not to lose focus. In these moments, sometimes, she
discovered something new. The wrinkles of his permanently furrowed frown, his
front teeth, separated by a measly millimeter, barely visible at first glance.
Or even his earlobe, a different temperature, in discordance with the rest of
his head. Cold. The thickness of each of his dark hairs.
It was funny how at the time she used to fear forgetting
his face, although it was not his face exactly, the panic lay in failing to
recall the feeling of it, the noisy song of partying floating in the air every
time they shared the same room all along. And, yet, there she was, surprised of
how she didn't mean at all to forget him until the exact moment the chewing gum
popped. In fact, it turned out being so easy...
To be continued...
