Equation

I closed my eyes and repeated in a rhythmic manner, at least a million times six hundred and forty-two thousand, four hundred and fifteen times, that I didn't want you anymore. I know, I know I could simplify this equation, but the complexity is in line with our story, although maybe I am too foolish to believe that there is something too complex for someone who loves math like you…

"My heart is with you" was the damn phrase you sent me. Your message arrived on a tumultuous August 13th. It was too late. Late enough to extrapolate my bedtime. Before I could reply, another message came with a smiley face: "you forgive me, I forgive you and in the end we were fine."

Unlike you, I didn't smile.

I didn't smile because there was no forgiveness in that. Because we were free and it was okay if you had kissed someone else in front of me and I, with all my illusory cloak of maturity that covered the childishness that inhabited me, had also kissed someone else. The problem was that I did it to make myself equal to you or even, who knows, to get even. And I was not like that. I was not like you.

...I always wanted to ask if your mathematical reason makes you lose sensitivity, because I, a mere student of literature, I think I already lost mine a long time ago. And since you only believe in numbers and hard evidence, do the actual proof yourself. Take a paper and start writing your incredible formulas that seem to have no end and see if even with the infinity of numbers you still can't find a formula that explains why we still insist on each other...

That night, I rolled from side to side in my bed. Everything seemed so meaningless after the lights went out, the party music was muted, and there was only my own presence. I've always been hungry for you. No matter how much I had, I always seemed to want more and that was understandable, considering that you never seemed ready to give yourself up with an intensity that came close to being considered sufficient.

From time to time, I could say with all certainty that, in truth, it was not a question of being ready or not, but of having the pleasure of always seeing me return, longing for the next touch, the next sentence with one or another feeling, because my feelings for you escaped any and all control, and left me no trace of sanity.

No matter how many times I went, the turns always seemed worth it. It wouldn't matter how much you hurt me for weeks if we had at least a two-hour truce in our little world.

Anyway, when reality slammed the door, there was no poetry to save our love. Not even on paper was it beautiful. And it burned everything inside my chest. And in the silence of the night, in my empty room, in the gap that life has given me to let sanity in, I got rid of you. Nothing else in the world mattered, because there was no trace of you inside me anymore.

"I miss you," was the best you could manage, two days after a silence never witnessed by both of us. And it all came back like an avalanche. And I had traces of you everywhere. There was a little bit of you everywhere. There was so much of you that I could hardly find myself.

"Could you say something better than that, so I wouldn't feel so stupid forgiving someone who didn't even ask for forgiveness?" I replied without any trace of irony.

"No, my missing is enough."

I thought I would tell you that I was sorry that your excessive fear did not allow you to show your feelings for me back.

When you was lost and stopped at my door, it was despair, but when you knew where to go and still knocked on my door at three in the morning, it was almost love. When you felt alone and called me, claiming to want to hear my voice, it was loneliness, but when you was at a party in the middle of the night and called me screaming "how I wanted you here now!", It was almost love. When you said at the height of your sobriety "you can love me that I love you back", it was provocation, but when you could barely formulate a sentence and still struggle to be able to say "how I like you, baby", it was almost love.

Almost, almost, almost...

Anyone could see the "I love you" hidden between your lips, as you struggle to swallow it as if these simple words would burn you if you tried to speak them.

At that moment, I just wanted to say it all at once. Nobody knows you more than I do, and even with your way of escaping any kind of truth like this, I know you would have been lost.

However, it was never my intention to make you get lost.

"Whatever. Where are we going today?"

...if I were you, I would give up formulas. I would throw it all away, because while you spend your time going over numbers and numbers and numbers, scratching out new formulas and looking for the answer, you refuse to understand the simplest things. You make a point of pretending that it is too complex for you. And I always make a point of standing next to you in the calculations. But you're always saying that letters and numbers don't mix, and putting me on the other side. The truth is that it doesn't take a calculator, papers full of numbers, or absurd expressions to know that we don't need a reason to keep coming back to each other. I hate you for this. I hate you because you make your numbers not apply to that equation, while my letters make it all too obvious: I love you."