After the break up, we didn’t see or hear each other for 6 months.

I purely and simply disappeared on her on January 1st, 2014.

We had cheered to the New Year together.

I spent the first day of the year in bed in a fairly poor state. I got up in the evening and put all her belongings/gifts/memories in a big box which I donated to the street.

The day after, I organised an escape to New York for two months. I wish I hadn’t come back from this trip.

In June, I wrote her a letter to tell her what I had been up to all this time.

I was loving her, still. She was regularly visiting me in my dreams.

I found out much later that we randomly happened to be at the same place, at the same time, on the day of our 4th meeting anniversary. We had already been off touch for weeks, when I bumped into her best friend at a tube station where I never go. Months later I was told that she was there too, waiting at another exit.

She wrote me back.

We met on a Saturday, the first day of Summer. She picked me up at the tube station of her new neighbourhood. I had no clue where she had moved.

At the top of an endless escalator, there she was, exactly as I had left her.

We spoke for 12 hours that day. And we spoke for 12 hours the following Saturday.

We were respectively more ourselves without each other, but also left with an unexplainable void that wouldn’t go away.

All our pores were sweating the chemical remnants of how much we had adored each other, long before love had turned into violence.

My sister summarised it well: “Il y a de l’amour dans le gaz”. (Untranslatable).

We tried to be friends for 4 weeks. Saturday to Saturday.

Many things happened, it was all exhaustingly bouncing, as if we were dancing an endless tango.

I saw her for the last time on the 19th of July, one week after my birthday. The day after I was told that my brother almost died. I was pale and spaced out.

Late at night, she dragged me to a bar with live music. I was somewhere else, battling the multiple waves of shock that had been assailing me for months.

We smoked and drank.

I told her: “I love you, still. We won’t be together again, right?” I love making questions when I know the answer. Mantra for miracles.

She didn’t say yes or no, as usual. Just maintaining me in that sentimental fog.

Most ironic is that I am the one who left.

We stayed till 4 or 5 in the morning before looking for a way to reach our respective home. I needed to collapse under the eyes of no one.

She wanted to walk me to my bus. I just wanted her to get the fuck away. I begged her to get into a cab, which she finally did.

When she slammed the door of the car, a feeling of relief triggered in my brain.

Dawn was breaking and I burst into tears on the street.

I instinctively knew it was the last time I would ever see her.

That’s the last time I ever saw her.