He was imposing with every gesture he made, with every look he made at one thing or another, so that he often didn't even get to say anything, that I understood what was going to happen. His strong blue eyes, which I always likened to the unknown and the devilish desire to explore within me, also helped him, because I would not have stopped to probe his depths. I looked him in the eye and found myself in realms untouched by me until then. And without indicators. He had forgotten one thing in his haste to live. He had forgotten that when you put barriers in your soul, it makes sense to put signs for those who eagerly began to chase through your life. There I hit him hard and he shook all my thoughts for the future, maybe since then I don't even dare to think about the future.
Otherwise, he was a simple man, as complicated as he was. From clothes to very short hair. He seemed to do everything simply, he seemed to let things go by himself, but how naive I was to think that a man like him would ever fall into the hands of the unpredictable.
He was insensitive to the man through the short decisions he made and getting up from the table. And although it was not the best way to communicate in a couple, they somehow suited each other. Or so I left my impression. He was the man whose name opened doors for you, but he didn't shy away from opening doors with his hand. He was always one step ahead of the others, with many people under him, and he did not seem to have bothered to earn his place, much less that he was striving to maintain it. But the sins on his face were read, his self-reproaches were read aloud, when he told me from time to time about the past. He was the man with a long history, not in years but in life, whom few things surprised in life, and women, I had discovered later, were not among those things.
He was the tired man. He still had leaks and was tired of anticipating movements, tired of juggling situations, tired of feeling. In fact, he was tired of hiding his feelings and canceling his soul. But at the same time, although he seemed to be doing well in my arms, in the end, when he got up, they were just arms and I don't know when he did it, but he seemed to have sworn never to see more than that. He had once noticed that women are a waste of energy and she, the energy, must be saved for important decisions. He said that to parade with your soul in sight is like swimming injured, with blood crawling in an ocean of sharks. Which sharks, although you don't always see them, appear when you smell prey. But I was a poor mermaid on land, singing her last song. He was the man tired of feeling, and I was the woman who stubbornly put his life in it, where she didn't even have it.
You bite and smile. You bite and smile. He would tell me every time, subtly pushing my back to stand upright, his hand opposite the one he was holding me by the hand. He told me every time I went to a place with people I had never met before, but he warned me from the beginning that they were not friends more than they should be. He repeated the same thing to me when I was about to get something, and my fear of failure made me go round and round. And she succeeded, she put her trust in me and made her sit up straight and with her heels firmly in place.
He didn't talk too much or too often about us. He had a problem with time and said we was wasting his time talking about things that were going on. He wasn't a champion in caresses either, he rarely did it and in my mind it meant that he only did them when he felt and not out of complacency. Instead, he liked to hold me when he was just us and his hand when we were with others. And I allowed myself to be his, without further ado.
What I was, what he wanted me to be, I don't even know to this day. But I know that his life was a chessboard, and we women, in the lives of such people, are certainly not the ones making the moves. How much less would we have wanted to be adversaries. I stayed, I waited to find out who we were, but there was only a shadow of what we could have been. Somehow, time and important decisions were a priority in front of a woman's arms, which he did his best not to give them any meaning other than that which two members can have.
