Chapter 45 Echo #2
“Look, Marín, that’s my problem, okay? Who cares what name I want to give it, what I want to call it? It’s over. I fucked it up, and I didn’t know how to tell her or ask for help, and we went to shit.”
“You went to shit because you have a totally toxic way of looking at relationships, Gus.” And I swear I’m not saying it to hurt him.
I just…want him to know so he can do something about it.
“Love yourself a little more, dude. Don’t look for reassurance where you are now because most of the time, you’re going to end up alone.
In the worst-case scenario, alone and with some venereal disease that’ll kill you. ”
“Yeah?” He raises his eyebrows. “What about you, Marín? What about your relationship with Coco?”
“What about yours?” I counterattack.
“Ah, now that I recognize. I do that a lot, Marín, the whole dodging-the-issue thing, blaming everyone else, defending myself with an attack. You wanna be like me? Is that it? Because you’re going down a great path. In two days, you’ll have dethroned me as idiot of the year.”
“Now you’re the one who doesn’t get it, Gus. I don’t know if you ever will.”
“Explain it to me.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “At least try.”
“I violated the intimacy and trust we had, and…I’m mortified because I did it the wrong way, there’s no way to fix it, and…you know her. She’s forever, dude. She’s forever, and she deserves someone who loves her like hell. Can I do that?”
“Look, Marín, I went out with her for a year. I know her pretty well. I’ve seen her laugh up a lung, cry out of rage, dream out loud, suffer, come—”
“Okay,” I cut him off. “I get it.”
“I know her intimately too, but…I never thought she was forever or that she was the ultimate girl. She deserves someone who loves her like hell, you’re right, but I never felt like I had this heavy responsibility you’ve imposed on yourself.”
“Because you’re an irresponsible dick,” I retort.
“Cool. So what are you? Because the only thing that makes sense to me is that you think she’s forever because for you she is.
It has nothing to do with her. Coco doesn’t have any labels on her; she wasn’t born marked to be ‘the kind that’s forever or not at all.
’ And, like…she never has been for any other guy.
Don’t you get it? That idea is all about you, about how you see yourself, not her nature and her…
I dunno, her fucking DNA. You’re out of your mind in love, you bastard, and you’re losing her. ”
“So what do you care?”
“Let me do at least one good thing this year, okay?”
“You just wanna win points with Blanca, don’t you? You want it to slip out in front of her how sweet you were to come help me—”
“No.” Gus gets very serious. He actually seems nervous. “You have to swear, Marín, on your sister. She’s never going to know we saw each other or talked or anything… Do you understand me? She’s never going to hear you talking about me.”
I furrow my brow. That does throw me off. “Why?”
“Because she’ll forget.” He smiles sadly. “What I did, how much it hurt… She’ll forget if she never hears my name, if she doesn’t hear from me, if she doesn’t see me. And I want to give her that. I owe it to her.”
“You fucked Aroa when you were with her,” I say. “And while Aroa was with me.”
“Yes, and I’m sorry, but Blanca and I weren’t together.
We weren’t… Not in the strictest sense, okay?
The thing with Aroa was a mistake, and I knew it even as I was doing it, but if it helps, I think we both needed to show ourselves that we could do it.
Aroa always…” He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“She was always really jealous of Coco. You know that better than anyone. It’s sad, dude, but it wasn’t even about you or me.
Her struggle was always about being better than Coco, having everything she wanted or had ever had. ”
“What’s your excuse then? You hooked up with your friend’s girlfriend.”
“My excuse is that I’m a jerk. I don’t know if that’s good enough for you.”
“Yeah.” I nod and take a deep breath. “It’s good enough.”
“Marín, here’s the deal: We’re a fucking walking moral of the story.
Life showed us with a bang how fear can destroy anything we love, but…
there are two endings here. On one side, there’s yours, and on the other, there’s mine.
I got stuck on how romantic the pain we were causing ourselves was, and I broke it.
It can’t be fixed, and even I’m aware that it’s over.
But…you haven’t completely fucked it up yet. ”
“It’s too late,” I say harshly.
“Well, you’ll never know if you don’t try.”
“I can’t see her, just like you can’t even say Blanca’s name.”
“Because it lingers on my lips, Marín. If I say it, it lingers…”
Fuck. I put my hands in my hair.
“Tell her you’re an idiot, Marín. Accept it: You are, like we all are sometimes.”
“That won’t fix it.”
“You know something weird about you, Marín? You’re like a fucking movie screen where everything you want is projected, everything you’re really hungry for, but your back is to it and all you can see is the light bouncing off the screen.
Turn around, soak up the film, and tell her about it.
Coco’s not gonna be able to say no to that. ”
“To what?”
“To family,” he says very confidently, almost petulantly. “You’re dying to have a family. You’ve been building one for years. You just never called it that, projecting your desires onto that house. That’s all you have to say—that that was what you wanted all along and you want it with her.”
I don’t say anything. I’m pretty shocked, but I don’t want to admit it out loud. I just want him to leave, to be honest.
“Is that everything?” I shoot him an evasive look.
“No. Last thing: Let her tell you that’s what she imagined too and she’ll find some space for you. Her life doesn’t revolve around you.”
“Don’t fuck around,” I mutter. “You’re the last person I need to mansplain it.”
“What are you talking about?” he says.
“I’m saying I’m not like you, dude. I’m not like you. What I wanted, desired, or imagined doesn’t mean shit to me. All I’m worried about is not being good enough for what she wants from me.”
“Okay, then that’s it.” He straightens up, takes a sip of his latte, and wipes his lip. “God, this stuff is gross. I’m out of here.”
“Great.”
“You’ll probably never see me again in your life.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” I sigh.
“Remember…if she asks, this never happened. And if…if you can somehow stop her from buying my next book, I’d appreciate it.”
“Another chapbook full of arrows?”
“When is poetry not full of arrows?” He smiles jauntily. “By the way…you say you’re not like me, right? Well, prove it.”
As I watch him heading off, he pulls his hood back over his head. The last thing I glimpse before he disappears into the crowd is him tossing his coffee in the trash. I don’t know why I feel bad. Deep down, I loved that bastard. I appreciated him. I admired him. But there’s no going back.
I feel like I just had an extraterrestrial experience, a UFO sighting, a vision, a spectral visitation.
Son of a fucking bitch… He’s right. It was like talking to the ghost of a Marín who never lifts a finger to avoid this fucking nothingness, which, like in The NeverEnding Story, is eating everything that lives inside my chest.
And no…I’m not like Gus.