44
Water
T hree days had passed.
Three days since Romeo locked me in his room.
Three days cut off from everything and everyone.
Three days in which I only received his visits at main meals, the same meals that kept me fed, or when I was taken to the bathroom to do my business in front of him, my husband, my jailer.
The number three became one if referring to how I bathed in the shower. I remained bound, and he scrubbed the soap on me without any delicacy, saying he didn’t want his room stinking from my odor.
He refused to treat my wound, just as he refused to listen to my side of the story, no matter how much I tried.
Contempt and indifference had turned him into a granite statue standing in front of me. There was no trace of the love or passion that had once filled his gaze. His dark eyes were a muddy pit in which I drowned.
I tried to kick him, scream at him, spit at him. Anything to get his attention. The response to all my acts was the same: impassivity.
I felt frustrated, especially when that stony silence came as a response.
By the second day, I started feeling unwell. I told him, I asked for clothes and a paracetamol. The response was the same. Nothing.
I didn’t know what time it was; I tracked the days by the meals and the light coming through the window.
I shivered from the cold. My head ached, and nightmares had taken over my nights.
In them, Yuri transformed from a child into a kind of demon with sharp teeth, humming our song while spinning his pistol. I felt uneasy, begging him to return to being himself, my playmate, my beloved brother, to stop his obsession with destroying the Capulets.
A door appeared out of nowhere, and R emerged from it. I wanted to warn him, to scream at him to leave, that he wasn’t safe, I ran and collided with an invisible wall that held me on the other side of a transparent barrier.
My voice wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard I tried, and he didn’t seem to see Yuri, who pulled the trigger and blew his head off in front of me.
I screamed, pounding the wall, which now did shatter under my fists. I ran to him, not caring that the glass cut the soles of my feet, and when I reached R, all that was left was that reproachful gaze that would haunt me forever.
My body convulsed as I woke up, in pain and unable to cover myself. Any kind of movement felt like running a marathon for which I wasn’t prepared.
No one opened the door, no one cared about the ordeal I was going through, I was alone in this, in the end, I had always been alone in everything. Exhaustion once again pulled me into that drowsy state. I knew I would dream the same thing again, yet I couldn’t avoid falling asleep.
When the door to the room slammed against the wall, I wasn’t even aware it was because my last nightmare had coincided with R’s visiting hour. I had no idea if much time had passed since the last visit, or if I had been having one bad dream after another.
My eyelids were too heavy to open and see his frantic face holding the gun.
I was thirsty, and my bones felt like they were about to break. I had never felt so weak and so ill.
I heard a noise. I was too out of it to realize it was his gun hitting the nightstand. Two hands shook me, but I couldn’t respond, I was incapable.
I felt the bindings on my arms being untied.
A small whimper escaped my vocal cords. Too many hours in the same position.
His voice shouting. My body convulsing. Weightlessness. Water.