Chapter 14: Before to sending her the invitation to my life

After sending a friend request to Psyche and listening to "Rubia Sol Morena Luna" all week, I had no sign of her. I stopped speaking about her out loud, and silence gradually swallowed my hopes of finding her. The exams were looming over me, and with so many parties and alcohol, I had piled up an enormous stack of books to study. That’s how I spent the entire Wednesday afternoon studying literature.

I greatly enjoyed reading literature and poetry; I was passionate about writing. Sometimes I felt that the only way to understand what was happening inside me was by taking a sheet of paper, a receipt, or anything I had on hand; only then could I give shape to my emotions. I enjoyed journaling, and beyond activating my writing, it was a practice I found therapeutic.

While studying the classics of romanticism, I discovered that Psyche made me feel exactly like a romantic, like Lorca or Baudelaire: marked by the idea of solitude, exaltation of the inner self, individualism, selfishness in my own feeling of love. “The romantic poet seeks a dark environment in solitude.” All of that described me. I was aware that Psyche was a stranger, unreachable, who didn’t know my name or the desire to kiss her that I felt since that night. Despite that, I clung to an idea that didn’t exist in reality; I kept hoping to see her appear again, to stop dreaming that she was by my side and make it real. That’s how I lived, with a feeling of loneliness, wanting to have someone who barely knew of my existence. I had become quite the romantic.

I discovered that I liked romantic literature, especially classic novels. Reading them made me feel close to my adored stranger, to Psyche. I read poems by Walt Whitman or Edgar Allan Poe and watched movies like "Romeo and Juliet" or "The Dark Side of the Heart." I became a bit obsessed with García Lorca and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. After a few days, different Rocíos I had sent friend requests to on Facebook began accepting me; I deleted them with disappointment upon realizing that none of them were my Romantic Lyric. I just hoped she would accept me and wasn’t one of those people who only used Facebook once a year.

The next day in class, we were to express what romanticism was in prose in five lines for an exercise before the final exam. When the literature teacher asked me to share my text, evoking romanticism, I blushed as I stood up from my desk and read it aloud to the entire Social Communication class:

This Holy Week, I met my Romantic Lyric. I don’t know how she came to me, but it hurts every pore of my skin now that I’ve discovered that cold exists because I don’t have her. “What are you doing here?” she asked me with her gaze before I heard the whisper of her voice. We warmed up; she touched me, molded me in her arms, made me her accomplice, and let me go with a pile of questions that began with the initial of her name. I met her without really knowing her.

The prose expressed in images and small actions what had happened. At the end of the class, I shared the text along with a photograph and uploaded it to my Facebook profile. To accompany the text, I chose a photograph of a naked woman from behind, with a cigarette in her hand at shoulder level. Surely this is what Psyche would look like naked smoking one of her green selvedge cigarettes.

The rain was falling hard that night. Would I see Psyche again? Would I sleep with her? I had the feeling that I was great in bed. The soundtrack of that night, when we danced, plays in my head every time I think about it. That opportunity to be happy that lasted a second while she looked at me with ardor and fury, reminding me that there was something that makes us feel less alone, further away from death, or perhaps indifferent to death. This was how I found myself facing life thinking about a stranger and the wasted opportunities to ask her out. I took a cigarette out of an old green Marlboro box, the last one I kept in my dresser drawer when anxiety got the better of me. I still hadn't completely gotten rid of that bad habit that, along with my eating disorders, had cost me Bulimia, from which I was recovering.

I took my orange lighter and smoked a cigarette in my underwear, I looked out the window, and I thought that somewhere out there was my Romantic Lyric. If only I could find her and she would let me make her lyrical, music in a fleeting encounter, I would be extremely happy.I had seriously thought about going to that reggae festival, but it was impossible to compete against Adriana, they both smoked weed and you could deduce at a glance that they had more similar tastes and more things in common. I have never tried Marijuana, and I would feel out of place at a Reggae festival where the only thing I would probably recognize would be the song “One Love” by Bob Marley. Adriana and I were nothing alike, she was scruffy and quite masculine, although she had delicate hands and an elegant look. I was the closest thing to a feminine and passive lesbian. I looked at my bedroom mirror, suspended on the wall in front of the window, I looked at my pert butt and my wavy hair covering my chest. I sighed, before Meiby I had only had two lovers, and at 19 years old, I had never had an orgasm, nor had I been with a man.