40- Dreams with crocodiles

When she told me she was on drugs, I was overwhelmed with the urge to cry. The whole house lost its light; there was no music that could turn a wilted flower into something beautiful again. Knowing she was on drugs felt like a hole opening in my chest, feeding on all the feelings that could make a person happy, as if my tongue dried up and nothing could quench my thirst while tears shot out like bullets from my eyes. I was so sad; disappointment crushed my shoulders with its weight and clouded my mind. I could only feel the knot in my throat, leaving me without reason to breathe.

After a couple of hours, I texted Ro, but she didn’t reply. I called her, and she didn’t pick up. I started to think something bad had happened to her; maybe she had overdosed... and tomorrow I would find out. A pain crawled from my throat to my head, gripping my vocal cords; I couldn’t breathe, scream, or swallow. Tears and the drug were the protagonists of that night, that damned dawn that felt eternal.

I wanted to turn off my phone and forget about her, but the mere idea that she might need me and I wouldn’t be there tortured me. Promises like “I’ll never do it again,” “I want to do things right for you,” “You helped me quit that, skinny,” came to my mind, and I broke down into fierce tears. I was surprised by how much it hurt; it hurt so much that the crying burned my face.

It was so true all that crap about drugs not only sinking the one who consumes them but also those who live through it closely. I wanted to get high too, forget all this pain, disappear, die to reach the state of calm and indifference to pain that my body could have. I felt so dead; every part of my being was dying. I wondered if everything would really pass tomorrow. If I could tell her I loved her again without feeling like I was being torn apart inside by remembering so many broken promises, so many words filled with flowers and magic that now seemed locked in a drawer from which I had swallowed the key.

My twisted, self-destructive mind was wide awake amid such emotional chaos, with crying as the protagonist. I seriously thought about ending my life, an idea I dismissed when I imagined a pain in my chest and a tube in my stomach after a failed suicide attempt. I thought about cutting my veins; it wouldn’t be elegant for my style, it would stain my whole room, and in case I survived, I would be left with horrible scars. If everything went well and I died, they would bury me with yellow skin and cut wrists. The poor woman committed suicide and looked haggard to top it off. I opted to sit on the floor and hug the pillow until I drowned in tears.

That night, for the first time in my life, I wished I didn’t love Rocío. I wished I could help her without what was happening to her affecting me, but it was too late; it always had been. I always worried about her. I promised myself that night I would never leave her alone. I would never leave her alone; I would set aside my feelings and be there for her whenever she needed me. I would love her until she asked me not to, and even then, I knew I would continue loving her.

And I also knew I could never keep that promise, to set my feelings aside and only feel gratitude toward the person who taught me to love. I would always love her, even when she shouted to the world that it was no longer so. A small electron had settled in my chest since that first kiss, and I couldn’t have her close without that latent current awakening in my atria. That magnetism passed through my ventricles so fast that oxygen wouldn’t reach my brain when her eyes met mine and she smiled at me with mercy and admiration reigning in her gaze. The only way I had known to have her in my life was by living her, letting myself be filled with everything she created within me. Forgive me, Rocío, now that you breathe another air and seem to come from another world even when you still hide all my worlds in your beauty marks, I am so sorry, my love.

I called her again around four-thirty in the morning; she didn’t answer, and I texted her, but her WhatsApp was deactivated. I panicked; I couldn't stop crying, and I felt a tingling sensation running through the tips of my fingers, hands, and feet. I wondered if she really loved me; why had she done this to me? Why was I lying on the floor crying in these conditions? Sometimes I wished I could go back to being the way I was before, when Rocío wasn’t in my life; the memory is barely perceptible... I was empty... without poetry. And thus, it confirmed to me that I only lived to love her; it didn’t matter that she let me down, that she didn’t love me, that she slept with other women; I couldn’t love anyone else.

Finally, I learned to value solitude; I now knew that after her, I would never be alone again. I couldn’t be alone because I would think of her so much that I would never know what it meant to be without her, not even now that I was with the connections deactivated. I found myself mentally beside her on that unbearable night; I was always by her side. Nothing was real but her invisibility.

That Monday dawn was the longest of my life. I wrote and couldn’t find myself in the letters. I bombarded her phone with messages and calls, and she never replied. I didn’t understand how I could hurt so much, how I could face a relationship with someone who had been doing these things from the beginning. I understood that my subconscious hoped to change her. Knowing that I could do it again was an option I discarded when I believed in her word. I never thought I would hurt her so much that she would go back to using drugs; I knew it wasn’t my fault; they were decisions we make, and she knew what she was doing when she decided to do it; however, I felt so guilty. I had pushed her over a cliff. I had spent so long avoiding it, avoiding suffering for love, but here I was, wanting to die because my beloved had threatened her life, mine, and our precious love, the one that was born from me and understood nothing of distances, jealousy, disappointments, or anger.

Six in the morning. I called her again. She didn’t pick up, and I ran out of tears. I turned on the light and went to the bathroom to wash my face. I found my face in the mirror with no expression at all; it wasn’t me; I was sure I had stopped existing. I lay down on the bed. Again, that feeling of emptiness invaded me; I felt nothing. My brain had forgotten how to give the correct orders; calm and tranquil, I couldn’t think.

I fell asleep.

The next four hours, I dreamed of Rocío in a series of chases that threatened the death of both of us. I remember a dream that felt very real, where I found myself trapped in a room built over a wooden bridge in a lake; a ferocious beast wanted to devour me, and I was stuck in the wooden compartment floating in the pond. Rocío was in a kind of small port, and a crocodile was lurking outside the room; it was enormous, and I felt I would die being devoured by that terrible animal.

Hours later, I woke up, had a coffee that I ended up vomiting effortlessly upon remembering what had happened, and got ready to go to the university. I had a poetry workshop that afternoon; when everything abandoned me, a part of her lived on in poetry.

The sun was so hidden that afternoon among the clouds that there was no way to tell if it had set or not. In my permanent zombie state, upon arriving at the Catholic University, I walked to the university lab. At that hour, the labs were always empty; I took a computer and sat in one of the seats at the back of the room. Like a dead person in life, I googled what it meant to dream of a crocodile. There was an extensive list of possible meanings; they all agreed that it was a sign that situations and people would come into your life that would harm you.

Dreaming of seeing a crocodile means you must protect yourself from hidden dangers that are lurking. Someone close to you is giving you bad advice and trying to make you make a bad decision.

You may be a victim of deceptive situations. The crocodile may represent an aggressive aspect within you that makes you aggressive and harsh with others. It could also mean that someone is being false and hypocritical with you.

Dreaming that you are caught or bitten by a crocodile, or are at risk of doing so, means you will suffer disappointments in love and business. You are afraid to face the problems and obstacles that arise. You believe you will not measure up.

“Well, what a wonder is coming my way…” Rocío called me just as I was starting to read the next definition on the list. I looked up as I became aware of the noise around me to answer the call. I noticed one of the signs that said “Do not take calls in the laboratories.”

“Great,” I murmured sarcastically.

I took the things in front of the computer and carelessly dumped them into my bag, picked up my notebook and the folder from the desk while holding the phone to my ear with the other hand