a short story of how we fell in love written by me
Madrid can wait
I. Every beginning eventually comes to an end... but eventually came too soon
"I feel like you're not coming back," Laura said.
"No, I'll only be in Santa Marta for a few days," Ben said.
"Okay."
Ben gently stroked her black hair, tucked it behind her ear, and gave her a kiss.
"I'll come back, I promise."
Eleven months later, obliviousness weighted far more than memories. Messages and video calls could never replace a good back massage, one of those that feel like a mix of tickling and massage, like a mini-orgasm. And what had happened? Laura's country had gone to shit. So much so that they stopped issuing visas to leave, pensions were gone, and a group of proud landowners armed with guns and cocaine had come into power. Foreigners fled as soon as the beheaded protesters appeared on the front page of newspapers (back when they still had press freedom). Laura was one of the last ones to escape.
"Welcome aboard Air France flight 423, direct service from El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá to Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris."
Laura sighed deeply. She made it; no one could take away her future now. During airport security, one of those neo-nazi-looking policemen had put her through an X-ray machine and searched her more thoroughly than they searched anyone on those planes from Buenaventura to Central America. Now that everything was going well, she decided it was time to open the message Ben had sent her hours before.
"I'm going to visit you in Bordeaux in three days."
II. Electric Love
"We're not going to be anything more than friends," Laura replied to Ben's message.
"OK."
It's strange to see an ex. Even stranger when you've convinced yourself that you no longer want anything to do with them, even if they didn't do anything wrong and it was just life that pulled you apart. Now, trapped for at least five days in a nine-square-meter room, they couldn't afford awkward silences. How do you silence a silence? With a game, of course. It had to be cool like "truth or dare" or "never have I ever," but those were too basic for Laura. For some reason, she still wanted to impress Ben.
"Let's play something with my tarot cards. Let's tell a story with each card that comes up," Laura said.
"But isn't tarot like black magic?"
"No... well, the person who made this deck was Aleister Crowley, who was an occultist and sort of a wizard, but he wasn't evil. That's a stereotype."
"Okay, how do we play?"
"We'll each draw a card randomly and tell a story from our lives, the first one that comes to mind when we see the card. You go first."
Laura refilled their glasses with red wine while Ben drew a card. Five of swords. "Defeat," said the card.
"Okay... I'm not really sure why I'm here... I know I wanted to see you. Let's see, the story... in the past few months, I've felt 'defeated,' like the card. I was working at a supermarket, and that's when the panic attacks started."
"I'm sorry. That's terrible."
"Yeah, but I don't think I have the right to feel this way. When I see my parents' life, your life, and compare it to mine, a happy life without having to struggle for anything... that's why I feel so lost.
Ben lets out an ironic laugh. "I hate red wine, you know? But drinking it with you feels strangely good. Wow, I must be drunk already, here I am complaining about my white-european problems while your country is falling apart."
"We all have the right to feel things, Ben." Laura takes her glass.
"Cheers. To finding ourselves," Laura says.
"Cheers." Ben kisses her. Laura feels as if a taser touched her from her upper to lower lips. Ben feels that same taser gave him a little bit of a desire to fight for something. In France, there was a curfew at six in the evening every night. Very early. It wasn't that Ben and Laura always followed it, but generally, that was the time they returned to their residence in Pessac to have the 1 euro cafeteria meal. On the days they couldn't make it (which was most of the time), Laura cooked pasta. Tomato pasta, chicken pasta, with blue cheese, camembert, brie, everything. Ben and Laura loved pasta. Plus, eating pasta is not like eating that plastic food from the cafeteria. Pasta is an experience. First, Laura cooks it with her special touch of olive oil, pepper, salt, and love. Second, pasta always goes with wine. Third, pasta is the appetizer for dessert, a spoonful of Nutella for Laura and Baguette and Nutella for Ben. Fourth, Nutella is the appetizer for the real dessert: making love.
Those two months, Laura and Ben made love so much that one day a neighbor on their floor left them a note on the door, "Hi! I know asking you not to have SEX all the time is not hard. I am a student and I would like to be able to concentrate and rest. 😊 THANKS." Ben and Laura laughed too much that night. And then, of course, they made love.
Post- It note we found on the door of our 9m2 CROUS room in Bordeaux.
III. Berlin- Bordeaux- Madrid
Ben hated the weather in Bordeaux, that wind that was overwhelming for him and made him wear a scarf, but for Laura, it was refreshing. Ben hated the French, he always complained that they were too pretentious and always pretended not to speak English. And everything was so expensive. But there was something that made him stay and delay his trip week after week. Sometimes it was going shopping with Laura so that his wardrobe had things other than sweatshirts. Sometimes it was going to parties with English exchange students who showed him that Germans were a bit boring. Sometimes it was taking trips to other French cities that he supposedly hated but while he was there, he smiled more than in his entire last year in Berlin, his home. Maybe France was his new home. Maybe Laura was his new home. Maybe Ben was maturing in a place where all he knew how to say was oui, oui, baguette. There are people who say that if something scares you, you should go for it because that's the only way you'll win. Maybe those people are right. Ben lasted two months and two days in Bordeaux, and on March 7th, he went to Madrid to learn Spanish. And the return date to Bordeaux? God knows. And Laura could be very messy and crazy and everything, but she had already promised herself that long-distance and uncertainty were not for her. Her little heart had been broken many times. So, after eighteen days of Ben being in Madrid, Laura, in tears and self-harm, wrote to him, "I love you, but I can't be with someone who doesn't love me. I won't let you make empty promises to me again." And Ben didn't know how to respond. His response was to return to Bordeaux the next day.
IV. FUCK, I LOVE HER
"Why did you come back?" Laura asks.
"I don't know."
"We can't be together if we're not together, in real life," Laura said.
"I don't like France. The only reason I'm here is because of you. I need a purpose," Ben responds, his breathing already quite heavy.
"We can make plans."
"You know I hate plans."
"Then we can't do anything. Just end it. You came here just to end things with me," Laura spits out the words as if they were a bitter drink.
"No. I don't want to end it with you."
"Then what? You don't want to end it with me, but you don't want to be with me. You don't love me."
"Why do you always jump to conclusions? I didn't say that. I don't know if I love you. I just know that when we fought and you told me you couldn't handle this anymore, I knew I had to come back even if I didn't have the PCR test to come to France, even if I got fined, arrested, nothing mattered.. And that scares me, fuck, that the closest thing I've found to a purpose is you, that what I feel wasn't a realization of FUCK, I LOVE HER, but rather that you snuck up into my life without me realizing it, and now I can't imagine not having you in it."
"All my life, I was the girl that guys left after enjoying her for a few months. But you came back. I don't think I could live almost three months in a tiny nine-square-meter room with cockroaches and a bed where we can only fit sideways, cuddling, with anyone else. My self-esteem was rock bottom, and you showed me that I can be loved and that I'm not just a piece of flesh to fuck, and that fucking with love is like all the drugs in the world combined. I spent so much time surrounded by death in my country that I wasn't living, I was just surviving. I want to live, I want to fuck until the neighbor leaves us a post-it note on the door telling us to lower the noise, I want to be politically incorrect and mock those we don't like, I want to get tested for std's, and I can only do all of that with you."
"Let's make it work."
"Yes." Ben and Laura were a sea of tears and snot at this point. Oh, oh, oh, because neither a paramilitary dictatorship nor a pandemic break the heart as much as love does.
The first Tik Tok we ever made together. After this, we started a couple account which went viral and we amassed 60.000 followers in 3 months.
Ben with the Jacket I gave him for this Birthday on 27.03.2021
Ben's letter for my Birthday- 29.03.2021
Drawing Ben made of us sitting at the Sansouci Castle in Potsdam. This is the place where we had our best date and he considered getting the word "sansouci" tattooed- May 2021
Jar that Ben brought for my family when we moved to Colombia. It was made by his step grandmother.- July 2021
Video I made for Ben for Love and Friendship day (Valentine's Day in Colombia) - September 2021
Note Ben left in the fridge door after fixing the Bordeaux magnet pt 1- September 2021
Note Ben left in the fridge door after fixing the Bordeaux magnet pt 2- September 2021
excerpts from the letter I wrote him when we broke up on October 27, 2021
"But if you love me why’d you leave me? I never want to love again. I’d do anything for you. And you did for me, but now I feel guilty and I want to help you but I can’t fix you. I wish with all my heart I could just make everything go away. I love you one, two, three, four, five, infinite. This night feels so quiet. I had never felt such a silence in this room. And it makes me sick. My biggest fear came true and I just feel hollow, like there’s a hole I can never fill. You’re the only one who could. I feel stupid writing this, childish, but it’s how I feel. I also feel anger. Why did you ruin something so beautiful, I don’t say perfect because it wasn’t and nothing is, but it was beautiful and human and deep. So fucking deep I could feel like sometimes we really were Siamese twins and were connected. Sometimes I felt like you were my little child and I wanted to protect you from the world. Sometimes I was the little child and wanted to be protected.",
"Obviously I had already imagined all my future with you. Living together in Germany while you studied and I worked and being able to retribute you some of all the sweet attentions you gave me here. Make you breakfast, organize, give you a kiss goodbye when I would go early for work. And then later, you proposing me in a creative way to make me feel like it was in Central Park, all our friends at the wedding party, lover by taylor swift playing in the background, a honeymoon in Italy, meeting the rest of your family at a Christmas party. I feel robbed."
"Even my parents who hate everyone love you."
"After you left, (and after smoking a cig) I wanted to get out of the room. I didn’t want to stay and cry and mop(...) I needed to leave (or to escape?) I needed to live. So I went out and 2. I wasn’t scared to go out alone at night. I walked alone for two hours in la Candelaria at night. You would’ve been proud of me. And while walking all I thought about was writing. I think I'm a writer otherwise I wouldn’t be thinking that and thinking of sentences in my head when the love of my life broke up with me."
When Ben came back saying he wanted us to get back together.- late November 2021
The first flowers he ever gave me- Valentine's Day (14th February) 2020
Last flowers he ever gave me- Valentine's Day (14th February 2022)
He wanted the bouquet of flowers to be anonymous because we had already broken up but the flower shop made a mistake and sent his last name as a note.
Video Ben made for my 22nd Birthday. We were broken up for 5 months at this point. - 29.03.2022
My tickets to go to Marseille, France. Here was the last time we ever saw each other- 09.09.2022