I could not hear him.
I stepped away from my friends and pressed the phone closer to my ear.
New Orleans continued around me.
Music through an open doorway.
Rain shining on the street.
Someone laughing nearby.
I asked him to repeat himself.
I still could not hear him.
Later, a message arrived.
Something close to:
I can’t do this with you anymore.
I have forgotten every word he said.
I remember every word I wrote.
I had always been the one who left.
I knew when the air had changed. I knew when affection had begun to turn into something else. I knew how to reach the door before anyone could close it behind me.
But I had known him for decades.
He belonged to the long history of my life, and I had mistaken history for proof.
There had already been reasons to leave.
I knew them.
Still, I stayed.
That was the part I could not forgive.
Not that he ended it.
That I had remained long enough for him to.
That night, I went to Chuck’s Bar.
I sat outside.
By then, the screen had begun to divide itself in two. I remember closing one eye, trying to make the words stay where I put them.
Chuck’s Bar
I long to be something
stronger
than a woman
who once loved you.
September 6, 2015
Four lines.
Nothing about New Orleans. Nothing about the call. Nothing about the message.
Only the wish to become someone else.
For years, I believed the poem was about him.
It was written against the woman who had stayed.
I thought she had failed me. I wanted to become stronger than she was because I did not yet know how to forgive her.
Years passed.
He asked me to forgive him.
I did.
Today, we are friends.
I still see him tenderly.
That would have been impossible to the woman sitting outside Chuck’s Bar, closing one eye against the doubled screen.
She hated him.
God, she hated him.
But time returned him to his proper size.
When I read those four lines now, I no longer hear a woman asking to become stronger.
I hear a woman leaving herself a way back.
I have forgotten every word he said.
I remember every word I wrote.
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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