Fernando

The plane takes off and Alicia thinks: finally.

A tremor of relief passes through her body when finally courses through her veins. Finally. Elbow against the hard plastic of the seat divider, Alicia looks out the window at the receding shores of Salvador. The docks lining the ancient city port shimmer and wink at her.

Alicia knows this is a final goodbye.

There is a joy in taking off, the next stop, the promise of the open road and the limitless possibilities of where to go next. Alicia thinks of Fernando and his sickly sweet lips softly pursed; his easy gait; the sure, straightforward step of an honest man; the way he muttered under his breath every morning that ti je jeta ime, you are my destiny, my life.

Until this morning he didn’t.

Alicia opens the little black notebook and starts scribbling. The lights are off in the cabin and it’s a joy for the heavy darkness to interrupt the space between her eyes and the scratchy moleskin. Her right hand sketches his face: the shapely almond eyes, crow’s feet around grey, ivy-freckled irises. His hair stands up straight and his smile is etched permanently onto his face. He is with her, she can feel his hands grabbing her waist and pushing her up against the kitchen counter.

Even after dumping her like a whore.

There is no pride in love, but, also, no particular attachment, either. Alicia trembles remembering the first time they parted ways on the beach in Japaratinga. It was positively stupid. The sun was setting and his keen, earnest eyes – always so open, inviting you to simply drown – were telling her what she knew in the pit of her stomach would invariably happen.

“I am going to Menaos,” he’d said in his IKEA-construction-manual English, so perfectly European and precise and polished. His accent exaggerated every ai so it sounded not foreign but like he was trying to tell you, really hard, where each vowel in the word truly belonged. Pay attention.

“I am afraid we are just going to get closer and closer and I am trying to protect myself. I don’t want to get hurt.”

There was an airy nothingness to the time she spent with Fernando. Time, that ever-thick, ugly slug of a beast that was grabbing at her heels and slowing everything down to the trickle of lapping honey…it slipped by. She was unencumbered and sheltered against its menacing. He took care of time – directed it, budgeted, drove, ordered, beamed from this end to that one and said: “This is what we are doing.” And she didn’t do anything; she followed him, and in her following she realized: I am time itself.

Alicia wonders where the spoke should have gone: the first turn of the wheel when he said: “I want to take you out on a date tonight”? Or was it when he said: “I hear Valliya has incredible beaches”? Was that the right place to have put a stop to it all? Or was it lying in bed the first night in Salvador, before they’d gone off to Lenzoa, a town tucked into the hug of a mountain, and Vale de Morao, with its dead-eyed hipsters roaming dusty streets and incense shops; and he said “I don’t think you should come.” Was that it?

Where had the backbone come from? Was it a manipulation? When he said “this isn’t going to work,” where did Alicia’s bravery come from, to say, “Stop trying to make this not work.” What was their root? Their source?

Alicia knows cerebrally that love exists, but it was never a word that stuck. There had never been a love that was pure; and Alicia knows that to be the exception to that rule is to reach the status of a Buddha-figure. It’s okay to love with half a heart, half a mouth and an entire body and the yearning of a lonely soul. It’s okay.

Alicia supposes it is love; it must have been. The curling of a bottom lip, the way a voice could go so low, so pathetic, so pleading, saying: “Don’t leave.” Had anyone ever uttered those words without a sense of other – don’t leave me, I love you, but also, if you leave I will be so empty inside that I cannot stand it, I cannot be separate from you because then I must be alone.

Never had Alicia been such a receptacle of lust and want. Never had she let go and said: yes, yes, yes, so many times.

She remembers the first time; the quiet, giddy, childish way Fernando had asked. The queasy feeling in her stomach at something so intimate, letting a body become so open as to let another’s love in.

“Yes.”

Alicia said yes the same way all the other yeses happened: as a means to an end, a way to stab at the darkness inside the heart that could only be chased away with that one thing.

“Yes,” in a small voice. Louder: I don’t care. Louder still: is that really necessary? The loudest of them all: everything will be okay.

But there was a pleasure in it: not in the action itself, but in the way Alicia could wield deadly power over a man. The power was intoxicating.

Alicia’s favorite moment was by the river. The water in Vale de Morao is disgusting, the result of its voyage through rich minerals and highly acidic herbage that turns the water positively black. The river gushed over a hillside abutting the outskirts of the town, riverbed the consistency of polished, supine pink marble. It was just stone. It had rained that day and the torrential flow of water was so powerful that at times you could see droplets floating through the air, translucent; you could forget the water’s true color.

The sun was setting behind the hill, giving the river, the trees, the sunburnt blue and orange houses dotting the landscape not even a mile away a mystical feeling. They were not on Earth in Lenzoa at this moment; they had entered an alternate universe, a place where the foliage of the trees was verdant but muted, the sky a brash of pinks and turquoise providing just enough light to see exactly what you needed to, not a speck of light more.

“Marry me,” he’d whispered with eyes closed.

How? How could a man be so sweet and so kind, so open and honest and perfect? Proposing just like that? Not even three weeks in and already baring his all.

Alicia remembers her stomach dropping and then churning, turning inside out and over and up, wanting to scream yes for a split second before remembering NO, NO, NO!

“I want to.” And that was the truthiest thing she could say.

“Why?”

“I can’t right now, today, promise to marry you, Fernando.”

Fernando’s eyes dimmed a little at that. It was all so beautiful. The way the light in his eyes visibly faded, like someone pointed the remote at them after realizing that it was a bit too bright in here, could we just make it a little less intense? Please?

He was beautiful especially when he was sad, but the sadness did not suit him, so he ran from it anytime it crossed his face.

“Okay,” he said. Matter of fact, a wounded animal.

That was the beginning of the end. There was a price to pay, after all, for everything – he wasn’t spending all of his time, giving all of his love and energy, those furtive glances and stolen kisses and squeezing the hips and body so affectionately…none of it was for free. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Marriage or bust. Alicia chose bust.

She had resisted it when he gave her the money, but he would not take no for an answer. Did he feel responsible for the way things were ending? Did he believe that he was to blame? How could he, when he had done nothing that wasn’t storybook love story material, when she, playing reluctant princess, proceeded to break his heart?

“If you love me, let me hear you say my name,” she had said. She wished that instead of cabs pulling in and out of the departures terminal that there could be something, anything...a sunset, a bouquet of roses, even just eye contact, anything less unromantic than being discarded like a used condom after a single fuck.

“Alicia, you know how I feel,” he said, eyes still averted downwards. And she knew that even acknowledging that was all he could muster; that in her hands she held a fragile creature held together by band-aids and bobby pins, a kaleidoscope of broken heart pieces begging for release, to say: I love you.

“Anyways,” he started. This was how he changed topics. He did not realize how inauthentic and stupid it sounded because when “anyways” had to be pulled out it meant the situation was so dire that, yes, we had resorted to semantic segue that could not be reasonably used in conversation containing any semblance of normalcy.

Twenty-thousand dollars was more than enough. She knew and he knew what it was for. They had fought endlessly over it. He wanted her to get it taken care of, and she...was not sure.

“Well,” he said. It was another one of his semantic segues, another way he prohibited himself from saying what was really on his mind. “Well” was never followed by anything well at all.

“Well, it’s been really fun getting to know you.” And he hugged her gruffly. Wrapped his arms around her in a prickly, cactus way, so that before she even felt his body he was pulling back and giving a quick, tight smile.

“Oh cut the shit, Fernando,” she said. Or, wished she’d said. The force of his casualness had struck her so hard, she did not even register that she should have said anything. The shock running through her body was snake-venom, paralyzing and electrifying her; everything was aflame and she could not feel a single thing.

“I hope you have a great rest of your life.” Another stretched smile. And then back into the yellow cab.

Alicia is sitting in her window seat and is crying. The entirety of the day is now falling on her, setting her alight, making her heavier than the plane itself, pulling her down, earthwards. How is this plane still in the sky when she feels like she is death itself, body being laid into the earth to find its final resting place among the worms and roots?

In her despair, the wispy-haired girl touches her stomach; she feels life flutter anew.