So I am now set off to book our seats for one of the performances in October or November, as fall here once again signals the beginning of a working year. Before then there will be Buenos Aires, her own Portland earlier on and Seattle for my birthday. However, there is that specific image that I keep replaying on my mind, her hand on mine, enthralled in the story of Cio Cio San’s love belittled by Pinkerton’s «butterfly« desire. It is that vision alone that gives the wait its meaning. And I have waited for you. And I will wait for you as long as it takes you to trust the love I bring, knowing that you may be Pinkerton to my hope, but you may also stand up to it like the woman I think you are.

Regardless of outcomes, life, or potentially thwarted plans, Butterfly’s final scene will remain with me, like the first time I listened to the opera, which I have never had the opportunity of seeing live yet. The final aria, Con onor muore is Butterfly’s goodbye to her son as she puts an end to her life in search of the honor she failed to have when she was alive, according to her own traditions.

I, for all life is worth, will prefer to live with honor, with the truthfulness of a word that does not falter, a love that remains and gives, and the belief in the you I know, rather than the dim hope of your memory.

And we crossed the frontier with Malaysia, back into safe, police-controlled Singapore, to catch up on sleep while fully dressed before our early morning flight. And there was a last look at the hotel rooftop, where we had slept the night before under the stars. And I could tell you were already mellow with me, different, as if I had grown into you despite yourself, as if you were no longer fighting that inner battle between saying it or not saying it. And I could sense you drifting away into the land of your own demons.

We crossed a less marked frontier in that trip, and I still choose you. My racing heart betrayed me yesterday as we lay on the couch and you finally told me what your life is really about in that city on the West Coast where I have been banned to set foot, at least for now, the outcast of our love. I knew you were going to say something important, and I still don’t know what else I will be learning about your life before me. Yet, oddly enough, we keep blaming space and time for the complexities in our relationship.

Space and time we may not have, so perhaps it is best to go with what we do have. And that is love, unknown as experienced in this life, flaky and afraid, trying to withstand the fears of us. All we will ask of it is to surmount the great divide between our mirror images, so different in many ways, and see if it makes it through and it finally builds the bridge. For that, we only need to hold on to the walls of the Menara as we climb.

You hurt today, so much, and I love you.

It is only for the past couple of days that I have owned a rather pricey but charming desk with a banker’s lamp that I always craved and never quite indulged in. In Woolfian terms, I have only now secured a “room of my own”. So I might as well use it…although I must confess the couch and small Ikea table I got for myself simultaneously in May are tempting enough to write on. Parts of this place that I now start to recognize as my home are coming to life, designed by me and my taste (or lack of). It is a major step towards the overcoming my own homelessness, the snail’s shell inside of which I am finally free at my pace and with my choice.

Yet all of this housing independence — minus ownership — is happening while someone is by my side, albeit still quite physically removed to make anything simple. Perhaps that is the most obvious and challenging side of my freedom, the planning on my own while I know that we both might plan otherwise one day. I know the time for togetherness will come, and it will be the way it is meant to be. For now, my own time is this, set on Houston rhythm, with large roaches that hang on trees (like they did in Buenos Aires), with hot mornings filled with sunlight entering the kitchen, with her sleepy voice at the other end of the line when we can speak, with me retreating into myself for now, going without much thinking of the future, as if I was taking this for granted. It is not, or it may not be, but she and the space she gives me makes it all feel like home.

None of these things happened while I stopped writing. The earth continued to revolve around the sun and everything leads me to expect a 365-day calendar filled with achievements and further questions on December 31st. Nothing changed and everything did. I am no longer on Argentine soil, and a part of me begins to feel the severance, that even cut that I decided was the necessary step toward the new phase of my journey.

I now live in a garage apartment that in the next few months seems more inclined to harbor the scorching Houston summer in the day, so I can enjoy its stuffy walls at night despite the air conditioning… I have got a couch, which she helped me assemble after my first foray into the iconic IKEA chain. I have a rack to hang my clothes upon, but it fails to do the job so a walk-in closet is now in the making…with a challenge – shapes in a garage apartment would defy the most versatile designer. I still don’t have a desk, but the couch and a small laptop table do the job of letting me churn out basic work. I still sleep on an airbed, but even that becomes a regal bed when she is around.

Last Wednesday she was arriving. The morning found me working from home before I drove my car to pick her up at the airport. There was the regular attente at Terminal C, the minutes that became hours as the escalators gave me small misleading clues of a potential arm resting on the side, the rim of a patterned skirt that could be hiding her beautiful legs, the shoes that would reveal Gothic-painted toenails. It would be a while before she actually found me…but she eventually did. As I stabilized my senses before the myriad of sensations she triggered, I looked into her eyes as she came close, unsure of where the kiss would fall. It is always on the lips, but I like to mislead her and she likes to pretend she does not expect it. And after that moment in which my thirst finds its relief,  I am whole again, unique in my connection with her blue eyes. Her touch will guide me out the automated doors, and I’ll think I know where I’ve parked my car…but I won’t. Yes, I know, at some point I’ll find it…because that is part of the magic, and just like us, it is meant to be.

The movie they showed for the five-hour flight that separates Houston from San Francisco was A Flash of Genius, and I never got to see the ending. I do remember being quite intrigued about its ending. Would the man end up beating Ford in the battle over the intellectual rights to his invention of windscreen wipers, or would the film dare to go beyond the American dream to show the American reality, where the system always wins. “If the movie is American, then it ends well”, you said, making me smile. Yes, you scored again.

I made it late to baggage claim, and you were already there, light-packed for the weekend, patiently ready to go on the train that would take us to the hotel you picked, Vitale, just across from the Ferry building. You seemed embarrassed when the receptionist gave you his “welcome back” greeting, as if that had exposed your privacy in a way that simply escaped me. However, I found it particularly charming that you would make a point of clarifying your never having been there before, as if I had a say in that.

Looking back, perhaps we already meant more for each other than we dared to acknowledge to ourselves. Yes, we preferred to play the game of pragmatism, not making more of a weekend escapade to San Francisco than what it was… the opportunity of meeting and repeating what we had already been on a night of Pinot Noir and Italian food in Buenos Aires a few months earlier. So we innocently embarked on the endeavor of trying to be the practical and wiser versions of ourselves, spending three days and two nights together in a magnificent place that meant so much to you and would hold so much for me. For you, the moment of magic was when I held your hand at the gay bookstore in the Castro area to show you a funny postcard. For me, the magic was there but I refused to see it, putting up a barrier of denial between myself and my feelings until I could not even act on the bare emotion of your imminent departure. I could not hold you, or kiss you as you stood near the door…how could I? My body no longer responded to the mind that calculated each step on a no-expectation prerrogative for whatever was unfolding between us. The door closed behind you, and my eyes filled with tears. Not even an idyllic walk to Fisherman’s Wharf in a chilly winter night would lighten up the heaviness of your loss. J’etais perdue. I already loved you.

Oh silly W, writing nice practical emails and trying to dust off her little demons upon her return to safe, workable Houston…the West Coast tornado had arrived, and with a stroke of patience had shaken me off my base. All of a sudden, there was you all around and I still refused to face it. How hard it would be to date again, I wondered aloud on a computer keyboard. Your answer on the other end was simple and protective in its impossible pragmatism…yes, we would take this for what it is, being lovers as time allows.

A year later, it is your reference to sleep in that email what my mind evokes most vividly of that reply…your lack of sleep, the importance and elusiveness of it, how you build around its absence. Throughout the year we would revisit our relationship with Morpheus, and sometimes sleep would become more of an enemy to fight than a lover to seduce. At times it would become a contextual intermission to the unfolding of our love, a natural pause and eventually a fact.

Perhaps sleep comes to us like a natural companion now because we are, instead of trying not to be. A year later, I think we have dared to dream…and when the god of sleep takes its true form, it has wings.