First I blamed it on the other friends we had. The ones you liked and I hated, the ones I couldn't stand but always seem to be hovering. Then I thought it was because of the guys we screwed, or kind of got serious with, or tried to date or pretended not to care about but secretly loved. Then it was Rome, and the experience of your life taking you away from me. And afterwards it came Istanbul, and my turn to try to make it out there without you. Never thought I could. I don't think up to this day I actually did.

Sometimes, when it wasn't any of this, one could say it was the money. Never enough to go out, to meet you somewhere, to travel half the country to see you.

The worst thing about it all is my own self-indulged blindness. More naive than religion or political ideology; I actually believed this conspicuous fabrication of my twisted mind.

It was never the money. And distance has no business intruding here. And I can't blame it on the guys we drove away while sabotaging our rare chances to be like normal people having normal relationships. The only thing coming in the way of you and me was no more than myself. I was the only true enemy to what we had. I alienated you, as my masterpiece; I tried it out on everyone else first, and saved the one I loved the most for last.

I find comfort - or quite the opposite - in knowing you're better off with me hiding away. You look fairly ordinary, you've got yourself a boyfriend, you're on your second Bachelor's degree already, you have your own house, a group of friends you're always with, and you're an amusing guest in all the cool kids' events. Congratulations, you made it to the other side. The one we always looked from afar and criticized harshly while living in our own self-made world. You look happier now though. Not a bit more authentic, but at least you've got yourself a constant smile. Isn't that just everything you dreamed of?

I am not myself

We were born one, uno. Then someone on Earth (probably a man) decided to break us, separating us from what we were and expelling us to two different parts leaving us to life. And we lived; we became these two living-breathing-walking-talking-beings who do not really know what they are, because the darkness of the world made us blind to what we were, like diving into an induced amnesia by the surrounding ugliness. And we lived; euphorically, between extreme good and bad, great and awful, for the balance was lost with birth. But as one, uno, we pursued the same dreams and followed the same path constructed differently until we found each other. This 'other' that was once the 'same'. And we found that we could regain what was once lost, even inhabiting two different bodies; physical never meant much to us anyways, for this world never seemed ours. Hence we started our quest against everyone else, closing us to the outter space where we lived just for personal amusement. And wherever we went, we knew where we belonged to. Somehow the brutal horror of the Earth started to break us apart from within, and our clashing living-breathing-walking-talking-beings became self-destructive, and that was something more that we could ever take; because even though we could fight the physical break-up of the uno, we had never known what it was to be really broken. And that was what being without each other, the 'other' that became then 'stranger', meant. It meant being broken, from within, without our part, deprived from our real being, body, shape, substance, essence. Deprived from us. The 'us' that was once a single 'I'.