THE STORY OF RAFA AND DANI 9

Your room.

You closed the door. It didn't have a latch, but you closed it with the universal gesture of pushing and trusting that no one would enter, and no one would enter, because no one ever entered your room. It was your territory. The only space in the universe that you could claim as your own. Four walls of yellowish plaster, a ceiling with humidity stains that formed maps of non-existent countries, a narrow window that overlooked the interior patio and let in anemic, filtered light, a second-hand light that had already bounced off three walls before reaching you, as if even the sunlight reached you used.

You took off your shoes. You left them next to the bed with the toes pointing towards the door, always pointing towards the door, an unconscious habit you had acquired as a child in case you had to run out, in case there were screams, in case your mother's boyfriend of the time raised his voice too much and you had to slip out into the hallway and down to the portal and sit on the sidewalk curb waiting for the storm to pass. There were no more boyfriends. The last one had left four years ago. But the shoes still pointed towards the door. Certain reflexes don't erase.

You lay down on the bed. The mattress sank on the left side with that familiar deformation that was almost a hug, the topography of your insomnia, the exact mold of your body excavated in foam and worn-out springs over years of nights when you didn't sleep or slept badly or slept too much, depending on the season, depending on your mood, depending on the amount of noise coming from the living room or the street or your own head.

You pulled the duvet. A non-Nordic duvet that wasn't Nordic nor was it a duvet, it was a filled cover that was once synthetic fiber and now was a crumpled mess that was irregularly distributed, with lumps here and empty spaces there, so that some areas were warm and others weren't, like a textile metaphor of your life. The cover was dark blue. You had chosen it, the only aesthetic decision you had made in eighteen years of existence, because dark blue didn't show stains.

You covered yourself up to your chin.

The ceiling.

The humidity stains.

The map of nowhere.

And then it came. Without invitation, without prelude, without the conscious decision to think about it. It came as it always did: like a wave. Like something that rises from the bottom of your body and floods you before you can close the gates. The memory of the previous night.

Javier.

No. Before Javier. Dani. It started with Dani because everything started with Dani, because Dani was the prologue and the epilogue and the index and the dedication of this story, because without Dani you would be an eighteen-year-old boy lying on a broken bed thinking about nothing, masturbating to mobile porn like any other eighteen-year-old boy from Carabanchel, but Dani existed and Dani had chosen you and that ch...