Nemo - VI - No One

The night kept moving on, and sleep seemed to have left the room long before I did.

I had turned off all the lights except the small lamp on the bedside table, whose warm glow barely managed to break the darkness. The clock read half past four when I picked up the phone again. Not because I really expected to find anything new, but because I no longer knew how to be without it in my hands. It was an automatic gesture, almost a tic: unlock the screen, open our conversation, and run my finger through a past that remained intact, frozen inside that chat.

The words were still there.

The “good mornings” written before the alarm went off.

The improvised photos of a coffee, a station, or a hotel room.

The voice messages he sent me when he was coming home.

The “let me know when you arrive.”

The “not much longer now.”

The “I miss you.”

The “I love you.”

It was strange. The conversations still breathed life. If someone read them without knowing the ending, they would think they belonged to two people deeply in love. That the next message would arrive in a matter of minutes. That the next trip would already be planned.

Only one thing was missing.

Him.

I caught myself smiling as I reread an old joke. It lasted barely a second. The smile faded on its own, replaced by that stab in my chest I was beginning to know far too well.

I wondered how many times I had gone over those conversations since everything had ended. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands.

I was no longer looking for answers. I did not even expect to find some hidden phrase that would explain everything. I did it because I needed to check that I had not invented our story. That it had been real. That, for a time, someone had spoken my name with affection.

I rested the phone on my chest and closed my eyes.

That was when that memory returned.

Not the one from the beginning.

Not our first kiss.

But the one from the end.

The one I was unable to speak out loud for a long time.

We had been together a little over a year.

Twelve months that, from the outside, were not especially extraordinary. Two men living in different cities who found ways to see each other whenever they could. Improvised weekends, stopover hotels, train stations that eventually became as familiar to me as my own home, and goodbyes that always hurt a little less because we both knew when the next one would be.

Or at least, that was what I believed.

If anyone had asked me then how my life was, I would have answered without thinking that I was happy. Deeply happy.

I had never loved anyone that way.

Nor had I ever felt that someone knew me so well.

We had built little habits that ended up feeling indispensable to me. Every morning I woke up to a message from him. If one of us finished work late, the ...