Dayana Benavides Briceno
Writer - Books - Stories - Chronicles
Other Publications
What ironies life has
Written by Dayana Benavides
"Love Letters 2015" Contest
For you
What ironies life has... I'll start by telling you that the days I live without you are just like the ones we shared, nothing new has happened, I still perceive your scent of tenderness without it disconcerting me, it's familiar to me, it even seems like mine now.
Your popular songs with those complicated names in English, which by the way I never understood, and those far-fetched and absurd bands... their melody now evokes your mocking smile at my total ignorance.
I won't say that I miss you like all lovers do, because I don't. I just think sometimes about what could have been. Because only in my idealization could we have been happy.
That would have been the most genuine love I had ever had, comprehensive and timely. I don't know why I thought I could materialize it in you, if you are everything I don't want, or rather, you are everything I don't need, because I have plenty of it.
I have nothing to say to you, but I will tell him that I am still waiting for him, but I don't know his eyes, maybe he passed by me and I didn't see him because you got in the way, but what I do know is that he has the stillness that I lack and that you don't know about.
But the days have passed like a staircase, step by step. With each step I have climbed, I thought I was losing something important. At some point I hesitated and wanted to go down, but although going up is more tiring, I continued forward without stopping, slowly or quickly, but without going down, always heading for the top floor.
On each floor I checked even the door that seemed the most insignificant, and after years of wandering, at the end of a hallway on the thirty-seventh floor I heard a melody that caught my attention, I ran to the door where the sound was coming from. A gray-haired man, tanned by the sun, opened it and upon seeing me embraced me with the protection of roots that resemble limbs. I didn't understand anything, until I saw the amber in his gaze. I had found him at last, full of peace and love to share, full of pleasant and not so pleasant experiences, with the maturity of gray hair, with the temperance of mature age, with the clarity of someone who understands that the being he was waiting for had arrived.
And I finally understood, I was always looking for you, but twenty years older...what ironies life has.