El Amor Al Margen -

“I know,” he said.

They never went to restaurants with tablecloths. They went to diners where the menus were sticky and the coffee tasted like rust. They never exchanged grand declarations. They exchanged footnotes. He would tell her a story about his mother’s funeral, and she would add a footnote in her mind: 1. He cried only when the priest mispronounced her name. This is the only detail that matters. El amor al margen

She would tell him about the video she had to watch that morning—a man saying goodbye to his daughter via a frozen screen before a missile hit. Lucas would underline it mentally and write in the margin: See also: the silence of the surviving parent. Page 42. “I know,” he said

“No one will read it,” she said.

“And you?” she asked.

They never said “I love you” again. They didn’t need to. It was written in the gutter. It was glued into the spine. It was the space between the words, the breath before the sentence, the silence after the scream. They never exchanged grand declarations

Lucas was there because his hot water heater had burst, flooding his copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude (he mourned the paper, not the prose). Sofía was there because she had spilled red wine on her only white shirt—the last object she owned that wasn’t beige or gray.