Oh my god. This is seriously the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. And please believe me when I say that the hours we spent in bed–you reading Borges and Garcia Marquez to me in the Spanish, both of us drunk on Chilean wine, the gnawed bones of pampas-fed Argentinian beef steaks in a pile on the floor–I will return to those hours, those nights, those months, for the rest of my life.
I will no doubt regret my decision to leave every time I listen to a tango or cumbia or salsa and think about how we moved together on the dance floors of the Americas, the way your body taught me to dance.
Doubtless, I will for some time (as I have done for the past week now, as I’ve wrestled with this decision) find every forkful of Mexican or Chilean or Brazilian cuisine I eat a bit lacking. Doubtless I will think, as I have thought for the past week now, the pozole or cochinita pibil like ashes in my mouth, it’s just not as good as Paolo used to make.
But. I think I am right in making the decision I’ve made. It’s not that I’m jealous of your ability to eat mountains of food and never gain weight without exercising. It isn’t that I cared that every woman we walked by nearly broke her neck ogling you. It isn’t that I feared that one day you’d leave me, maybe when you turned twenty.
It’s this: I can’t get over the sense that I’m using you, somehow. Despite your professed love and respect and admiration for me, I can’t help but feel that my being with you is something like inadvertent sexual colonialism. It’s unfortunate–deeply, deeply unfortunate–but, I think, unavoidable. All the metaphors I use in my mind when I think of you–you planting your proud flag of lust into my virgin (as it were) soil being the most recent and egregious, the tipping point, so to speak–they’re inappropriate, these metaphors and, so far as I can tell, likewise unavoidable.
And that is why, most unfortunately sweet Paolo, I must bid you Adios, Ciao, and a most sincere and regretful Buena Suerte.
We’ll always have Tikal.
