Cat, this little grasshopper still loves you.

A letter for a love that lingers between nostalgia and farewell

This post is my intimate letter to lost love, a reflection where nostalgia and heartbreak mix, and where a little grasshopper still loves you, even when memory and farewell coexist.

I don’t know why I’m writing to you again. Maybe because some wounds don’t really know how to close—they just learn how to breathe. I’ve learned to live without you, or at least that’s what I tell myself every morning when I wake up without your arms around me. Lately, it’s been a little easier. Your absence still lingers here, like a persistent echo, but it no longer hurts with the same wild fury as before.

On Saturday, I cried for you again. It was brief. Something—a glance, a scent, a fleeting thought—took me back to one of our moments, those so entirely ours they couldn’t fit into anyone else’s life. The tears came without asking permission.

I spend my days with Doña Teresa now. Today we went to the beach. Every time she speaks of you, she does it with such tenderness it disarms me. She says your name with such warmth, with such longing, as if evoking you could somehow bring you closer to the world again. And I just listen, because if she knew that each time she says your name, another little shard of my heart gives up, she’d stop talking.

I got tired of waiting. Of counting the minutes between the messages that never arrive. That’s why I stopped writing to you. I want to teach my heart how to uninhabit you. But I don’t know if I can. Because even though I tell myself I need to forget you, the truth is I don’t want to. I don’t want to forget what I feel for you. I just want my heart to stop hurting in your shape.

Last night, again, I tried to calm my body with the memory of you. I touched myself as if my hands could bring you back, but I couldn’t go on. It wasn’t desire—it was nostalgia. All I could think of was us: every encounter, every sigh, every post-orgasmic smile you drew from me just by existing. My body misses you. But what hurts most is that my soul does too.

Sometimes, while I’m doing something ordinary at home, you cross my mind, and I smile. Your memory still brings light. Doña Teresa says my face changes when I talk about you. Maybe she’s right. Maybe you still live somewhere in my gestures.

Our songs are still a sweet kind of punishment. The other day, at Marta’s house, one of those songs you used to sing to me started playing, and I had to ask her to change it. It hit me right in the center of my chest—the place only you ever knew how to reach. It hurts. Your leaving hurts. Not knowing about you hurts. The emptiness where your embrace should be hurts most of all.

Sometimes I convince myself that soon I’ll hear from you, and that thought terrifies me. I’m scared of not knowing how to survive myself if I see you again. How do you bear another goodbye after touching what you’ve already lost? How do you hold someone knowing you’ll have to let them go again?

I’m exhausted. Tired of staring at my phone, waiting for a “good morning” that never comes. Because in those two words I used to find proof—small but absolute—that, if only for a fleeting second, you were thinking of me.

I hate this hope. This damned illusion that you might appear at any moment. My mind plays cruel games. It tells me you don’t care, that what we had was nothing to you. Then reason tries to defend you—maybe you’re somewhere you can’t reach me. And then I fall again, knowing that’s just the refuge of this stubborn hope.

I’m traveling on Friday. And all I want is to see you. I imagine us sitting together, drinking coffee, like two old lovers making plans for a future that will never exist. Because we both know it—you’re not for me, and I’m not for you. And still, I fell in love. Against all rules. I swallowed them whole—no commitments, no sex, no love. The irony of it. I fell in love in the middle of “just having fun.”

This Friday, I’m also leaving our apartment behind. Your chair. Our bed. Your soap in the shower. The laughter floating through the rooms like ghosts that won’t move on. It’s the beginning of goodbye. But I’m not ready to let go of your name yet.

Cat. Gatubelo. Gatolín.

This grasshopper still loves you.

Come back to me.

Nel Duarte

Diciembre 7, 2015 Willemstad, Curacao

Read another letter about absence and memory → April 27 of Every Year, or Rest in peace my life partner