One sees the photos and knows: our old boyfriends have gotten older. They no longer resemble the children we love at school or that we admire at university, they no longer resemble the kids who took us by the hand in the neighborhood and took us to the bank or the ice cream or the motorcycle or the portal of the kiss. They do not resemble the boyfriends with whom we stroll Granada or Malaga or Campo de Criptana, they do not resemble the boyfriends with whom we made love everywhere, in the bathrooms of bars and in small hotels. Now they are tired. Sometimes I can see something of surrender in his gesture.
We loved them once that seems remote, when we had not yet made any essential, constituent, severe, sensible, adult decision, we loved them when we had never done what one is supposed to do to be someone profitable, we loved them when everything was game. Now they dress differently, they speak differently, they use different words. Sure its smell is no longer the same. Smell is something you can read on the face.
We see you on Instagram, of course, still beautiful but more timid, worried about hair loss, about the trip to Turkey, about the leak in the salon, because of the paperwork, the gigs, the administrations, because of the wheel of an ineffective and authoritarian world, and that idea of the public photo, which we see but anyone could see, the idea of that photo that is not intimate, it is also flaky : Instagram is now the photo album that in the end we do not share, the album full of friendly faces that we never kept in the house that we never had.
That is liberating almost all the time – because we chose to leave there, because other adventures awaited us and we traveled to other bodies – but it is still a possible life crossed out. And the certainty of that farewell has something of a dull, atavistic hum, like the underground drums of Jumanji.
Our ex-boyfriends have grown older, there is no going back: what better proof of how old we are too. Some gray hairs us when we pick up our hair with our fingers. Some death, some stretch marks, some call to the bank. Wiser indeed, more sardonic. More skeptical.
Life overwhelms our old boyfriends and ourselves, only now separately, and separately, we are breaking every plan, every adolescent fable. We betray each other all the time and that’s okay: we already understood that we weren’t so special. We are less of an asshole than we were then, but we also have less hope. Hope is something that is read in the face.
We have entered that age: the age of seeing how the mouths we studied in the wide afternoons marry other mouths. We thought we didn’t give a damn about those guys, and we really do, but this brings a point. Sometimes it has something funny and even expectorant, as when Pedro Ruiz said, with a lot of joke: “When I see an ex-girlfriend of mine with another, I think ‘how happy the three of us are'”. But also it does not matter if we were the ones who abandoned them: their rite splashes us, makes us think.
Some old boyfriends are fine, bubbly and excited, and others are just scared. That inertia saddens me, it has some tameness: I would like everyone to be happy –almost every, to be honest-, that they were very happy while we kept moving away, while the earth turns and places us a minute hand farther each day.
It gives terror and tranquility, because we could be the ones who were there, in those altars, in those moves to flats with three rooms, in those delivery rooms. It was close for a little while, but we dodged that bulletOr perhaps it was the bullet that eluded us: we can no longer remember everything, but we agree that it seems good to us not to be them, the ones who came later and stayed. We already we had nothing to say to them.
We talked about it among the friends: it gives me a bit of vertigo to see how my old boyfriends begin to have children, but I also experience an unbearable tenderness, as if the years had made them my brothers in some way, brothers minors – Isn’t that nuance curious? -, and I think I hope they read them Manolito Gafotas and put the movie of Matilda And never miss your Christmas shows and always know what shoe size you wear and who your best friend is.
How strange life, how labyrinthine, how it places us in enigmatic places. How the mystery becomes great. I was always groggy from decisions that can’t be reversed in just one callAnd that’s just the kind of decisions that are often made in this decade, from your thirties to your forties. Weddings, kids, mortgages. Or the possibility – sometimes also irrevocable – to abstain. The next era will be that of divorces, I think; and this is not antiromanticism, it is statistics.
It makes me smile a bit bitterly that perhaps those who make mistakes today – maybe I myself if I’m wrong tomorrow – can meet again in that second dance, in that sort of play-off before boredom, sexual impotence or death, like Ben Affeck and Jennifer López, who now kiss with a shocking forcefulness and look at each other with the intense complicity of good times. And the most intense of the worst.
Complicity, that’s for sure, is something you can read on the face.
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