Free This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

the night air and I had my hand on your back just in case.
    We were both drunk and you had nothing but garters and stockings on under your skirt and you put my hand between your legs.
    What did your family do here? you asked.
    I looked at the night water. We had barbecues. Dominican barbecues. My pops didn’t know how to but he insisted. He would cook up this red sauce that he’d splatter on chuletas and then he’d invite complete strangers over to eat. It was terrible.
    I wore an eye patch when I was kid, you said. Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue.
    I doubt it, I said.
    I’m just saying, Yunior.
    Maybe five thousand years ago we were together.
    Five thousand years ago I was in Denmark.
    That’s true. And half of me was in Africa.
    Doing what?
    Farming, I guess. That’s what everybody does everywhere.
    Maybe we were together some other time.
    I can’t think when, I said.
    You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago.
    People weren’t even people back then.
    That night you lay in bed, awake, and listened to the ambulances tear down our street. The heat of your face could have kept my room warm for days. I didn’t know how you stood the heat of yourself, of your breasts, of your face. I almost couldn’t touch you. Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.
    —
    T HAT WAS THE SUMMER I couldn’t sleep, the summer I used to run through the streets of New Brunswick at four in the morning. These were the only times I broke five miles, when there was no traffic and the halogens turned everything the color of foil, firing up every bit of moisture that was on the cars. I remember running around the Memorial Homes, along Joyce Kilmer, past Throop, where the Camelot, that crazy old bar, stands boarded and burned.
    I stayed up entire nights and when the Old Man came home from UPS I was writing down the times that the trains arrived from Princeton Junction—you could hear them braking from our living room, a gnash just south of my heart. I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was
loss
or
love
or some other word that we say when it’s too fucking late but the boys weren’t into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.
    —
    WE WENT BACK to Spruce Run once more. Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you’d be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little puños and the first time you saw us you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn’t have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.
    That second trip I stood on the beach and watched you wade out, watched you rub the lake on your skinny arms and neck. Both of us were hungover and I didn’t want any of me wet. There’s a cure in the waters, you explained. The priest announced it at service. You were saving some in a bottle. For your cousin with leukemia and your aunt with the bad heart. You had on a bikini bottom and a T-shirt and there was a mist sifting down over the hills and lacing the trees. You went out to your waist and stopped. I was staring at you and you were staring at me and right then it was sort of like love, wasn’t it?
    That night you came into my bed, too thin to be believed, and when I tried to kiss your nipples you put a hand across my chest. Wait, you said.
    Downstairs, the boys were watching TV, screaming.
    You let the water dribble out of your mouth and it was cold. You reached my knee before you had to refill from the bottle. I listened to your breathing, how slight it was, listened to the sound the water made