Forty Hours.

A personal essay on the end of a relationship.

I was locked out of my apartment Sunday morning. I’d gone to buy bread to get on with my life after what had happened the day before, but it had started on Friday night. In my haste to get out of the house for air, I’d left my keys and bank card on the kitchen counter, beside the purse I’d taken out the last time I would ever see him. I’d been up for forty hours.

Tears have tastes, like food, and the ones I cried were a mix of betrayal, lies, perversion, addiction, insomnia, and a failed attempt at friendship. That was on Saturday, and it had all started to hit me by Sunday morning, when I left my keys on the counter. For two weeks before this, his secret behaviour had left a bad taste in my mouth, and I needed one final mouthful of his bullshit so I could spit him out of my life for good.

Those hours blurred into each other. Sleep was not coming. Neither was clarity.

I was in the largo near my apartment waiting for my landlord to open the door with the extra set of keys he had to my place. My phone died and it was raining, but I had fresh bread, coffee, and cigarettes, plus three books in my bag to help me wait.

I noticed how easily I could sit there with myself.

That was not something he could do.

He could not sit alone with himself this way, which is why he filled his spare time with women. When I finally understood that, I let myself be hurt enough to walk away from someone I knew would not change. The last forty hours had been the most revealing of our time together.

Only after that did language begin to arrive.

What the Portuguese call carinho is what happens when you have a deep affinity for someone. It lands somewhere between love and kindness, not quite head over heels, but close. That was what he said he had for me.

At the time, I believed him.

I had already written about him a few weeks earlier. This was what came in the weeks after the photo above, the night we met.

People who do not like their own company will not know what to do with yours. Someone who does not like themselves will hate you for giving them carinho. They will destroy the thing they cannot return because they cannot access that kind of love within themselves. It is a sad process to see, but I had to see it through so I would not look back again. I needed to know what I already knew in my body, and not just suspect it in my mind.

Not all instincts are the kind you should act on, and an untamed, unchecked person in the area of desire tends to be a handful.

Knowing what I had already seen, friendship was never going to be possible. He had treated me like a discarded ex, and I was not the only one. I am experiencing the cultural stereotype and pattern of the Portuguese man.

A close friend of mine asked why I had gone to see his bad behaviour, why I would go looking for trouble when I did not need to. Because I love and trust her, I was not offended when she questioned me about it. I told her it was not trouble I was after. It was the test I needed to move on. I had to know for sure that deleting someone, after weeks of wrapping ourselves into each other, was not a mistake.

I had adored lying there, pressed into his chest hair, shirts, and skin, smelling him into my cells to create a soft place to land. In Portuguese we call it encaixe, to fit, somewhat perfectly.

I loved the dopamine surges that come from touching and talking at the same time when there is attraction and carinho. It is a drug. So I tried to become a different kind of friend, to preserve the softness we had found in each other. I wanted to know if love could survive without romance.

It could not.

I know many of us have tried this. I do not think it works. Or not well, anyway. The jump from boyfriend to buddy requires acceptance and letting go, and that was never going to happen here.

When we met, I asked him if he wanted me as a lover or a friend. I have asked men this before when they are trying to make a move. We had been flirting all night and he was trying to find his way in. He does this with women, but I did not know it at the time.

The weeks that followed were intense. Our days were shaped by one another. Wins and losses were shared by text and phone, and the space we took up together felt familiar.

After forty hours awake, the last thing I needed was to be locked out of my apartment, the only place that felt safe enough to let my body detox from him. Standing there in the rain became the purgatory I needed.

What I was grieving was not the man. It was the idea of him. He was never there in the way I had imagined. In the rainfall, it washed itself out of me. Finally.

I walked back into my apartment when the door was unlocked. I felt lighter. The rain had been peaceful. My landlord asked why I had not waited inside the building. I told him I liked the fresh air.