Could you be-loved?*

Dinorah Pérez-Rementería

Have you ever pictured the love of your life? Tall, short, athletic, skinny, overweight, artistic, pragmatic, with blue eyes, smart? What if you haven’t and he takes you by surprise? What if he appears just when you think everything is (not perfect but at least) Ok? What if you become a sentimental little girl after having been praised for being cynical? Let’s say, for example, you may spend three hours on the road without noticing it, smile at the sunset in your mirror, listen to the horoscopes on the radio, spy on a couple of doves kissing in the kitchen window, or even discover (God, this is really embarrassing!) the most beautiful rainbow over I-395. And you can’t understand how –why- it is happening, for there isn’t any logic (except an ironic hypothesis). You cried so much when you left your country four years ago, you wanted to leave Miami as soon as the aircraft landed, you couldn’t stand the fact that your younger brother needed to stay for a period of two months in the number one Spanish-speaking city in the United States; so many Cubans there (the kind of Cubans who would still be loud in a quiet place or look at you with shameless eyes). And yet, you could’ve been saved if you had gone somewhere else in Aventura, Little Havana, Plantation, Pembroke Pines. Only he exists now. He is there, so far away; drown between patients, nurses and front-desk ladies, infinite cell-phone numbers and no-number-telephones, gigantic wedding rings, walls, doors.
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*Note: This is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.