Like a new moon,
like Madrid's Metro¹,
black as a cavity
or a student's September.
Like the certainty that you don't dream about me,
black was that bar
where the damned hide
from dawns,
from the newspaper delivery,
from the sun needles,
from the love of others.
That's where I found her.

Like a suicidal person leaning out
from the edge of the precipice,
gathering curses
at the aluminum bar.
In her eyes trembled
the smoke from the thousand cigarettes
that she had smoked with a guy
that had kissed her,
who abandoned her one morning
sleeping among the dunes of her bed,
who left one night with another woman.
That is how I found her.

Someone told me she had been for a hundred days
confined in that bar,
asking for a light or some clue
to help her find
the light inside the labyrinth,
the map where it's hidden,
the sea where promises burn,
where you used to shipwreck.

A hundred days hiding from the gray
March sky and its traffic jams,
inhaling fog through the nose,
dreaming of you in the restroom,
swearing not to make it out alive,
sealing all the exits,
looking in a sea of gin
for a beach to run aground.

She kissed a cup full
of ashes, she looked at me,
she gave me the smoke in her hands,
I took a drag. In return I
told her that the city
was waiting for her,
that honeysuckles rained outside,
that Summer was coming,
that what would become of us
if she decided not to come with me,
that she had to come out and challenge
dawn and its murderers.
That is how I spoke to her.

She smiled lost and weary,
her blue mouth opened.
She kissed the cup again,
she left and all her light
was devoured by the door of a restroom
where soulless women push you off the precipice.
It will be a hundred and one days
locked in the blackness of this bar,
I went out to the street and forgot to pay.
That is when I left.