Trafika Europe 2 - Polish Nocturne

After a few days, you stop looking with such single- minded eagerness. You just happen upon them. You open your appointment book and you find a little drawing. It’s an amusing illustration, a rather wide, ungainly skeleton he’d drawn for our daughter in a restaurant in Tuscany when she’d asked what we were like inside. They’d just shown us the fish they were going to cook for us. Waiting for fish to be prepared after seeing it, fresh out of the water, always put Cometa in a good mood. The skeleton was cute and I kept it in my planner. We walked back along the stone footpath by the sea, waves splashing us in the night. You open the closet and see his jacket, and him in it, and you feel the touch of his fog-cold skin when he arrived for dinner during our vacation in the house of the three doors. You open the other closet and you see the dress you wore last summer and you wonder what you’ll feel next summer when you have to decide if you’ll wear it again. You open the kitchen cupboard and you see the kidney beans he bought in the town of El Barco de Ávila, where he had the mystical revelation that he should stay and live forever in a place like that. You take the cap off the toothpaste and you know it’s almost finished, and the next tube of toothpaste won’t be the one he used.

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