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  I should tell you more about this sensation that almost drove me mad. But sadly, I think that this “burn” as I call it and its intensity exceed my grasp of the invention we call “word.” As I said earlier, I am not that smart anyway, so I can only try, but you should know that it will fall short of describing how it used to feel.

  Have you ever held an ice cube in the palm of your hand? After it melts, your hand starts to heat up. Something like that, only better. And there’s this tingling sensation that runs up and down, left and right, virtually in all directions, but you don’t want to scratch it. No, no, you want to close your eyes and just enjoy it.

  It burns and tingles. It’s hot and cold at the same time. Damn, this whole “use words to express sensations” is pathetic.

  Anyway, let’s get back to our story.

  This Danny boy took a sip of coffee, looked me in the eye and smiled. “You really love her,” he said, and his smile grew stronger. “But she never wanted you. She never loved you, no matter how much you tried.”

  Yes, yes, he said those words out loud, while I sat there, on the other side of the table, staring back at him, speechless.

  “I remember now,” he said, and his eyes darted around the café. “You were always the faithful friend, the guard dog, all that.”

  “I tried,” I said and smiled in a mischievous way. Somehow I felt I looked rather pathetic because I could see his smile as strong as ever.

  “You were always way over your head.”

  I might have sighed. I might have even felt my eyes wet. I might have felt the urge to call my bodyguards. Instead, I frowned. I was, after all, worth several million dollars at the time.

  “You still regret it. Oh, how much you regret it,” he said, and took another sip from his cup.

  “Why should I regret anything?” I said and tried to sound as confident as possible. “I made a lot of money.”

  “Oh please,” he laughed, “you’re the right hand of a business man that acts like a thug.”

  That was rude, and I think, Dexter, that even you think that I was in my right, then and there, to pull out my gun and shoot this Darryl or Darrell or Daren.(Yes, I always carry a small gun with me because I had done business with some Russians and things didn’t turn out so well.)

  Instead, I said something like, “He owns one of the biggest basketball teams in the world.” After all, it was my duty to protect the man who was my employer at the time.

  “As I was saying, after I sustained that injury and couldn’t play anymore, I had to find a normal job,” this guy who’s name could’ve been even Dexter (no offense, Dexter) said and then I saw Alexandra take her seat next to him.

  He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, as if he wished to suggest that she was his property. And that he was, somehow, scared she might, all of a sudden, disappear.

  “It was hard at first,” Alexandra said, and she didn’t seem to enjoy Daniel’s tight grip.

  “I had to work in Iran, Syria and Nigeria,” he said.

  “And several other places,” she added.

  “How much do you make?” I asked and looked at my watch, pretending that I didn’t really care.

  “Not as much as you,” he said in a poisonous tone.

  “But enough so we can get married,” Alexandra said, and he loosened his grip. They kissed once more, and I could feel my cheeks burn, burn, burn, and my body shuddered because of a bittersweet pain.

  “I have to go,” I said and took another look at my watch. (You know, how important people do.)

  “So soon?” Alexandra whispered.

  I took a hundred euro bill from my wallet and put it on the table. “I am afraid so.”

  And I left them there, holding hands and kissing. You know, doing pathetic things like all lovers seem to do. I left them there, wishing that it was me doing all those pathetic things with her, all the kissing and the hand holding, all the jokes and smiles and giggles. I left them there, knowing that I had no choice but to go back to my hotel room and try to forget. I left them there because there was nothing else I could do.

  Several hours later I was in my hotel room trying to pick what shirt to wear in the club that night. I have to admit that I have only one obsession; shirts. I have an incredible collection of them: blue, black, turquoise, brown, pink, purple, striped, and so on.

  Ah, and watches. I adore watches, expensive, big, shiny watches. And, besides, I once read in one of Paulo Coelho’s novels that a watch is the only socially acceptable jewelry a man should wear. A sophisticated man, I mean.

  Someone knocked at the door. I hadn’t ordered any room service, so I was a bit suspicious. I looked at the gun that was resting on the nightstand beside the bed and gulped. I have to be honest and tell you that I had never fired it.

  But somehow I made my way to the door, telling myself over and over again that there was no way the Russians could have found me there. I opened the door fast.

  And I was right. There were no Russians.

  Alexandra. Alexandra. Alexandra.

  Standing there, in the doorway, not really smiling, but not really sad either. I let her in, and as I closed the door, she looked at it in such a strange way… as if she was afraid that someone had followed her.

  “How’d you find me?” I asked her. My voice sounded so strained that it made her frown.

  “You have to stop doing this,” she said and she looked around.

  “How did you find me?” (Yes, I know that I should have asked her a ton of other stuff, but still, you know, the Russians and all)

  “This is the most expensive hotel room in Rome,” she said, and she looked out through the window for a while, and then glanced back at me. “You have to stop doing this to yourself.”

  “What am I…”

  “You, me,” she said and shook her head. “It was never…” she left the sentence unfinished. “And it will never…” She walked around the room. “I never loved you. At least, not in that way.”

  “But I…”

  “The way you look at me.” She kept shaking her head like an old, demented woman. “You have to stop this.” She stopped in front of me and sighed. “It’s not healthy,” she said, and for an instant my mind strayed, and the picture of a whole aisle of food marked as “bio” or “eco” was all I could see. “You have to stop,” she whispered, and she was so, so close. So I did something that I don’t normally do. I kissed her. It was not a real, real kiss. Our lips only brushed for a moment, and then she pushed me away.

  I took a few more steps away from her, my lips trembling and my shoulders shaking. I thought I was going to fall on the ground, that’s how weak my legs felt. But it didn’t burn. My lips. I felt nothing of the sorts. Her lips were soft. That I remember. But it didn’t burn.

  And I felt as if she was different. She was still gorgeous, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Her blue eyes, her lips, her long hair falling loose down her back, but something had ruined everything. Right there and then, with Rome melting under the sun, I felt as if she was just another woman.

  But that’s not the only thing I felt in the few seconds that passed without either one of us saying a word or moving. A few seconds in which she stared at me with her eyes wide open and her lips trembling furiously.

  I am afraid I have to take a little break and smoke a cigarette or two. I need to think about which words to choose next. That’s why I hate writing. Sometimes words can’t describe certain emotions and feelings, certain sensations. Sometimes, words are just as cold as an ice cube.

  Okay. So, Dexter, do you want to know how I felt in that hotel room in Rome?

  I felt empty. And I felt as if my entire future had died. My past had altered into this viscous matter in which I slowly drowned. All my restless dreams, my foolish love, that stupid void that I felt grow inside my chest every time I thought about her, all gone. I looked around, at all the expensive furniture, at the beautiful Rome unfolding toward the horizon, and I felt that everything was hopel
ess. Everything around me seemed to slowly decay. That was what my eyes didn’t see, but my soul could feel, and this uselessness felt ever more poignant inside what I knew was a terribly pathetic existence.

  “You should go!” I was the first to say something. In fact, I was the only one who said something. She just opened the door and walked out of my life, taking with her all that I had ever hoped to gain in life.

  After that, I packed my bags and left the city, the country, the continent. I tried to put as much distance between me and her.

  That was ten years ago, and it was the last time I saw Alexandra, my beautiful and tender dream.

  A long time ago, when I was a kid, I used to keep a diary. And every night, before I would go to bed, I would write down everything that had happened to me during that day. And I pretended to write a letter to a friend, someone named Dexter. That’s how you got your name, my friend. How pathetic am I? I have to write a stupid letter addressed to no one, because I can pay people to smile, I can pay them to listen, but I can’t pay them to care. I am worth several million dollars, Dexter, and even though you don’t exist, you’re the closest thing to a real friend I ever had. After one month of writing daily, I gave up. I’m just lazy, I guess, or maybe I found no use to writing down the events in my life as they happened.

  To be honest, I completely forgot about that diary until a few days ago, when I stumbled upon it in one of the drawers of my desk. I thought that it couldn’t do much harm if I read it. And so I found out that I couldn’t remember the events that I, in my own handwriting, had described. Of course, I was able to assemble a vague illusion of those memories, in a way you’d put together a puzzle. I took certain elements from memories that were still vivid inside my head; the way I used to look like when I was a small kid, the places that were described, the people that I had described, but in the way I remembered them, slightly different from how they were described in my diary. After a few minutes spent on playing and replaying and changing my memories as to follow the precise order in which those small glimpses of my own life had been written down, I felt almost content with the end product. There was a gentle, fog like perception that mingled with what I thought of as being a distant reality, but it felt that those words and what they described still belonged to me.

  The next day I started reading the diary again. And I realized those words, places, events, and memories were no longer mine. They were cold and empty, just words, and no matter how much I tried to put the events back together, they still felt alien, as if they had never belonged to me in the first place.

  This is what Alexandra has become to me. It’s been more than ten years since I last saw her, and all I can remember are her blue eyes and her long, black hair. And, of course, the bizarre perception of her being, for most of my past, the most beautiful woman in the world. I am afraid that if I pass her by on the street, I might not even recognize her. She’s slowly fading away, like buildings on a misty day, she’s slowly turning into a ghost, and I fear there’s no way of stopping this insidious process.

  If I try hard enough, if I really concentrate, I can almost feel my lips burn, a vague sensation caressing my skin, nothing but a faint echo, but I do know this is as close to completely forgetting everything about her as I’ll ever get. This is something I can write down so I will remember.

  About the Author

  Cristian Mihai (born 25 December 1990) grew up in Constanta, Romania. And he’s still growing up, or at least trying to. Sometimes he writes. Sometimes he gets lucky and writes something good. He can’t, however, draw a straight line. No matter how much he tries. Not even with a ruler. And, please, don’t ever ask him to sing.

  Visit him at www.cristianmihai.net

  Also by Cristian Mihai

  SHORT STORIES

  A SAD, SAD SYMPHONY

  REMEMBER

  MEMENTO MORI

  ONE

  CROSSROADS

  MR. NOBODY

  NOVELS

  JAZZ

  Table of Contents

  www.cristianmihai.net

  Remember

  About the Author

  Also by Cristian Mihai