SenVersum

It’s 3 AM when I wake up. In the dark, something huge plummets from the sky like the blade of a guillotine falling in slow motion. A plane, I’m sure of it (I’m always sure of it) and it’s coming down to crash on my two-room home.

I stay motionless in bed, staring at the dark, my heart about to burst out of my chest, and I wait...

And I wait…

But the plane sails away, the baritone screaming of the blade following behind.

I don’t leave my bed until I can’t hear it anymore.

Later on, I tell my parents and grandma about it at lunch. “I feel like something bad is going to happen.”

“Something like what?”

“Dumbest answer? A plane is going to crash down on my house. Less dumb answer, el Flako is going to have a car accident.” A blade made out of a car roof or door, slashing the air, slicing through the tender flesh of his neck. His head flying out of the cabin of his truck, or falling on the passenger seat.

I laugh because at 1 PM it sounds stupid and I can almost wipe out the awful image of his headless body from my mind. My aphantasia is nowhere to be found whenever I picture the most horrific deaths of the people I love.

My mom gives me a blister pack of my grandma’s anxiolytics. “Take a quarter whenever those thoughts appear.”

When el Flako comes from work I tell him I can’t wait for December to end. When he asks me why that is, I tell him it’s a shit month and that everything bad always happens in December.

I take a quarter of a pill whenever I feel like bad news are around the corner. I’m jumpy. Car honks make my skin itch all over, a kid scream makes my heart race. It’s worse at dawn. Planes keep playing chicken with me.

It’s December 24 and el Flako and I spend christmas eve camping in front of the Río Talabera. We drink pear cider and beers while stargazing. No planes follow me here. I didn’t take my anxiolytics with me.

We travel back home. My dad is sitting out when we arrive. A single look at his face tells me something is very wrong. He looks old.

“What happened?” I ask.

“The water tank fell through your roof.”

It fell on grandma, I’m sure of it. “Is everyone alright?”

“Yes.”

Then why do you look like it killed someone? I want to ask. Instead I push, “For real?”

“Yes.”

My muscles relax. Yeah, it sucks. It’s the third water tank that gets obliterated—the first one burned down before we could even install it, the second one flew off the roof in the storm of December 17, 2023. This one was full, and a faulty base couldn’t withstand one tonne of water. Death by fire, air, and water; this shit is really starting to look like the avatar of water tanks.

It’s fine I tell myself, nobody is hurt, it could’ve been so much worse. Sure, it broke a more or less small part of my very new roof, but I’m sure we can fix it.

Innerly, I let out a sigh of relief. This is it. This is why I’ve been fearing something falling down on me. Case closed.

December ends in a week from now.

My anxiety drops for exactly 5 days.

It’s 5 AM on December the 30th andI’ve just sat on the toilet when my phone starts ringing. It’s el Flako’s brother. “Don’t fret,” he begins, “[el Flako] passed out at work. Another trucker called an ambulance and is with him at the hospital. I’m about to go see him.”

“Could you pick me up first?” I ask. If he can’t, I’m taking an uber, but he can.

We spend the entire hour-long trip to the hospital assuring each other el Flako is fine; he never has breakfast before going to work, not even mate or mate cocido. It has to be that. We purposely avoid discussing what his coworker said about el Flako being unable to speak, or stand by himself. Or how he couldn’t follow the paramedic’s instructions while on the ambulance.

When we finally arrive, we zip through rows and rows of tired, scared looking people waiting for news of their own relatives in the Emergency wing.

“There he is,” says el Flako’s brother, and I spin my head around waiting to see my life partner. Instead I see a late thirties, early forties guy sitting on a metal chair. He is rubbing his eyes.

He is crying.

He is not crying.

He is crying because el Flako is dead.

He is a coworker, not even a close one.

He turns to see us approach, and my stomach drops. He looks like my dad before he told me the water tank had taken a piece of my roof with it.

He stands up.

I can’t feel my legs.

He is crying. His eyes are red.

I feel like I’m walking on stilts, or like all my joints have fused together.

“Hey,” he says. They give each other a dap, and when he tries the same with me, I go for a greeting kiss. I always accept daps, but there’s only one thing in my mind at the moment.

Is he dead? I want to ask. “Is he awake?” I ask instead.

“Yes,” he replies. I think I say something, I think I give thanks to something—the universe, god, the devil—I’m not sure. I’m not religious but I was born in a catholic country and that stuff is hard to shake off. “The doctor wants to talk to a relative.”

“I go,” I say, and el Flako’s brother gives me the go ahead. I’m not el Flako’s relative, I am his partner. Our anniversary is in 2 months: 17 years since I asked him to be my boyfriend. But we aren’t married. His brother doesn’t mind, though; he isn’t married to the mother of his children either and they’ve been together for almost 20 years.

The doctor tells me el Flako had a brain hemorrhage. He asks me if el Flako takes drugs. No, he doesn’t. Does he drink? We had some wine last night, I say. The doctor looks confused.

“How old is he?”

“34,” I reply, and, “What is the worst case scenario?” Because my anxiety is killing me, and I need to know there’s a roof to all of this, a limit, something. I’m drowning in the middle of the sea here.

“Worst case scenario, he slips into a coma,” the doctor tells me.

Not death, my mind takes a hold of that fact like it’s a rope ladder someone threw at me from a helicopter.

And maybe because the doctor realizes I haven’t understood the severity of the situation, he adds, “It’s a lot of blood pushing against his brain. It’s shifted his longitudinal fissure—the ‘crack’ of the brain between the two cerebral hemispheres.”

The doctor tell us “relatives” to go in and talk to him. El Flako is awake, and the moment I see him it feels like I can breath again after having my head underwater. He says he’s fine, but half of his body lacks strength, he’s speaking as if drunk, and so low I have to lean in really close to hear him. His brother tells him to stay calm and that everything is going to be OK before leaving.

“You were right,” my life partner mutters. “About your gut feeling. Something bad did happen.” We laugh. We kiss. Then he is crying.

El Flako is a sensitive guy, but I haven’t seen him cry since we were in our teens and would have dumb fights which culminated in both of us crying. He is doing it now in that silent, tears sliding-down-your-cheeks way. He is scared. I am too, but I hug him and kiss him over and over again. “You are here with me,” I tell him. “You are alive and being taken care off. They got you just in time, don’t fret.”

I have to go. I don’t want to go. I don’t feel like myself when we are apart. We were 17 when we met and started dating, the same span of time we’re about to celebrate in our next anniversary.

I sit in the waiting room feeling like a gutted fish, hollowed up inside, like a carcass, like half of my soul is locked away. It sounds so dramatic, and I’m never been particularly romantic, but I swear there isn’t another way to properly describe it. I’m half-empty.

That first night I return home at around midnight. My mom brings me food and checks on me. I haven’t cried the entire day. I don’t cry with her in the room, but I do cry in the shower, and I cry harder when I get into bed.

Why him? Why? He is one of the most good-natured people I know. He doesn’t deserve this.

But who does? Life doesn’t work that way.

I fall asleep, but I don’t dream.

On the next 3 days we learn El Flako has an arteriovenous malformation, and that it can be treated with a procedure called a brain embolization. It costs 20.000 dollars, and I’m already thinking about asking for donations on this blog, but I don’t need to; his obra social* takes care of it.

They transfer him to their sanatorium that same day. The ambulance trip is uneventful, and while they take him to the ICU, I stay down in the lobby to fill in forms.

He spends the next 10 days in that room before the medical supplies arrive, and he can’t be more done with the situation by this point: all of his roommates are comatose, two of them pass away of horrifying injuries while he’s placed in there, the urinary catheter hurts him, he can’t have his phone with him and obviously he can’t watch TV in there. They keep sedating him, so every day I visit someone that looks like my Flako but is maybe half of the person I know. He wants out. I want him out of there too.

His neurosurgeon asks to speak with a relative before the procedure and I’m half-way to the elevators when I look back at el Flako’s parents. “Go ahead,” his mom tells me. The surgeon is so young, and he says the procedure should go well, but there’s always the possibility of rupturing an artery and leaving el Flako in a worse state. He’s been getting better ever since; the strength in his muscles is coming back, and he doesn’t speak slurring his words anymore, although the slight stutter he’s always have has worsen. “Any more bleeding is bad news for him,” the neurosurgeon tells me, “But if we don’t do it, you can be sure his brain will bleed again.”

I sign the papers.

“You can talk to him before we bring him here.”

I do just that.

“It is what I want,” el Flako tells me. “I’m tired of being coop up here.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“No.” He thinks about it. “Can it go wrong?”

I wonder if I should lie, but only for a second. “Always. It’s a medical procedure. But if you don’t do it, then it will definitely bleed, and we will be back where we started.”

“Yeah.” He grabs my hand and I give it a tight squeeze.

They take him away. I’m incomplete again. I take half a pill.

I fall asleep in the waiting room. I don’t dream. I haven’t since December the 30th. I think the part that handles my dreaming sticks to him.

Four hours later, at half past 10 PM they call us up. I am waiting outside the operating room alongside el Flako’s dad. The neurosurgeon, steps out and offers both of us his hand to shake. “It was a success,” he says and I feel like I need a wider face just so I can smile a bigger smile. Then to me, he adds, “Everything I say could go wrong, didn’t. He’s just waking up from being under.”

He opens the door and I catch a glimpse of el Flako and the people in charge of keeping him alive and well. A group of five women and men get at the feet of his bed. “One, two, three,” they say before pushing it out of the room. I lost count of how many Thank yous I shoot their way, and they beam at me as they accept them.

El Flako is still dazed, but he holds up a hand when his dad and I wave enthusiastically at him. He doesn’t put it down even as the orderlies roll him into an elevator.

He is discharged from the sanatorium 2 days later. We get married a day after our 17th anniversary.

I’m dreaming again and I only take anxiolytics whenever it starts to feel too much like the last five minutes of a Nightmare on Elm Street movie. I guess that stuff won’t get magically fixed, but we’re taking it one day at a time.