Lover lost in Seville

First book. Where it starts.

I met her on Tinder. She was in Peru for the summer and I waited. Purple dress, rooftop bars, a woman who knew the name of every building in her own city. A teacher. Wiser than me by a distance I could feel and did not want to measure.

I broke it. Not in one moment. Slowly, the way you break something you have been handed and do not believe you were meant to keep.

These poems are the record of that. Seville in the heat. Feria lights and a caseta I could not walk into. Bathroom floors and lines going down like they were going out of fashion. A dealer who took my money so I could feel her. Wedding photos of a woman I once thought would be my wife, arriving on a screen with no warning. A hospital bed. A gate with no windows in it, and me leaving flowers outside because that was the only thing left I was allowed to do.

There is a boy in here too, sat in a corner with no one to hand him a tissue. I did not understand for years that he was the reason. That a man who was never shown how to receive love will find a way to destroy it when it arrives, and will call that instinct.

The city stayed. She walked me through her crowds, gave me back my own footsteps, let me sit in a square and be nothing for an afternoon.

I loved her badly. I want that on the record before anything else in this book earns your sympathy.