She asked if I could taste the grenadine. I told her the stars cut the night like broken glass. She said to stop being dramatic. I said that was exactly her problem. You don’t let yourself feel anything. You’re up here making me a drink like it’s any other night. She rolled her eyes. She said everything was a problem for me and when I ran out of problems then she became the problem. She said Maybe you’re the problem. 

I said this whole day was a problem. 193 dead. 

She said Can we talk about something else?

What else is there to talk about?

Tell me about California.

California is more proof that you’re the most beautiful person in the world. It is an ugly place full of ugly women and ugly men with ugly souls.

She said Don’t be nasty. Tell me about something you liked. 

I liked the trees. Nothing like that in Madrid. You’d probably like them too.

She said That’s wonderful. Was that so hard?

I said it was hard. I said I don’t need instruction on positive thinking. I am on this roof with the love of my life on a night so full of stars it makes me dizzy. And on any other night I would have looked at my love and kissed her like it was for both the first and last time and then asked her to come to Casa Alberto with me to enjoy some huevos cervantinos while we mock the British and American tourists and their ugly accents until we grow tired of it and the taste of our beers grows stale and we laugh at the serendipity of our fortunes to be together at that very moment in time as we hold hands walking down Calle del Principe together clothed and decent, but already naked and wrapped around each other in the imagined spaces of our mind such that reality and tangibility are simple formalities to the love we’ve already made a hundred times over. Instead, I am here on this roof mourning the dead, mourning this city, gripped with the fear that it could have been us. And maybe it was us in another life, again and again in the endless permutations of time. 

She said Quite dramatic. It’s always about you. About how you feel. About what bothers you. About what problem someone somewhere needs to solve. And what if I’m not ready to talk? It’s been days since I’ve talked to anyone but you. I don’t know where anyone is. What if all my friends and family were on those trains? What if I’ve lost everyone in a single day? Let me have tonight, Oscar. Give me tonight. Give me your good side for as long as you can because we’re at the end of something we don’t know the name of and tomorrow we will wake up to new lives in a new city. These bombs. People think all they do is destroy material. Things you can touch. Metal and stone and bodies. But that’s only what we see. They destroy everything before and after. They rip apart our memories and our imaginations. They break time into pieces that you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to put back together. Give me this moment, Oscar. Give me tonight.

I said I could taste the grenadine.