Carlos
Words by Rachelle Rodriguez | Art by Sandrine Segula
You were the first person I fell in love with in my post-high school life. You were a talented fucking cook, and I still credit you to this day for being my biggest inspiration for creativity in the kitchen. You were so tall, and so brown, and you had a thick Mexican accent, and a head full of curly, dark brown hair, and you were a romántico, and you adored me and my olive skin and we would lay in bed together with the soft dim of a candlelight and press our skin up close against each other and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
You would come over in the evenings after I got off from my 10-hour baking shifts at Hey Cupcake, and you would lick the remnants of chocolate buttercream off my skin, and inhale the aroma of vanilla extract still lingering in my hair. You would pass me a loaded bowl and tell me to smoke this and go take a bath, chiquilla, and you would raid my pantry and have dinner waiting for me when I’d get out, and then we’d make sweet fucking love all the rest of the night.
But I wasn’t ready to commit. I came to Austin thinking I was going to meet some cute, tattooed, white boy and instead I was fooling around with yet another border town cabrón who played too much FIFA. I craved something new. I needed a new flavor. I wanted that pink dick, goddammit.
We continued to fool around despite the fact that I wouldn’t commit to you, but you had changed–grown resentful of me, started sleeping around with other girls. Once, I went over and you told me that I had forgotten a pair of my shorts at your place but I told you that they weren’t mine, you just laughed and said, “whoops.” I was mad, but I sucked your 4-inch cock anyway and you went into the restroom afterward to take a 20-minute shit and I found myself feeling pissed at you for having another girl’s shorts in your room and so I left without saying a word. You opened up your bedroom window that peered into the parking lot and caught me as I was walking to my car and you yelled out at me, “bitch,” and I laughed and played Belanova loudly as I drove away.
I cheated on my first serious boyfriend with you. I had you saved under my friend’s name so that when you’d call or text it would be “Gwen” that would pop up and not…Carlos. I’d deny it all when I’d get caught, and then I’d be good for a little while, but you’d come calling me back and I couldn’t stay away. I was so consumed by you for so long. I wrote poetic fucking shit for you, I painted on my walls, I wrote in my journal, I made inspiring meals. And it was all because I was so insufferably inspired, and lovelorn, and crazed, and in love with you.
After my boyfriend and I broke up, you and I kept up at this sickening on and off bullshit for almost 10 years. You moved away to Baton Rouge but you would call me anytime you came into town, and I’d meet up with your drunken ass at Molotov on West 6th and let you disappoint and berate me until you’d push me away enough to leave. Once, I drove all the way from Austin to see you in Louisiana, just to stay with you for one night, and you didn’t even have the decency to get off your frameless mattress and help carry my luggage to my car as I was leaving. I cried all the way back home to Texas.
When you moved to Oakland, and I was living in Houston, I think we were both feeling lonely and so we wanted to be by each other’s side. You were going to come visit me on Friday, and stay 10 days with me, and then we would decide how to move forward with our lives together.
But you never came.
And you never called.
And you didn’t respond to any of my texts or phone calls.
You reached out to me a week or two later and you told me that you think you found The One, and you were going to stay there with her in Oakland.
In my heart, I always knew that I was just second best to you. You would only ever call me or come around when you were lonely because you knew I would always answer to your every call. I was good Ole Reliable. But I had hoped that maybe this time would be different. I thought that our story would have proved to be a long and difficult one, like the affair between Florentino and Fermina, and it would be years, maybe decades, before we would find our way back to one another.
But you’re married now. That girl really did prove to end up being The One. You two even have children now. I felt my heart sink when I found out because I knew that our story was truly, finally, forever to be–over.
I’d watch your new perfect life unfold on Instagram for a while. I’m not sure why. I feel no emotion about it, more curiosity. Curiosity about what could’ve been mine, perhaps, or curiosity about what could have never been, what was never supposed to be.
I still watch your stories from time to time, with a finsta of mine.
I forgot the digits of your phone number that I had burned into my mind for so long, but I won’t pretend that I don’t know your birthday. And I’ll always remember that cologne you used to wear, and I’ll never not think of you when, on the rare occasion, my nose picks it up faintly, magically, woefully in the air.