It’s instinctive. I know it is as I reach for my phone and dial his number. He picks up on the third ring. His voice is morose but steady.

“Hello?” Uncertainty marks his voice.

“It’s me,” I murmur and there is no need for introductions. “I’m here for you.”

And I listen to him. We crumble into the same desperate heap, needing so much warmth. There is something comforting about being connected to someone thousands of miles away, sharing the same sense of loneliness.

“I don’t know what I’m doing any more,” he tells me. There is a pause, an incoming confession that needs to be run with one’s soul before the words are uttered. A deep confusion lying with it and then it comes, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

I do. I’m not sure if I tell him with my voice. But I hear it in my head and my heart. If I had stayed silent, I prayed that our bond was still strong enough that he would know if he lost faith in himself, I still have plenty of faith for both of us.

I remember sitting inside the car with him, a moment not far too long ago. He looks straight towards the trafficking lines of cars, his lips slightly pursed in thought. Cheekbones high and eyes twinkling. I tell him he’s beautiful, so he smiles. You say things you truly mean when you’re young. If you have any doubt as you grow old, it’s your cynicism making you doubt your truth. He meant it when he told me he loved me and he always would.

I never said the words back.

The person I’m talking to right now, he has the same distinct lilting voice as the one I’ve always known. I cradle my phone pressed closest to my ear. I whisper to him, I ask him if he’s eaten, I tell him small stories and he laughs in a tone of relief. Like he’s glad he remembers how to go through the motions of mirth. My heart sinks for my broken man and I absolutely break down and tear up because I wasn’t expecting it to be this bad. I cry because I know he wouldn’t break down, even when he needed a pause, so I do it for him.

We are emotionally damaged fools, who know far too many words, far too versed in prose and poems, but know very little about how the heart works or how to treat the ones we care for with intimate caresses and enveloping warmth.

He doesn’t let himself lay in peace for more than a second. His mind doesn’t let him stop from reliving his darkest moments. And no amount of little nothings I whisper to his ear can chase the demons away.

“I wish you weren’t alone,” I admit. I wanted to tell him, find someone, be with someone. I think of all the people who could love him. Faces make a montage inside my head, flitting through the backs of my lids. Your parents? Away. Your relatives?Busy. Cousins? No. Friends? Well, you’re here right?

He hesitates before he answers. “Me too,” he agrees, swimming in dark deep sadness I can’t quite dive in to reach. I’m afraid to swim again, remembering the sensation of almost completely drowning.

So I tell him truths. Because honesty always comforts him. I tell him short anecdotes and for the time being, he is appeased. And then, the clincher.

“You don’t have to believe everything,” I concede. “Just this one”. Finally, after years of uncertainty and niggling anxiety, I tell him my truest truth: “I love you. That’s the only thing you have to remember. Forget everything else. Forget the abandonment, the longing, the hurts and the fights. Forget the heaping experience of their overall pain. But don’t forget, I’m always going to love you. I’ll always be on your side.”

The penny drops and disbelief - the fastest and most hurtful conclusion – does not come. Instead, there is relief and acceptance.

“I know,” he tells me. “I’ve always believed in that.”

So hold onto it. I say. Because I’m not there. Because you’re not here. We don’t have anyone right now but ourselves and that’s fine. As long as we don’t take someone else’s side. At the end of the day, it’s yourself you’re still going to live with, in the eternity you’re here.

Even before I need to leave, he senses it and announces, “Then I’ll say goodbye now,” because he knows I’m scared of leaving him again. I murmur okay and the line gets cut after a last “I love you”.

And that’s what I’ve always wanted him to hear from me.

by Guia Galvez

I wrote this while listening (sobbing) to Florence + The Machine’s song, Heartlines. And, as a more painful treat, her acoustic version to her song, Breaking Down.