While I’m here, I walk outside and under the drizzle, thinking about the warmth of your sheets. I regret it, walk with your steps and the color of my coat. In Lima, at this hour, no one thinks about you, but I do, here.

And I regret it softly and think about what I’m writing now.

I looked at my pupils before going out, they are dilated, but actually, the color of the iris is lighter when one just opens their eyes after a nap. A black spot on my pale eyes.

Khaki.

Soldier’s uniform that has lost the war and is dying wrapped in its worn uniform and its withered flag.
The eyes lighten when one is dying. They also lighten when one is hungry, when one has hangovers, fevers, dawns, when one is sad. My eyes lighten when I think of you.

And when I think of Lima, I think of your dilated pupils, your first glance at me, two black holes absorbing me.
And I, blue. Deep blue, dark blue, the blue of planet Earth as seen in science magazines, which people surely read while they’re calmly in a café.

Sad blue, Lima’s Metro line, where our faces, like in an old photo, traverse the city’s arteries, dark, flickering lights and their arteries with galloping children, gray, and your face circulating within me, tying knots in my heart.

In Lima, the news says, a cold wave has struck.

White cold like my empty cotton sheets, where I twist looking at the ceiling, where my heart is a wet, childless yard, where my underground skin arteries stretch, where my blood gallops and hurts, where I am not and however I am

orphaned
tired
lost
very sad
self-absorbed
alone
bored
without you.