serrería cada puerta

Shakira: Tú.

It is the beginning (or middle) of my sophomore year of university. The carpet in the dorm room I share with a pre-med student from South Dakota is reddish-purple, berber, designed to hide as much dirt as possible. I never do my dishes (she hates that). She papers the walls with posters of David Duchovny (I hate that). I build shelves over my desk, loft my bed, and pretend the space is all mine.

I fall in love with a thin, blond boy from outside Moorhead. We magic one another. I meet him after work with muffins. We leave love notes on one another's bicycles. We don't see our roommates for months. I miss an inordinate amount of early class. We go to tango lessons, we go to the movies, we hang out in the architecture building, we go to lectures, we go to the library. He makes me fish out of paper. In my first apartment, on my 21st birthday, he brings me a bottle of plum wine and we drink it out of tumblers. It is my first drink.

In the building on campus where I work, I stop a Spanish professor and ask her what Te regalo mis silencios, Te regalo mi naríz means, because it's in a song my old roommate gave me and I love the song but can't figure out the metaphor. She doesn't know it either. I like the song anyway.

I keep going. I break the blond boy's heart after two-plus years and idle conversation about getting married. Sometimes, now, six years later, I wonder what happened to that simply happy girl in the photos, though I know I wasn't simply happy--the end of our relationship coincided with the deepest, most immobilizing depression I've ever experienced. I can't remember his smell now, or the shape of his hands, but I remember the word he used for me when we first met, and the feeling of those early autumn nights, and baseball, and Shakira on repeat somewhere far away.

Te regalo mis silencios
Te regalo mi nariz
Yo te doy hasta mis huesos
Pero quedate aqui