Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I didn’t say anything. I looked into his chocolate eyes. I think I was looking for suffering.

“Interesting. Interesting is much better than beautiful.”

I could almost taste his love for that poor and wretched city in his kisses.

What good were utopian ideologies about borderless worlds from a writer of political poems? What good was an argument with a beautiful man?

“It takes a lifetime to get good at something this simple.” “That’s true. But only when it comes to food.”

The body, even in the dying, wants to live, fights greedily for one more breath of air—and damn the pain.

“Hurt comes with the day, Carlos.” “And sometimes so does love,” I said.

On Sunday mornings, I would write. He would read. In the afternoons, we took turns reading our favorite passages from our favorite novels to each other.

“We can live this way forever,” I said. It was more heaven than I deserved.

“He has gone to be with the women. With all the nameless women who have been buried in the desert.”

But being born to fight did not mean that they were born to win the battles they fought.

“You’re sure I was screaming?” “Yes.” “I was dreaming,” I said. “It rhymes with screaming.”

When the doctor left, I wondered what the word for worry was in Spanish. I couldn’t think of the word. It was gone. In order to translate words from one language to another, you had to know both languages. The languages I knew were disappearing. I wondered if I would have to find a way to live without words.