It’s been a week already. A whole week since the last time we met. The first few days were easy. Work. Gym. Telly. Routine. Friends and their advice against her. The fact that I stopped drinking. A feeling of control: over myself, life, the future. Until she came back. “Did you move back to Chile?” she wrote me on Saturday evening. I thought of not replying. Then I didn’t give a fuck anymore and I did it. Nothing good came out of it. Just the misery of realizing that, again, I was trapped in an unbalanced… sort of relationship.

I was always able to the see the red flags. They were present all the time. Everything about it was red. Her lips, the smell of her perfume, the tone of the lights in her flat, her painting, her nails, the bite marks on my chest, my eyes after crying over her. Red. All red.

The possibility of meeting again seems harder minute by minute. Sadness and relief contaminate me in equal amounts. My Mancunian lover once said to me that she could only describe me with one word: unique. After meeting M, I can say exactly the same. She is, indeed, unique. I feel blessed for having met her, and for being some hours in the timeline of her fascinating -and highly intense- life.

M is a woman of contrasts. For uneducated eyes, she would be simply a drunk, who sleeps around and gets fucked up on coke every now and then; someone who has no expectations and no plans in life, merely living the present, like there was no tomorrow. But beneath that surface, behind that facade, there’s a whole different person. I’ve seen her. I’ve listened to her. But, most importantly, I have understood her and she has understood me. She always listened carefully, never interrupted me and never, ever, judged me. That is M. So I felt free. I felt I could be myself completely around her.

Perhaps soon we’ll become friends. Or not. Sobered up as I am now, the red flags are clearer than ever. A thick, dark red. Too much like blood. Maybe, when my mum started calling her “the vampire,” she wasn’t wrong.