This fiction book consists of a prologue and seven chapters.

                           PROLOGUE

Who has never fallen in love? Or, who hasn’t been attracted to someone of the opposite sex at some point in her life? In my case, I remember that the first time it happened to me was when I was four years old. My seven-year-old brother and I were “in love” with a girl (a woman for us) who worked in a laundry, very close to where we lived. Later, a year later, in kindergarten, I felt very attracted to a cute little girl my age, named Carolina. I remember that once I gave her some figurines that I had cut out of a LIFE magazine that was in my house; she received them very gratefully, saying that she liked them.

But these “attractions” didn’t keep me up at night; I kept playing with my brothers and my friends like any child of his age; It was very circumstantial. I tell this to show that these things can start very early in life. Who does not know the case of the little boy who falls in love with his teacher.

It is likely that the same thing has happened to the reader, but I have met many people who tell me that they do not remember anything they did when they were five years old, and some raise this age to ten.

The next time it happened to me was when I was nine years old. We were at my grandmother’s funeral and there I met my cousin Julia. She seemed to me the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. She resembled María Schneider, the actress who acted in “Last Tango in París”.

But, of course, I am talking here about the so-called platonic loves. Love, as people understand it, is something else. Just out of adolescence I read in a book that “to be in love is to dwell on the highest plane of life.” I believe that the person who wrote these words was right. Or as Jerry Rivera’s song titled “Amores Como el Nuestro” says, “nobody is saved from love, and that’s how it is.”

We have all seen two magnets attract each other. What we cannot see is the force between them, it is invisible; we can only see that the magnets come together. But the force of attraction between two people in love is much more powerful and is also invisible; they could be far from one end of the Earth to the other, and they would continue to attract each other, thinking of each other, looking forward to the moment when they would be together again.

I don’t know if I’m wrong, but I think that this happy time of our existence comes to us only once or twice in our life. And sometimes it can last very little, a month, a year. Blessed are those who keep this flame alive longer. There are marriages that achieve it for several decades, and we can only congratulate the members of these couples for such an excellent achievement. I hope I am wrong and hopefully these happy marriages are more frequent than I think.

The story that concerns us is precisely one of those moments in which one lives only for the other person. A time when it seems to you that everything is going well for you and that the world laughs with you. It is a very happy period, full of laughter and smiles.

An even happier stage than when you are officially the lover, because when you are officially there are some things that stop being funny, like that you no longer have to work so hard because you already achieved it, and you feel more free to express your disagreements, to impose your ideas and even to criticize something you don’t like about your partner, something that didn’t even occur to you before. It’s like a honeymoon and the moment she or he says yes, it’s over. I have seen many other couples before being in love, happy, laughing. And I have seen them a few days later, when they are already in love, embraced but serious, where did the laughter go? With this I do not mean that one should always be laughing, I just want to point out that the difference that I saw in those couples was very noticeable.

Sure, then comes the satisfaction of kissing and probably something else, but it’s different; you already know that you get her or you get him, you are not with uncertainty, you are not asking yourself “will she or he accept me?”. Each stage in life has its satisfactions and it is up to each of us not to spoil it. But this is much easier said than done. We generally learn by experience, by trial and error. Who knows, nowadays, someone who has married her first boyfriend or her first girlfriend? I believe that the best thing that one can contribute to the relationship is to have the firm conviction that we all have our virtues and our defects, and try to overlook the bad and praise the good that each one has, without criticizing, without judging. Of course, if there is a lot wrong with the person, it is assumed that the relationship will not prosper; that is the theory, but in practice there are many couples in which one or both feel trapped and they do not end the relationship for fear of loneliness, for economic factors, for not leaving the children without their two parents or for many other reasons.

I hope that this story brings back to the reader memories of his own experience, of those wonderful moments, when she or he was “chasing the girl or the boy”, when she or he looked forward to their whatsapps, their texts, their emails, their phone calls, their letters or the day or the hour in which she or he was going to meet her or his “sweet torment”. Or as the song by Oscar de León, Details, says, “every time you called her, and you asked about her, many times you bothered,…”

And for those who still do not have these memories or experiences, this story can give you an idea of what awaits you to live.

REFERENCES: For the article: none. For photos: internet.