PART 2
The first night, I slept in a simple room near Calzada Independencia. The mattress was hard, the window did not close properly, and the fan sounded as if it were about to fall from the ceiling. But for the first time in years, no one woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me Santiago had a fever. No one asked me to wash a uniform. No one left Emiliano crying in front of my door while Claudia “stepped out for a bit.”
I slept ten hours straight.
When I woke up, I stared at the ceiling and cried silently. It was not sadness. It was rest leaving my body.
On the fourth day, I found a small apartment above a stationery shop in the Santa Tere neighborhood. It had a narrow kitchen, a window overlooking a street full of stalls, and a bathroom barely big enough for one person. For anyone else, it would have been little. For me, it was freedom.
I bought a white mug, a new sheet, and a basil plant. I kept my phone turned off most of the time. I needed silence.
On the seventh day, I turned it on.
I had 46 messages from my mother, 22 missed calls from Claudia, and several voice messages where I could barely understand anything between children crying and people shouting.
