BREAK-UP!

My one friend with the cat and the Catalan dude (who I had introduced back in August and have been going out ever since) sat down for a relationship talk... and ended up breaking up.

They met downtown on a Sunday when everything was closing, but they had coffee in the basement of a Macy's until they kicked them out. She walked him to the bus and gave him a hug and wished him well, and then turned to walk the three blocks to the subway line that goes to her place, and it was all she could do to not look back or slump in a doorway and cry.

Then, like a block before the subway, she notices out the corner eye that he's following her on the other side of the street, so she stopped and he came up to her, right in front of a Walgreen's.

She wasn't sure what was going on, so she was like, "Did you need cigarettes or something?"

(He chain-smokes.)

"My feet just carried me here," he said, and he said it was almost like he was a zombie, which my friend with the cat appreciated, because he can never remember in English what's a zombie and what's a vampire and usually mixes the words up (he usually goes to bed at 6am and so he says he's a zombie, so she always has to correct him that no, he's a vampire).

As it turns out, they weren't done talking, so they went out for a beer and sat for like another four hours to talk, and after it got done both were emotionally exhausted.

They didn't see each other the next week, and the next weekend she was in town for a wedding in New York, and later she found out that he took a cab all the way to her neighborhood to drink and smoke alone at the bars that they used to go to together.

She also wrote him a very long, emotional email telling him that she cared about him as a friend etc., and he wrote back an email saying that could not express himself in English, but that perhaps she could find the same emotions in this Catalan song, and he sent her a YouTube link to some song about how when you love right you love so much that it hurts and that when that love ends it hurts even more, which song she watched with a translation of the lyrics next to it and tears streaming down her face...

She was so moved that she called him up and they talked for a while, and there was the same song playing on repeat in the background of his apartment.

At the end of that conversation, which also left her drained, she was like, "Thank you, but I think I need to wait a while longer to talk to you, I can't take all this Spanish drama," and right away he leapt on her words and was like, "No, it is Catalan!"