When Marina was mad at me her eyes were like aquardiente, or like the eyes of that android in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I don’t want to overstate it or kill what I’m trying to say with pop references. I don’t want to do that. I want – what I’m trying to explain is that her eyes most days were beautiful, empyrean and full of luz…but when she was mad, her eyes were like aquaridente, which makes the most sense to me right now. We talk enough about women’s eyes but, she, Marina Ojeda, had eyes like that.

One night, at a restaurant, I think, called Paz, somewhere off of Division, I had said or done something and it hadn’t been what I’d said or done necessarily, but it had been an addendum to other things, careless, inconsiderate things – things that had grown like an appendage on an embryo. The waitress, a tall and spindly woman, came over to see if everything was alright. Marina had, or I had, I don’t remember, slammed a near-full glass down on the table and the juice, I remember it was jugo de mana, pulpy and florid, spilled on the table. Anyway, Marina said we were sorry and she was sorry and she gave the waitress a generous tip and hugged her. I’d never seen someone actually hug a waitress before. After Marina stormed off, I’m sure I thought our relationship was over.

Later that night Marina came over and although her eyes had softened, she was still angry and I felt terrible and incompetent, a satire of a younger version of myself, a Don Quixote. But I listened to her injuries and I agreed with her and knowing that I needed more (more than myself, I thought sadly at the time) I brought out a bottle of wine and put on Sam Cooke. The song Sentimental Reasons played and then Tenderness, which is basically a list of the things I should’ve done in my relationship with Marina. But it’s a good song and there’s a sweet and short and sympathetic piano that accompanies Sam Cooke’s voice, which carries multitudes of loneliness and warning. So, in Tenderness, Sam Cooke is really singing some sense.

She cried a little and smiled – a soft and sure lunette – and then slipped her hand into the crook of my arm. I told her that I was sorry and I meant it and we danced for some time in my apartment, which was on the 10^th floor of a complex and faced the Lake and, that night, we could see the luna and the firmament of the eastern horizon, which was torpid and indigo, and that meant clouds were forming and a light summer rain would follow.

And this is how it was for two more weeks – almost all we listened to at night was Sam Cooke – until she told me without anger or guilt, her eyes just beautiful, just empyrean and full of luz, that she was moving back to Mexico City. She did go, at the end of that summer, and the next time I saw her was nearly twelve years later at a market on Chicago and Rockwell, and she was with a little girl, her daughter, who had the same lunette smile, and Marina hugged me we talked about how to pick out the best avocados, something I still don’t understand. I never saw Marina again and just before my father passed away last year he told me to marry the first woman I met who was nice, really nice, to waitresses because it says more than anything else you could ever find out about a person, it really does, he said, like it was a hard won secret, like I’d be an idiot not to listen.