I shadow the galgos. I am in Andalusia, a place of whitewashed villages. It is winter.

I stroll through streets covered in mosaics of Maori tile. I picture where they might have kissed. I follow their shadows as the colors of the horizon over the sea paint the silhouette of a woman familiar to me. I imagine what kind of people they were before everything. I imagine what he was like when he was happy, imagine his expression as he watched the Atlantic. I imagine how they made love on the sandy beach smelling of oranges and salt. Whose idea was it to leave Prague? I forget. I have trouble recalling everything he had told me about her, but the farther south I go, the more those memories surface and his words become travel companions.

I am trying to get some distance from the obsession. But he is with me on this journey. He is always with me. My neighbor had advised me to leave him in the apartment, like you would a favorite dress for fear you’d lose it on a trip, but I chose to bring him along. I packed him in my bag along with my diary and Aitmatov’s Jamila and carried him everywhere—planes, trains, buses, public toilets, coffee shops, pubs, hotels, streets, beds. I disdained everyone who’d tell me time heals—a platitude they’d read somewhere on the internet. How could time heal wounds created by time itself? The wrong time, bad timing, a missed storyline, a nonexistent photograph. Time heals nothing, only complicates.