Until today, I had been back once to Muntaner 88 since September 2011. Having avoided those coordinates “with extreme prejudice” by a margin of three blocks from any given direction for years, that November day in 2017 I drummed up the balls to walk past it timidly as I hurriedly glanced at the facade from across the street. Rita was in town for her birthday weekend and that day we had strayed close to the place on our various wonderings as I showed her about town. At some point I felt the compulsion to see it again, fueled, no doubt, with Dutch courage afforded by the presence of a close friend who seemed to understand when I asked her if she would mind doing this with me. I frog-marched her past the place with urgency, as if walking past a desecrated tomb for fear of seeing something awful behind the shards of broken stonework. It was closure of sorts… but with time it felt feeble and unresolved.

Aware of the date, a chance encounter with a photograph on Instagram this morning had me resolve to lance this boil once and for all. This afternoon I stormed down the hill with Inês in her pram, plowing through stupid, dozy pedestrians bent over their phones. Today I was bent on a fight. I squared off with the place – that fucking bastard – from the chamfer across the street on the corner with Valencia… and I took a good while to take it all in. 

I was struck by how I felt nothing at all for it; it was just a void tinged with the slight stench of grief in some other dimension. The only warmth I found was my searching for Otto’s silhouette on one of the two balconies… and I felt him in my eyes. I crossed us over the street, walked us up to the entrance, stuck my head against the glass and peared into a space so familiar and yet so divorced from me. It felt like coming up to the mouth of a cave as I sensed it blow its cold stale air at me. “I’m here to tell you to fuck off and die” I mouthed into the dark before turning my back on it.

I lent down and kissed Inês on the head as I thanked my luck and my blessings. We sauntered up the hill back to the warmth of our home with Cristina and Sara.