─ I used to paint her. Day and night. I painted her at dusk, until dawn, when her only concern was to hang the laundry, with that hair swaying gently like soft caresses on her shoulder. And I would get lost in the sight of her pale skin. So soft, so white. She would kneel in the damp grass, and her bare feet seemed to endure everything, so small and fragile. Then she would raise her arms to hang her intimate garments and colorful lacy nightgowns along the silver line. Every now and then, she’d turn her head to look around.

The early morning sun would burn her flushed cheeks, leaving a delicate blush on the bridge of her nose, right where I longed to leave kisses. Then, clutching the edges of her dress with her tiny fingers, she’d return home through the colorful violets with her empty blue basket. And so, as small as she was, she would walk away shyly, unaware that someone was watching her obsessively, as one watches a fixation. Because I was sick with her, completely and hopelessly.

I was sick with the scent of her freshly planted cypress and that pale skin. With those lips that parted in a small "o" when, on the other side of her little house, she'd lean out the lace-curtained window with a smile full of emotion. Her chest leaned out just enough for me to take in every inch of her beauty. Her hands would cross beneath her budding breasts, and I would stare at her with a pen in hand, legs parted before the window that allowed me to witness her every gentle movement.

From time to time, there were kind exchanges. She would offer to bring me breakfast with those enormous eyes, almost as if she were deliberately trying to make me sink into her reckless innocence. And I would smile faintly, nodding a soft "no, thank you." But truly, it would have been just an excuse to invite her inside, to hold her in my arms if only to breathe in that sweet scent I could sense even through the walls. Mine would have been a sweet torment I could not live without, one that would have dragged me down. And I would have taken her with me, her little arms clinging to my waist, defenseless as she was; There was no regret in my thoughts or words, only the sick desire for a woman I could never possess.

My fingers moved deftly across the blank page, scribbling something. I adorned her face with golden hair using simple strokes of my sinuous fingertips, gave her lips even fuller than the ones she already had. I lost myself in the details I needed to reconstruct her little upturned nose. Everything, up to the moment of my greatest sin. In my downfall, her name was etched. It was that winter day, after having spent every season longing for her like the most precious diamond, that the little one knocked on my door with sweets in her hands, in her wooden basket. There was a white ribbon adorning her hair, which she gently brushed aside with her fingers to keep it from falling into what was meant to be my food. A gesture of kindness between neighbors but one I found so seductive, it clouded my mind with twisted, sick thoughts. She took a step back when I slowly moved toward her to kiss her cheek, a kiss that restrained everything I truly wanted to do. And she stood on tiptoe so I could better reach her height.

I still remember the sweetness of those moments, which vanished, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Mine was a sick obsession that I didn’t want to grow. There was a desire for something serious to wake up with her for as long as life would allow, every day. And yet, my obsession— my diseased craving to possess her more than anything else —, a sick feeling that knew nothing of love, made me step back. And I saw the sorrow in her large eyes every time she spotted me out back tending to my garden, the few times I managed to leave those four walls. A gaze that seemed to say: ''We were something, don't you think so?" The awareness that our lives had taken different paths. A melancholic life, stripped of any daily pleasures. One in which I had married another woman, and she continued to enchant and seduce me from her little house.