Only yesterday did I learn his name.

I woke up in the middle of the night, just past midnight and went to pee outside (yes, we have an external toilet in this apartment) and brave the harsh northern Spain early winter cold just to see the full moon. But here, unlike in Andalusia, it is usually cloudy.

My hometown was struck by a terrifying typhoon yesterday. Images of a devastated Cebu keep me awake long after I close my eyes. Past midnight, I woke suddenly and couldn’t fall back asleep — as if the Andalusian sea breeze went here in Madrid carried with it the same haunting images of Manilva Guy. Only yesterday did I learn his name.

Eloy. Eloy. Eloy. 

Eliger in Spanish, from the Latin word means "to choose". All this time, he has this name. It's weird. We haven't introduced ourselves properly. We haven't exchanged names but here i am, i choose to love, smitten by him. 

It dawned on me that what we had was a transient kind of love — it began in February and ended by April. Three months of heavenly sex and hellish jealousy.

From a distance, it was only a fleeting moment. Yet, like Elio and Oliver’s summer, ours was a fling in spring — sun and rain, seeds bursting to life, blossoms at their peak, then wilting in their own beauty. A blanket of fog dissolving at sunrise.

As Sho once said in The Secret World of Arrietty, “There was a time it felt like a borrowed memory.” Eloy would see it differently — perhaps a therapist would have their own word for it — but I have to claim it. Because no matter how brief it was, it changed me completely.

It reawakened my childhood trauma. I know I’ve written about this before — and here I am, writing it again, as it resurfaces beneath this Taurus full moon, ruled by Mars.

A karmic checkpoint. Emotional flare-ups. Old patterns reaching out to the “new me.” Or am I still defining myself through who I once was?

I ask myself: What am I being shown about my patterns of giving and receiving love?

Acts of service and submission. Acts of surrendering fear while craving trust as protection. An alien, a migrant seeking validity, pareja de hecho, desperate for a permit — for belonging. A plea, a need for home.

But what I found was not clarity, but complexity — jealousy birthing distance, detachment disguised as control.

And yet, at the centre of the storm, something steadier emerges. A quiet understanding that home was never something to be given — it was something to be remembered.

And yet, perhaps this, too, is part of the healing — learning that even when love unravels, I remain. Whole, watchful, becoming.