[Click to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3]

I was determined to find my own apartment.

After two years of living with roommates, I wanted for once, just once, to live on my own. And what better place than an island?

Within a day, I found my dream apartment.

It was professionally decorated and looked like a hotel. I signed a year-long contract, and in a matter of days, the real estate agent handed me my very own keys.

I touched my own cabinets, my own kitchen, and my own sofa—mine, all mine. I couldn’t stop giggling. A year ago, I was eating rice and ketchup on the daily, and I could barely pay rent for a room. And now, I had the keys to my own apartment with an ocean view on an island.

How did I manage to find such a beautiful place, I wondered.

I was four minutes walking from the beach. I could see the ocean outside my window to the left. To the right, I could see a park, and I could hear the cruise ships come in at night. Below my view were palm trees after palm trees, lined up like models in a fashion show.

The apartment cost me dearly. I nearly emptied my bank account I’d been able to grow after a year of teaching at 6am every day. But the pandemic was still in effect. So if I wasn’t able to travel, give me some place beautiful to live in.

When I went to the beach that first day, I realized that this was the beach I’d been imagining all those months back in Madrid.

Next order of business: finding friends. One of my colleagues at the online company suggested I reach out to a church to find friends.

It had been years since I’d gone to church regularly—since I was 18. Years later, I’d learn that “religious trauma” was actually a thing. But I was so ready to find friends that I was willing to try anything.

And lo and behold, I found a group of friends around my age who were living on Gran Canaria.

We went hiking together, watched sunsets together, spent Thanksgiving together, Christmas, and rang in the New Year together. They took me in even though I had nothing to return. And while I still have my disagreements with the church as a whole, these people taught me that good Christians do exist.

And, let me tell you, living by the water is incredibly healing.

I felt like the ocean became my friend. The waves told me that things were only going to get better from here.

I started teaching two months after I arrived on the island. My school was in a small city, reachable by bus. One of my colleagues offered to drive me, and for two years, we went to school together almost every morning. While this teacher doesn’t know it, his kindness helped restore my faith and trust in people.

I was still learning how to teach elementary school, along with preschool and high school. Teaching children was still a learning process. But I felt more comfortable than I had the previous year. I had supportive co-teachers, and the students seemed to like me.

By this point, I’d been single for nearly two years. After years of being in one unhealthy relationship or situationship after another, I needed to be single.

But it wasn’t easy.

I spent so many sunsets alone, a few meters away from happy couples. Constant reminders of my status as a single lady in her early 30s.

By the start of 2022, I was ready to find love.

I thought I’d learned all my lessons I’d needed to for love. The next time I find someone will be the real deal, I thought.

Long story short, I’d thought wrong.

I met someone with my group of church friends one afternoon while watching the sunset. “He’s returned to Gran Canaria, and he’s coming tonight,” someone had written in the group chat, as if we were about to welcome Alexander the Great.

I felt a jolt of electricity go through my veins when I read that message, and I didn’t know why. And then when we met at the church group on a Wednesday in January, watching the sunset, I knew why.

It was the first time I’d liked someone in that way in almost two years.

A couple weeks went by before I saw him again. During the second time we met, we barely spoke to anyone but each other. I understood the whole “It felt like we were the only ones in the room” feeling I’d read about. My silhouette under the sunset was the jewel of his eyes. Every moment of his attention felt electrifying.

Is this the reward I get after all the pain? I wondered.

Everything felt so perfect. Meeting on an island at sunset, under the palm trees, listening to the waves roll like cymbals. Tall, dark, handsome, doctor, crypto-investor, nice eyes, nice voice, nice everything. He oozed cool and charisma, and having romantic feelings for someone felt like I’d eaten chocolate for the first time in two years. Except chocolate didn’t taste like I remembered it did. It tasted better.

Our story followed like any romantic movie would. We went to a wedding together, spent a whole day together, then a night, then three nights, then he says he’s not ready for a relationship—record scratch, wait, what, this is not how I saw the narrative going, why are the credits rolling when we’re not happily ever after, what do you mean you’re not ready for a relationship; do I need to remind you how old you are?, and he chipped that at least he was telling me, because he could have led me on the whole time before his eventual departure from Gran Canaria, right? Because I should have known he was leaving, right? Right? It’s not like he was in love with me, right?

Have you ever had someone tell you how they were going to break your heart to your face? Which is more heartbreaking—how they would have done it, or how they told you the truth of how they’d been leading you on?

And why do situationships feel just as hollowing, or even more so, than losing the love of your life?

But wait, it got worse.

So, my heart got broken on Saturday.

On Thursday, the war in Ukraine started.

On Friday, I realized that one of my best friends in Colombia, a guy who was like a brother to me, had passed away the day before.

And on Sunday, my two best friends in Gran Canaria returned to the United States.

What are you supposed to do when so much sadness happens at once, within a week? How are you supposed to carry on life normally when you feel like you’ve taken a gunshot to the chest? When you’re losing track of all the reasons you’re crying?

When you thought you’d finally gotten your shit together?