After Without After
I. The After There is an hour in London, on Fridays, when the whole city seems to loosen its tie at the exact same time. I knew it well; I had turned it into a ritual. Men in handsome, sharp navy suits, unknotting the weight of the week, leaning against the bar with a pint in hand, their laughter spilling out into the entire street. Walking among them was my way of stepping into the weekend. The city exhaled, and I exhaled with it.
That night promised nothing different. I went to Daniel’s apartment — a Spanish friend I had met just a few months prior in Amsterdam who was visiting London that evening, making the reunion the perfect excuse. It was meant to be a modest night: board games, new faces, the kind of plan you make without expecting it to turn into anything. There was no plan behind the plan. Just the simple, deeply human habit of wanting to share a space with someone on a Friday night.
I’m not entirely sure at what point the tequila stopped being a choice and became a current. I know I spoke Spanish with an Englishman about Colombia, and that at some point during that conversation, we were no longer in Daniel’s apartment, but in a car, heading toward a place called Fire, surrounded by people who an hour earlier were complete strangers.
He was there. I don’t know if I looked for him or if we simply crossed paths, the way two people coincide on a crowded dance floor. We talked. And with a gesture I now struggle to piece back together, I leaned in to kiss him. He turned away.
It wasn’t a dramatic rejection. It was barely a turn of the head, almost polite — the kind of “no” that needs no explanation. I thought, with the lightness of someone who has already collected a few similar noes: it’s fine, I’m not the first. And I kept dancing, because that is the unspoken rule of the after-party: no one lingers too long on what didn’t work out.
Of what came after, I have only fragments, not a story. And it is right there, in that gap between what I lived and what I can tell, where I begin to understand that the after-party was never a place. It is the part of the night we agree not to monitor. The part we surrender to another version of ourselves, with the hope — or the innocence — that this version will know how to take care of itself.
II. The Body The body holds onto what memory lets go. Hours later, that place became my bed until the dawn kissed South London. There was one week left before returning home. I didn’t speak to the guy from the after-party again; all that remained between us was an Instagram handle — that modern way of never fully closing a door.
Months later, he posted a photo: a London sunrise. I viewed it from Colombia. I told him what sunrises awaken in me: the feeling that they are never an ending, but a beginning dressed in light. That confession wove a thread between us that distance couldn’t quite break.
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After that, we talked for months. Photos, new memories, the kind of conversation that sustains itself effortlessly without anyone having to force it. And then he arrived in Bogotá, alongside his sister (with whom I also connected, and who remains a good friend of mine today). My only thought was to show them my city: its sunsets from the mountains, its nights that dance until the morning finds you.
This time, in the middle of the dance floor, there was no rejection. There were kisses, laughter, and I realized, while dancing, that the kiss denied in that London after-party had found its after-party in another corner of the world.
After the party, we kept looking for another after, as we always did. New friends, more drinks, until exhaustion finally overtook us and we rented a room to be alone together, away from the noise. But I woke up with no one beside me. I didn’t know what had happened. Concern set in quickly; he was a foreigner in my city, and I had no way of knowing if he was okay. Dinner that evening felt strange, heavy with everything we hadn’t said the night before. My mind, caught between English and one too many drinks, couldn’t reconstruct the conversation. And he never explained why he left. To this day, I still don’t know. I only know he left me there, alone in that room.
The body remembers the after-party in London and the two afters in Bogotá as if they were the exact same place, even if separated by an ocean and months of distance: one ended with a turn of the head, another with a kiss, and the last in an empty room with no answers.
III. The Start and End We kept trying to be friends for months. Today, he lives with a new love. For a long time, I convinced myself to keep waiting for my turn — a “later” that was perhaps never going to come.
But one day, I stopped searching for the after-party at the entrance of a club and started finding it elsewhere. In the friends who don’t need tequila or a crowded floor to stay up late talking about nothing; the ones who show up unannounced, who laugh at the same joke for the tenth time, who don’t demand a version of me that remembers nothing the next day, and who choose to stay despite everything they have already seen me be.
I found it in family, too. In that home you can always return to, no matter how many nights were lost in another language or another city. At the table where no one asks what happened at Fire or in that empty hotel room, because there, love requires no explanations — only presence.
I found it in traveling, as well. Not the trips I took trying to forget, but those I took seeking to see: new cities, new maps, the sense that the world remains wide open even when a story has closed. Every trip was a different way of answering the same question Fire left me with that night: what do I do with what I cannot control? The answer, every time, was to keep moving, to go out, to look at a new horizon.
I cannot judge him for doing what he did. I cannot blame myself for what I did. But I can choose, every morning, what to do with what remains. Because there is no after without a now: without this awakened body, without this concrete day right in front of me, there is no night worth waiting for.
That is how a game began, and how it ended. Afterward, there will be no “after” — only this: friends, family, travel, while they are here. And that, in the end, is all we truly need to cherish.
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