Jaumear

A morning like any other. Well, at least that’s what I think. The world outside must be the same as yesterday… Nope, there it is, that power some will call God and others climatic change, to show me the universe might be a lot of things but predictible. I walk out the room towards the bathroom and a snow rain (literally, none porno metaphores), falls at the other side of the living room’s window. Awesome. I go back to my room: “hon, it’s snowing”, I say with an unknown heat in my voice after waking up. She, still in the mental struggle to defeat the cold and rip the sheets out of her body, answers with a half dead “aha”. Like it happens all the time! If I said the backstreet boys were in the living room completlely naked, things would be very different.

A couple of hours later we step on the street with clear minds, clean bodies and our best antifreezing suits. This is what appears before us:

It’s snowing. It’s snowing hard. And at sea level. It occurs to me maybe destroying the ecosystem wasn’t such a bad idea after all. The camera gets wet. “Come on, run”, “comiiiiiiing”. People covers with no success under jaquets, waterproof coats and umbrellas.

¡It’s war! Everybody walks on the streets in a flurry. Those who work stare outside from inside their customers empty stores. Waiters, on the other hand, move crazy from table to table, serving hot chocolate, coffes and other stuff, not even noticing the snow. We head to the dubbing school, inside our coats and dodging pedestrians, under the miserable protection of a broken umbrella. We arrive to the metro station. “Do we get in or do we go on foot?” We can’t make a choice. Anyway we start walking while I argue something stupid about how close we are. Two steps further we turn back and enter the metro, like absorbed for a friendly force: the subterranean heat. My feet are wet. I put my hood away and some snow falls into my pullover and slides through my back: Good morning, friends! After a line transfer and three or four stops we are in the street again. What we see is not much better.

The floor is slippy, all covered in mood and footsteps. A viscous and brown fluid which used to be white and fragile fills the sidewalks and the asphalt. Little avalanches fall on the pedestrians like cluster bombs from balconies and roofs. This is better than medal of honor. We reach the school at last. We go in. “Hi, wassup…” We record a take, “come on, we are closing because nobody came”. The official version is they close for the students safety. I don’t clock in until eight, so we stay in the bar talking about life, love and other nonsense stuff with some school mates and the teacher.

Great day. I hope yours was even better.

Play before reading

The Frames throw at me an exact sentence from the darkness of my room: your will changes everyday, it’s a choice you’ve gotta make. I don’t understand. A sad voice keeps singing. Always never seems to work. Why is he so right? I ask to myself while loneliness enters through my pores. Saliva drawns my throat and it gets harder to swallow. I take a deep breath and my lungs burn and all of a sudden I feel a tear rolling slowly down my face and an impulse grows from inside like my entrails are going to explote. I need to get out of here. Mp3 keeps stuck in my ears and a violin echoes with weak tones from a far away place. We can burn this bridge or stay. I don’t know what I want anymore! I never did! And yet I can only think of seeing you, touching you, making love to you and yell out from the roof tops that this so called life of mine doesn’t belong to me anymore. Where did we leave the need for absorbing each other every second like it was the last one? I run too fast, escaped afterwards, I wanted more, but asked for less, gave everything even knowing I had so much more saved for you inside of me in a place dead long ago. Always never seem to work. I’m down the street. I try to walk without shedding more pain. I look into the faces of the people who pass along. I wonder if they cry too. I clench my teeth because the will to live pour away from my eyes. Music stops. The song is over. But somebody invented the repetition mode. They talk to me about decisions again. I would sell my soul for a kiss from you. For a smile from before, for you to grab my hand another time, for you to look into my eyes without saying a word while they say everything that is to be said. But I have nothing left to sell. I gave it to you. You took it away. Mis steps stop. I can breath normally again. I dry my tears with the back of my hand. I erase from my thoughts the warm touch of your lips healing my war wounds. I raise my eyes. Time will be the judge of all here. So right. I take off my headphones. The sounds of the world overwhelm me. A bunch of kids come back from school. “I want candy!”, yells one of them to his mother. She nods and the miracle appears. Somebody smiles. I stare to the sky and I understand the pain will go away only if I decide it has to. I can go back home now. It may take a while, but it’s time to burn some bridges.

X: don’t hurt me. That’s what she said while we were making love… or just having a fuck, I don’t know, while we were sarcastically emulating the act of procreation with a condom in between. And there I was, inside her, moving my hips gently. I won’t hurt you. That I answered and I added: never. It’s a confusing word “never”. Did it mean no anal sex?
Y: that’s banal.
X: sorry if I’m looking for shelter in irony.
Y: it is not ironic, it’s pathetic. ¿You love her?
X: how can I know. No! I don’t know. No, goddammit, must I love her in only two weeks?
Y: who obliges you?
X: what?
Y: you said: must I love. ¿Do you really MUST love her?
X: no. That’s silly. I’m just saying if she didn’t want me to hurt her, ¿why leave?
Y: it sounds like a reason to me.
X: truth is it really sounds like one.
Y: so?
X: so nothing. I just think it’s coward.
Y: we all are.
X: not all. Don’t generalize.
Y: true.
X: I don’t know. Did she leave because she didn’t want me to hurt her?
Y: …
X: right. You don’t have an answer. It’s not fair.
Y: it is for her.
X: and that has to be enough for me?
Y: what if not?
X: if not…
Y: she is gone. Period.
X: I would have never hurt her.
Y: you don’t know.
X: nobody knows. That’s the fun thing about future, it’s unpredictable.
Y: she din’t find it that fun.
X: banal.
Y: you are right. Sorry.
X: if just because we are scared we stop doing things, stop feeling, living after all. What do we have left?
Y: safety.
X: the hell with safety! Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Y: you can only remember winners stories. A lot are left behind in the way.
X: and they regret have ventured?
Y: probably.
X: probably?!
Y: yes, didn’t you ever tormented yourself for making a bad choice?
X: I guess.
Y: you guess or you are sure?
X: …
Y: all right.
X: if we do nothing because of fear we could be losing something really good.
Y: better than the peace of loneliness?
X: yes, dammit, yes. A lot better. Something that gets your heart to beat. That makes you wake up every morning.
Y: you just need an alarm clock for that.
X: you are an ass.
Y: and you are a romantic. Each one has his own burden.
X: ok, so now what?
Y: you just keep going.
X: what if I can’t do it?
Y: oh, come on. Two weeks ago you existed without her.
X: it stinks.
Y: get used to it.
X: what if I don’t want to?
Y: then maybe you still have a chance.
X: to what?
Y: to live.

Hit play before reading:

Johnny Cash’s “hurt” song sounds in the distance, his hoarse voice sings everything I feel. Sunday is a sad day. It is by default for us who dream and find nothing more but a wall in our path. It is for us who love the invisible nothing which cohabits with loneliness inside our hearts. It is for we idiots who pretend to be happy while there is something inside us eating our entrails and turning us into what we hate the most. What have I become, asks the master Cash. And I can only figure out that I am as sad as this day I’m leaving behind with the hope of a different tomorrow, maybe better. I might even dream of a Sunday where smiling is not hard. I’m seized by tears. I write line after line, barely guessing the traces of the letters I type on my computer.
Today I climbed the Tibidabo. I observed the town of Barcelona in it’s full splendor. It occured to me there are three million people down there living, loving and dying every day. Some of them laugh too. To think that I am a grain of sand on Mars makes me feel tiny. My mistakes seem reversible. A little light shines at the end of a tunnel of darkness I have been inhabiting for too long. I am better than what I am. A smile pops in my lips. Tomorrow I’m going to get someone to smile too. “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel”, and you know what mister Cash, I am alive yet.

You feel drowsy and tired, but you can’t sleep. Thoughts collide inside your head, when and where you screwed it, unforgivable whyes. Echoes of verses you wrote for a muse now dead sound in your ears and you can’t avoid feeling a sharp pain in the chest. You are unable to bring back any good memories, because the grief is so intense that it hardly lets you breath. You want to quit. Nothing works. Everything is grey where she drew a 16 million colours rainbow. You need to cry, but you can’t because exhaustion devours you from deep inside yourself. You want destiny to be kind, but clearly it will not happen this time. You entered this labirinth with no exit by yourself. Wish you had a time machine so you could go back to who you were when being you mattered or at least was worth something. When her hand was there if you reached yours, and the whole universe fitted perfectly, because you had finally put the missing piece of the cosmic puzzle. You take a look around. You are alone. Incomplete. You want to go back. So you demand a second chance to the gods who pushed you to agnosticism, but, as usual, the only answer is the hollow sound of the thunderous void that lives inside you. You don’t want to keep going, but you will. You let yourself be carried away by the flow of madness your life has become. While you keep walking forward, heading nowhere, you have one and only wish, that she asks you to come back. The worst part of it all is that you know she will never do it, because she has forgotten you a long time ago.