Category: Parent

He hung up the phone and put on his glasses. K´s voice was still resounding in his asleep brain. Where did all that come from? He left the room and dragged himself to the living room. He put the needle on the B side. Joe Strummer started yelling about opportunities. “If they didn’t have a way out back in ’77, imagine now” he pondered over.

It was going to be another tough day.

He couldn’t even remember the last time he saw her. He reflected on how memories are such a volatile thing. There were days when he could remember every sentence of a conversation. Each scent he could feel in those summers. That would normally happen when he was doing some other things and he couldn’t think about it. However, when he wanted to remember images, when he forced them, he could only find blurry sketches. Images, sounds and scents he couldn’t manage. That made him nervous. Now he could visualize many moments. However, they were false images, sounds and scents. They were just blurry memories. Very good memories. Too distant. It was as if he would put his current self, his current mind, and place it in those circumstances. In that space-time. That confused him.

That evening poetry reading was going to be tough.

K was a poet. “She had always been” she used to tell him. She walked as if she were. A sort of Neal Cassady wannabee in the doldrums. Or a sort of Kerouac who had parked his car and had quit partying. The kind of person who brags while describing Kafka’s narrative and then writes like Gabriel García Marquez. That attitude had served her for some time but it was no good anymore.

“Back in the garage with my bullshit detector…”

He took the poetry reading leaflet. It had been around the house for a while but he had not even read it. ‘Seven love and hate poems’ by K. Published by the E.P.A. (Existentialist Poets Association). Gosh, he thought. Now he remembered that K had explained to him about the kickstarter and how they had funded a project to publish poetry. Didn’t they think that there must be a reason as to why no one wanted to publish anything by them? Did they really think the world needed another volume as this one? There was a fragment of a poem in the leaflet:

”Like all those things

that are

too important

to be hidden.

To cross

looking

backwards.

[What really matters is what cannot be seen.]

Going back

to understand.

Seeing

everything

you do not say.

[Believing.]”

It really was going to be another tough day.

The road in front of her was dark and devious ; the light from the streetlights was barely enough on a night like this when even the stars could not be seen through the dark clouds . She shivered in the cold, it was a bitter night . She pulled up the zipper on the jacket high up to her neck and pulled the scarf tighter around the neck while she tucked her hands deep into her thin pockets. Why had she not taken her gloves with her?

In those last few seconds before everything went black, all she could think about was the bitter cold and how nice it would be to come home, to be warm. If she had known that the world would soon be dark, would she then have thought differently? Would she had reflected on her life and how lonely it had become ? How she slowly had excluded her friends one by one to avoid having to tell them the truth ? Or had she perhaps looked around her properly and seen that there was more than just darkness there?

When she took that last step and felt the darkness embrace her,  she thought of nothing. She did not know where she was, who she was , only that the darkness had taken her. When her head was fell hard on the gray , cold asphalt, all she saw was a white , blinding light before it all disappeared .

He leaned forward and looked at her. She looked so innocent as she lay on the ground, with the red hair spread around her like a halo. Behind her head, the blood began to spread in a round , flat circle as if someone had drawn a perfect template . He closed his eyes and smelled ; blood, mixed with her ​​own scent of vanilla. He knew that this was meant to happen , that she should be punished for what she had done. He had received clear instructions , but right now …

Suddenly he heard footsteps behind him , approaching faster and faster. The panic came over him, who could it be? Had they found him and her? He quickly jumped into a bush next to him, ignoring the branches scratching his face . He felt his heart beat hard and sweat began to appear on his forehead. How could they have found him, he had been as careful as possible? !

Hearing the familiar whistle of the missile, Francesc does not even have time to think. The explosion throws him away from his chair and shakes him like a doll, between crumbling walls and furniture that falls apart like paper in a fireplace. A few seconds later, he discovers the truth about that last moment that precedes death, almost smiling at how wrong everyone was when they said that your whole life flashes before your eyes. The reality is that there is no time for any of that, death is much faster, more practical, more simple.

While flying through the air between infinite fragments of what seconds before had been his home, Francesc suddenly understands it’s all over. There is a single moment in which he is overwhelmed by confusion, when he is even afraid, but it’s nothing more than an instant. Nothing can be felt by a body that no longer belongs to him, a body falling on the driveway of Banyoles street, resembling a pierced kite.

Now he can watch the action over and over again, with eyes that the new being he has become invents, picturing every moment with a mind he does not own anymore. He even attempts to simulate the sadness of seeing a life finished so soon, but he is unable to. Others will feel sorry for him. His mother, his father, his classmates , his aunt Gabriela… But not his brother Daniel . He is only a four years old boy that will soon forget that he ever had an older brother. He will notice his absence at first, maybe he will miss him for a while, but he will eventually grow without remembering about him, and that suddenly hurts. The last feeling that can extract from the withered body is a tremendous pain. An intense, deep, infinite, latent pain. A beat for every second, every minute, every hour someone just stole . He would like to cry, scream, curse with rage at someone who he does not even know.

The first curious approach the scene. A lady stops a second to look at him, crying helplessly. A young man climbs over the debris, screaming in search of possible survivors among the ruins. An old man who lives just two blocks away curses in Catalan; he curses the caudillo, the national army , the Italian aviation.

They cry, scream, curse.

But Francesc Bastida can not do anything at all…