Up hill
Suddenly I think that I have not brought enough lemons to make the isotonic drink, nor seawater mixed with the other and I know that it will be a challenge to climb the slope with only one liter, considering that the tears are salty and I sketch an attempt of smile for the first time in the last week, after Alina left like this, without saying goodbye to anyone, as if she didn't care that the memories of the moments we shared slip through my fingers as time passes, not a trace of me to de ene in her skin so soft.
I have a map of the route and directions in an application that I have downloaded, but I have not looked at a pepper since I left, because it has not dawned, and I know that the important thing is to pedal up the national road until reaching the true starting point, while I hear the tires talking to the pavement and I hear this radio set that I carry on in my head without knowing where it goes off, or an implacable judge asking me questions they have never asked:
What is the real mystery in this world? Who plays hide-and-seek with us and makes everything transform in a second? Where do memories go to hide when brains spill on the floor?
Suddenly I want to stop for a moment and delete from the gallery the photo of the trip to France, where she is the tenderness and I the one who cannot breathe without seeing her, and I stop, but I don't dare to delete anything thinking that it would be enough with not look so much, but I ignore it and the desire to slide my lips slowly down his neck, to put the little toe of his right foot in my mouth like that afternoon when we arrived at the hostel in Montpellier wanting to find out the mystery of the flavors that we have in every corner of the body, as if we were two puppies that were born in the laboratory and go to the steppe for the first time in spring.
While my pores are little springs of a September warmer than others and icy without it, drier on the rooftops and wet in my cheeks, with the highest bar than any, of that punch in the kidneys and the crushing burden of its absence.
Then I stop for a moment to take a bite of the banana that I carry in my backpack to recharge potassium and I think that I will overcome the slope because I am young, and they will pass the tail of this poisoned snake, that I have reserves of everything, and after winter it always dares to come another spring.
Instead, the thoughts have remained like a magician without a jacket, without knowing where to hide the sadness, or to make other eyes and another laugh like that, so that streams of that substance called dopamine continue to run through my veins, or God knows what mysteries of past lives where we were other Tristan and Isolde or divine characters who lived only in the imagination of writers, and now we materialize.
The sock on the right foot is bothering me because of a seam that rubs against the little finger and I think I associate it with those things that annoy, but are enduring, that do not kill anyone, but are a burden that is carried with the desire to release it, like anger or fear and I can't help but have the movie of someone driving a van come to mind again, carrying God knows what hates and torments.
The slope slows down at times and I change gears, taking the opportunity to breathe to fill my lungs with fresh air, which have been empty since she left with her usual smile and I go back to lashing out with that torture of not understanding for what purpose it has been escaped, if it were true that it is oneself who decides everything, according to the nonsense of quantum physics and string theory and I do not know what other occurrences that he read lately and shared with me.
At times, he annoyed me with that boring subject of space-time and the septenary composition of humans, when I wanted to chat about sex and how much he liked that I gently bite his chin when doing it.
Now there is a little more light and the traffic of cars has begun to increase and this gray pain that scraps my brow, tightens my throat and makes me think again about hitting a pedal and turning sharply to the left, when I feel that an articulated truck of those approaches, to see if I have just discovered the encounters after death, in other folds of time.
But the idea of feeling crushed by one of those twin wheels that trucks have terrifies me and the image of her blond hair soaked in blood comes back again, with her brains spilled on that sidewalk. That is why I have not stopped snooping around the network about near-death experiences, and it comforted me a little to know that the soul leaves the body an instant before the death throes, but I can't quite believe it either, although for a few minutes I grabbed to that burning nail looking for comfort.
What if it were true that something remains after life flees through a mysterious door? What if I could perceive that his shadow has remained vibrating in a butterfly and now flies along with me while I pedal and cry, I despair and think about all this string of misfortunes?
At times, it seems congruent to me what a metaphysics book explains that I have not stopped reading since we went to the cemetery to keep my girlfriend's ashes, like someone who keeps winter shoes in a closet, because it has been the only calming for this suspicion, the only saving crack between so much fear. And that agreement between the souls was a little beyond what I expect, because after meeting her, everything they say about the power of love seems true to me and the impossible, however strange they may seem, have gone from side to side my brain, they have slipped away like cloud water on earth.
At last, I have reached the hermitage where I will leave the two wheels to continue walking, as if life itself were also a slope that one travels first by sliding, then it gets complicated, until finally one gets stuck in the mud to see how far one can go attain courage. And for a moment I am aware that the Sun has come out of the hiding places where it spent the night, it makes a miraculous space that reveals the dew on the leaves and the shadows are taking shape with the mystery of the light.
I start walking down the path uphill with the backpack on my back and the stumbles of bitterness for not having my girlfriend's hand, nor her eyes and the smile that I adore, while I look for her like a fool in the clouds, in the leaves dry that autumn begins to pile on the roads, in the faint whistle of the breeze touching my ears. And I'm walking without knowing where, trying not to drown myself with the questions that I throw into the universe, for the first time in my life without using words.
Dawn is over, and I fight with El Sol because nothing seems to matter to him, with the mountains because they don't have an anxiety attack and with the grass that is still green despite my sadness. I fight with stones and tree trunks, with TV and social networks, with advertisements that sell a canned life, religions and even with my father because he has had the audacity to tell me, surely for my comfort, that I'll meet someone else in a couple of weeks and the storm will pass.
I fight more than anyone with the unfortunate man who had the recklessness to charge me such a great price for some sin that I have not committed, and it is not enough to know that now he is not breathing either, that a bullet from the Civil Guard took his breath away, and I cannot even unload the rage because it is nothing more than a mass of flesh and bones that is rotting in a cemetery.
So who to take it with if there is no culprit alive? Who could wish a long illness or a tortuous existence locked in a dungeon? And I have no choice but to take her again with Life and be disgusted with her, take her with God without being a believer and deny her proclaimed justice, because Alina did not deserve that disgusting brutality, nor the end that has eternalized in my head as If it were one of those films that are successful and go from room to room, with the only difference that I am the only spectator in all of them.
Because I try to put them aside thinking that just if she had entertained herself chatting with her friend Laura for three minutes after finishing her art history class, if she hadn't missed the subway at Sants station and to top it off she sent me the photo of the wagon that he would walk away and then the saddest emoticon in the world, so that I wouldn't despair, not knowing that those three minutes would cost him his life.
And it is not worth the roll of the dice so that all the possibilities occur, the fable that in some parallel universe she could catch the subway and another happy self could hug her again is not worth it. Total, if it were true, I cannot know it and I do not care about the other me, but the flesh and blood me that right now is sinking in the mud of despair.
For a moment I stop on the road because my mind does not allow me to even take a step, and I am left out of the water. Here there has to be another way out, there has to be a reason that I have not been able to grasp, a reason bordering on the miracle. What if that was the plan for me to come up with? If it were the flash of light that knocked Saul of Tarsus down with his nose in the dust, the one that made him bend his knee and dare to do the simplest thing to do in this life: change his point of view?
Suddenly I close my eyes and everything turns in a kind of whirlpool that scares me, but at the same time it is pleasant, making me fall for a silent start that was in my intercellular spaces. I feel a call that invites me not to resist, to let myself be carried away, and I accept the invitation and little by little I let myself fall on the soft leaves of the forest, in the lap of Mother Earth.
I wake up without knowing how long has passed, and I start walking like a newborn fawn that, while staggering, is discovering the forest and enjoying the amazement.
