January 20, 2015
I looked at my watch and hurried. It was late.
I would have missed the bus that would have brought me home.
Running, I took a puddle full and shuddered.
I kept running.
I crossed a street, I jumped on a sidewalk and with a last shot arrived at the destination. I took a breath. My knees trembled. My chest rose and fell impetuously.
I did not have running, I was discouraged to get tired, indeed, forbade me, but the time was too precious to stop thinking about what I could or could not do.
I looked back at the watch and breathed a sigh of relief.
I was early. Just a little, but I was early. Time was so important that those five minutes seemed like hours to me. I felt I had won a race.
It was a continuous race against time.
If I had been late five minutes more I would have to wait another hour for the next bus; It was cold and I did not want to stay there alone.
I took the smartphone from my bag and looked at the calendar.
It was the twenty of January.
I would have to wait five days.
Anxiety increased. I took a deep breath to calm myself.
It was quite normal fidgeting, but unconsciously I knew that that was not the real reason.
It was the passing of time that distressed me.
Pride, however, did not allow me to admit the truth. The fault of my agitation was that date.
I looked around and, as usual at that time the bus station was not very populated.
There was a boy sitting on a little wall that was swinging its legs, people buying tickets and boys with their suitcase ready to go home or leave for who knows where.
I would have liked to travel too, but I had not had time. There was never time.
From my eighteen years, the time had flown.
As children we could not wait to become "adults", greater age.
But what was that number?
That number indicated only the beginning of greater responsibilities. Deadlines. Objectives to be reached. The ingenuity had to disappear. There was no place for the sleeping world. We had to open our eyes and cross the border that separated us from the adults.
That number for me had represented hell.
I could easily have remained locked in the house, staring out the window for the succession of the seasons, no anxiety, no fatigue...
But ...
I had left my world of dreams and hopes.
For what purpose?! I often wondered this lately. Probably, indeed, almost certainly it would not have helped, but when I had embarked on this adventure I was full of initiatives and full of hope, but now...
I did not even want to wake up in the morning.
I looked away, at no particular point.
The cars ran. People who hurried through the streets noting that the weather would not be mild on that day. Everything as usual was to run its course.
And me? What was I doing?
I was a dot in that immense universe.
Nobody important. Nobody to notice. No one for whom it was worth losing a shred of attention. I was one of the many people which served as a side dish to the main course.
Those who had or were leaving an imprint of their passage on that land.
There was not much to do.
I was a simple black dot on a blank canvas and nothing would have changed, why?
There was no time.
I smiled. I gritted my teeth and smiled.
I told everyone that everything would be fine and what did I receive in return? I was subjected to their looks full of compassion.
They were sorry for me.
For this reason I smiled. I did not want they to see what I had inside. I did not want they to see my heart shatter each time they hugged me and whispered naive words of comfort.
I shrugged. The temperature was falling. January was always the coldest month.
And as the temperature cooled, Me too freezing too slowly.
Something suddenly hit my face. It was cold and pungent. Then again. Water. It was starting to rain.
I backed up to the ticket booth, a rectangular, narrow, and aseptic building. Simple concrete walls and some other material. It was devoid of any character.
The last thing I wanted was to take a trivial influence. In just five days I would have inaugurated my first personal exhibition. I was very proud of it, it was a year that I worked there and it was not long before now.
Though I thought the adventure was useless, there was still a flame of determination that burned within me. Despite being small and wet, it was there that she was fighting to win the storm.
That flame kept me going, with small steps, but forward. A small light that gave color to gray that veiled my eyes.
I had worked hard and had to make another single work, missing a piece to complete the puzzle, but...
t was as if the inspiration had died ahead of time. Nothing was fine. It was all too trivial or already done. There was nothing that represented me.
I sigh lost in my thoughts.
Someone came running, I heard footsteps on the wet asphalt. He stopped in front of me. He made me a shadow, so I raised my head and crossed his eyes.
Time stopped running.
The lungs stopped rising and lowering, preventing the oxygen from entering. Even the heart stopped. I was afraid. The time had not yet arrived.
Certainly it was my brain that had hallucinations, because it was logically impossible for such an important organ to stop working for that reason, right?
Usually there was talk of lightning. But, I thought, it was something different. In the novels that were so fashionable and that I loved myself, one read of a handsome and popular boy who fell in love with the provincial, naive and simple girl. But, since we were not in a book, the person in front of me was not a model, he seemed like an ordinary person, like me who was neither naive nor simple.
He was staring at me and I reciprocated his gaze. He had something strange that shone in his eyes. I did not understand. It had never happened to me. A living light that hid a veil of melancholy.
He was not very high, but not even low. From the jacket open I could see a sweater and a shirt and the right shoulder hung a bag. A student? Why did I ask all those questions? I should not have been interested.
I had lost interest in all those details that characterized life.
He had strands of wet hair between his eyes. Dark eyes. Here is another thing different from the guys described in the novels: usually they had clear eyes.
It was not love at first sight. I did not feel butterflies in my stomach. I had to stop reading those novels, I was beginning to confuse reality with fantasy. And, I had to stop noticing all those details.
I felt only that everything around me had stopped. Except for the rain. That fell incessantly.
Here it is.
It was like a drop of rain that hits you suddenly. Cold and pungent. You could not jump and raise your head to the sky.
You had to necessarily notice his presence. It was freezing and burning there, where it had hit you.
It was as if you suddenly woke up from a long sleep, where, even if you were conscious and awake, you did not see. Lost in your own hell the rain brought you back to reality.
His eyes had taken me and thrown into a storm.
Here's how I felt: at the mercy of a storm.
You had to get up and swim if you wanted to survive that impetuous sea.
You had to live.
Your instincts lit up with life, the little flame grew.
They were a mix of emotions that I could not recognize, for too long I did not give space to those emotions that made man human.
I was afraid, but at the same time attracted to those eyes. Attracted by the feeling they gave me. There was something magnetic. I felt an energy flowing down to my feet.
However, that bond broke too early.
I followed his gaze to move to the bus that arrived and slowed down to stop. I saw him start, in a hurry to avoid the rain, up to the same bus that I had to take. I gripped the belt of my bag with cold hands and followed the passenger's tail toward the doors of that long machine with an irregular heartbeat.
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