Quim

The best thing about Christmas were the trips to Norfolk, a county on the east of England.

Helen, my mother, who had lived at the family cottage, fifty kilometers from Norwich, the capital, until she turned twenty-one, moved to Barcelona in the year 77, three months after meeting Manel, my father. I am the daughter of a classic summer love in the Mediterranean. My mother, so English, so pale and with such exquisite manners, fell in love with Manel instantly. From the moment she saw him, by the sea, cleaning an old and faded wooden boat. Manel was a rough young boy, not at all like the refined boys she was used to see. My mother, who had studied at Saint Mary’s girl’s school, knew men almost of hearsay. She watched the boys from her age meet at the doors of the pub, play cricket at the field and from time to time, coincided with them at the popular festivities. She watched them, but did not touched them. As if they were pieces of fine porcelain. If one of them came by, she would answer with her exquisite education, but didn’t go beyond the limits that my grandmother defined. Rigid and oppressive limits that drowned her.

When my mother traveled to Spain with the excuse to explore the world and a desperate wish of escaping the corset with which her mother educated her, surely she wasn’t thinking of falling in love but when she met Manel, she couldn’t help it. He was a strong young man, muscled, with olive skin. He had a deep brown look that was lost in the waves. Unaware of anything around him. Manel, hypnotized. To look at him, was to get lost and that was exactly what my mother was searching for.

They were so different from each other, that love was almost inevitable. At least the love of eternal sunsets, the starry skies and the salt-flavored kisses. The love of a summer almost adolescent, with the smell of eucalyptus and sea.

Manel was a dreamer, a romantic, a poet stuck in a boat in Tossa de Mar. His words flew. He did not speak, he tore your feet of the ground and took you on an imaginary journey through his particular universe. My father lived in a world so his own, that only by loving him unconditionally and blindly, could my mother be part of him. She felt for the first time in her life, light. She took off and let herself be carried away.

With the end of summer, autumn dropped its leaves and dismissed tourists from Tossa de Mar. The beaches were left deserted and my mother moved to Barcelona. It was the month of September of the year 77. She was pregnant.

The reason why my mother left Tossa de Mar, I discovered when I was ready to. Until then, I lived believing whatever I wanted to. My own version of the facts, as unfair and inconsiderate as it was, it seemed better than to know and take on the truth. Not all of us are prepared to be told the truth. It took me thirty-two years to be so.

When my grandmother Helen, with whom my mother only shared the name, fund out that her daughter was to stay, with her belly of four months, to live in Spain, she cursed so much and so hard, that the earth shook at her feet. That day was the only earthquake ever remembered in the county of Norfolk, where fortunately there was only one victim, my grandfather. That sweet man, of almost transparent eyes who barely spoke and only if he was invited to do so.

- This is your fault! – Her wife screamed at him – I told you not to let her go! But you... you... - she was saying while pointing her index finger at him and with her neck red of rage – you insisted that it would be good for her to know another country, another culture... that this house was too small for a young woman like her and now... look at what you’ve done! – She was throwing on his face.

He kept his quiet, that in which he felt so comfortable in. With his feet deep in mud and the tip of his toes always cold.

- For once you speak... you were better silent! – his wife told him before closing the house’s door and drop the porcelain that hung over the entrance. The noise of the vase against the ground let my grandfather know that it was the right time to go and visit his sheeps.

I was born in a hospital in Barcelona. My father took a day to come and meet me and when he finally arrived he slowly came towards closer to me and in a whisper which almost sounded like a sigh, he said: <<may the waves bring you, may the waves take you, and may they never compel you the way to go>>. He left a daisy next to me, a sea star shaped pendant, he kissed my mother on her forehead and left.

It was a month of May and my grandmother refused to travel to Barcelona after my mother had confessed to her that her daughter would be named Elena.

- Elena? No, no, no, no... that I won’t have! Every woman in this family have been named Helen. It has been four centuries since that name is inherited on from mother to daughter. Who do you think you are to break the family tradition?

- Mother... it’s the same – she clarified – Helen and Elena are the same name. I am not breaking any tradition...

My mother tried to justify herself but my grandmother had already hung up the phone and broken another vase.

My mother accepted my grandmother’s rage, just as she’d been doing it her whole life. She faced alone every change that came her way, the daily challenges that her new life as a mother and foreign citizen brought. I can imagine the tears, the desperation of the toughest moments, the constant doubt of the right decision. I am convinced that it was a very complicated time for her. A time of great suffering and loneliness. She was a survivor of her own decisions, a wonderful woman that I have the pleasure to know.

On December twenty-one of that same year, when few days were left for me to turn my first seven months of life, my mother got me on a plane and we went together to Norfolk. My grandmother was expecting us full of reproaches. The rage was stronger than the wish to meet her first grandchild, it was stronger than her. Even so, my mother took me to the place that up until then had been her home and so we spent our Christmas over there. The whole family, mi grandfather, my grandmother, my mother and me, at the family cottage in Norfolk. That was the start of a tradition we still keep.

- Mother, why did you go visit grandma? – I asked her once – why did you take her critics, her bad faces, the shamelessness of her absence in your hardest times? Why did you crouch your head and swallowed your pride?

- I have always walked with my head up high, Elena. Let that be clear. Really clear! – She emphasized – your grandmother Helen is your grandmother and I neither want nor to have the right to keep you from her. I came back to Norfolk because that is also your land, your roots, your home. Pride has nothing to do with the wellbeing of a daughter. Selfishness and resentment on the other hand, can be her ruin.

Every December twenty-first, my mother and I would land on Gatwick’s airport, south of London. Since there we picked the train that lead us to the town in which my mother always wanted to run away from. A land that had nothing to do with the Barcelona that she herself had created, the one that surely nobody else but me knew about. The train ride was one of the best moments of my year. I would sit on the seat next to the window and I would look at the landscape believing that time, could still give me a little bit of tranquility. My city was changing continuously, the rhythm of my day to day would suffer the transformation of modernity, of political and social changes that were turning my life into an uncontrollable mud slide. I was me, but I belonged to something greater, intangible and incomprehensible. I remember sometimes, having my daughter’s age, I would lock myself in my room, under the table in front of the bed, with my bare feet on the carpet and my arms surrounding my knees and I would just cry. I was scared of the incontrollable, to everything that was not up to me.

Norfolk, was at that time my biggest treasure. When my mother and I arrived at London and rode on the train, my fears would take the back seat, threatening a change of landscape, a skyscraper in the middle of the fields or a mechanic cow that would produce mil for some pounds. My imagination always went hand in hand with my monsters. Just my luck, it only took leaving the capital to check, year after year, that everything was still the same. That time respected the land of my ancestors, those my grandmother was always mentioning and that to me they were just a succession of names and photographs in black and white. Everything was still in its place, every December twenty-first, to my comeback. The wet grass, the imperforable, unbreakable plains, with the clouds flying over the hills. The green of the landscape would show me the pride of its tonalities, so different from the Mediterranean, so dark, so Atlantic. Its low height houses, the dark and pointy ceilings, going through the rain, letting it fall. Bridges, rivers, wooden doors, towers that had become the memory of old castles... that land which my mother called my second home, was my peace. It comforted me.

My grandfather, for whom the years notably passed, came to pick us up at the train station. He drove, silent, until we reached the cottage. The smell of wood, fire and chimney of their woolen sweaters is still today, my Christmas meaning. My grandfather parked the furwaggon in front of the fence and the three of us would walk the 100 meters that separated the entrance from the main door loaded with suitcases. My grandmother was waiting for us under the brick roof, with her arms crossed over her chest and a frowning brow. To her, living in constant complaint, we were always late. I, in spite of everything, loved her and since I was old enough to run, this is how I crossed the narrow cobblestone road to hang on her neck and ruin the ironing of her apron.

- Take off your boots before you come in – she would greet me – you’ve already stained them with mud!

Love was mutual, but the way of showing it to one another, opposite.

My grandfather and my grandmother lived in an old cottage property of great-grandmother Helen, who inherited it from her mother Helen, who in turn inherited it from great-great-grandmother Helen.

- Even when your name is Elena, someday, this will be your house – she used to tell me every January when we said goodbye until another eleven months.

The cottage was a country house narrow and small, with two carpeted floors and eight white windows that broke the brown balance of the façade. Two chimneys warmed the walls that surrounded that square dwelling in which the privilege of heat in the form of fire belonged only to the living room and the main room. I descended from a family of women, always unique daughters, so the old cottage always maintained the initial design of only two rooms. They only extended the tea room the year my grandfather decided to sell part of the land and enjoy a late retirement. At first, my grandmother, who was the owner of the house, universal heir of everything their parents owned, refused completely. - The land of my ancestors can’t be touched – my grandfather shrank his arms, bent his head down and resigned. In the cottage he had none of the rights that outside the walls of his house corresponded more than by right, by male gender.

When my grandmother finally accepted that her daughter would not come back to the cottage, she spent three weeks without sleeping. She considered it the biggest failure of her life.

- Sell this damn land if you want – she told her husband one morning before breakfast. – The day I die, the family history dies with me anyway.

She was always this dramatic. She was living her own soap opera, interpreting two characters at one time, the victim and the evil one. Even when in reality she did not resemble any one of those. It was all a show.

For the first time he had gotten his way. It didn’t matter that his wife’s decision was not motivated by love towards him, but rather out of spite to her daughter, my grandfather quickly got to work. He sold the land and built a complimentary room, a bulge of the main house. There, surrounded by his books, he spent the major part of the hours. Drinking tea with a little hint of whiskey – to warm up the bones – and reading the newspapers the mail man delivered every morning for more than fifty years now.

- It is very important to be informed Elena – he would tell me – especially if you live in a remote land like this one.

My grandfather was exaggerating. The cottage was only one kilometer from town and fifty from the capital, Norwich.

They had a telephone line and had they wanted it, television and radio. Their isolation was wanted or at least, accepted.

That place had nothing to do with my life in Barcelona. With school, my friends, the summers at Costa Brava in which my father visited... Norfolk was the annual escapade to a land so mine as the Mediterranean city, to a place in which everything was known, where I could feel at home, run, dream and be the Helen that lived inside my Elena. My English side.

Each year, on December twenty-first, my grandfather would expect us at the train station and each year, the days prior to our arrival, my mother and I, we complied with the rituals of tradition. She would prepare the suitcases, filling them with winter clothes and only one pair of shoes, a pair of water boots. She would protest against the expectative of spending the next 15 days next to her mother, whom she loved with the same intensity with which she rejected her and I would presume of my double home, the silence of the British country side and the solitude of a winter that started with the reencounter of my roots, in which we were a little older every year, wiser, crankier and more united.

I enjoyed every single one of my Christmas at the family cottage, until I met Quim and the balance of my Decembers got filled with tears.

I belong to the first online generation, the school I went to studied the complicated informatics program MS-DOS and copy was as easy as writing COPY in a black screen and a little vertical line, white colored, which waited blinkingly for its destiny. I was born offline and finished university with a cellphone, a computer in my bedroom and a new way of communicating for young people that was called chat. To speak, in English, although it was actually written and the voice was reserved for encounters in which words worth less than those that where read on the other side of the screen, in which interpretation was free and convenient.

Internet came into our lives like a hurricane. It ravaged everything known and settled into our routine as if it had always been part of it. The novelty didn’t only drove us to the madness of new ways for communicating, it let us live in it. We normalized chats, messenger and online dating cites, accepting the impersonality like a technological advance. We shortened words, used the same abbreviations, we forgot about orthography. We stopped having conversations and learned to type. Faster every time, without looking, without thinking.

I can still presume of having spent hours at the library searching in encyclopedias the answers for a term paper. Carrying a bunch of books to the photocopier and writing by hand later, without leaving the margins, what I considered more important. It’s such a distant and strange memory that I often pamper it. I like to take the dirt off of it and watch it. It’s not melancholy, well yes, it’s just that I often think about the past as a better place to live in. And it is not an age thing, I do not miss my youth, I am speaking of the world. I believe that which we call evolution, has actually been, somehow, our involution.

Internet caught me on the third year of my career. I was studying Business Administration and Management at the University of Barcelona. Mine was not vocation, it was discarding. At eighteen years old I did not know who I was to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, so I made a list of what I didn´t want and couldn’t do until Business Administration and Management was left as the only uncrossed option. I discovered later, with the tittle in my hand, that maybe mine was vocation. Or I simply, had very good adaptation capacities.

University brought big changes to my life. In a city like Barcelona, the town in which you live delimitates the frontiers of your friend land. I mean, of the place in which you move around freely. The school, the pediatrician, the head doctor later, after-school classes, the supermarket and my group of friends were or belonged somehow to my neighborhood, to the place where I felt safe. Going from the Gracia neighborhood up to Las Ramblas, was for me, traveling. To prepare the sausage tortilla snack, the water bottle and spending the day downtown.

University changed everything. It broadened the frontiers and separated the roots. The group of friends from my neighborhood split into different careers, professionals as well as personal and we started to create little subgroups in which new faces and habitats, immediately erased the innocence from a group of friends that believed itself to be eternal. When the chicken was blind, the field, burned and sitting on a bench to eat pipes was better than any three start restaurant. University or maybe it was age, made us forget the first values and we started to build a harder life and surely, a more superficial one.

The new technologies, helped to communicate with new friends who didn’t share a bakery or childhood memories, making the neighborhood, the new one, become the computer in our room. There was no need to see each other to talk, it wasn’t necessary to know others to call them friends, or say I love you to believe you felt it. The keys of a keyboard were enough to give words, make up relationships and daydream.

I was one of those post-teenagers pre-in loved by the internet. A trend that was originated at the end of the nineties and still lasts ‘til today. Even if we’re not twenty anymore, or as innocent as then.

Hidden in the anonymity of fake names, it was easy to talk to a stranger who would ask your name, gender and age. There was nothing to lose, we could even afford the luxury to be honest and not be afraid of being judged, and after all, who could know that behind the name Elenh was me. I could even be bold and write those things I would’ve never had the courage to say in the crudeness of a face to face conversation. It was easy to play, put on the costume of anybody else and dream.

Miuq was one of the conversations that went into my computer in the form of a “window” on the right side of my screen.

- Elena with an H? – He asked.

- Without – I answered.

- How much responsibility...

- Why? – I asked, surprised.

- Because Elena is the most beautiful woman in the universe.

A first phrase can leave you in the most absolute indifference or it can create an expectation that is difficult to forget. It only took one question and two answers to awake in me such a curiosity that, until this date, no one in my online life had generated. And not that I was so much as predisposed to that.

It was eleven at night of a boring Tuesday in the month of October and I delayed my sleep hours, with the computer in front of my bed, in the darkness of my room, to know him better. And so, we started an evening relationship of keyboard messages that hid itself behind a real life or an imaginary one, with the “certainty” that there were no lies, the desire that everything was true. Dreaming was so easy that we let each other be carried away and Miuq came to be the unrenounceable date of my autumn evenings.

From his part I only knew what he wanted to tell me. His name was Quim, he was twenty-six years old and lived in Bescanó, a small town in the province of Girona. The eldest son of a family with two girls in adolescence. One was entering it while the other, same age as me, was coming out of it. He worked as a gardener, he didn’t like to travel but he did like to get lost in the mountains with his dog Luna. His favorite dish was lamb with red peppers, his number was seven, his favorite color was orange and his unspeakable secret was, his passion for Star Trek. Maybe we didn’t have many things in common but he was easy to talk to, to imagine his voice, the expression of those brown eyes he claimed to have. I liked Quim, or at least the idea I had formed of him and after three weeks I wanted to check if the story in my mind was faithful to reality or not. And so, one night, before we said goodnight, I proposed we’d go on a date. Because dreaming is fine, but opening your eyes and breathe, is even better.

I have always tried to make shame not condition me, that the fear of failure does not stop me from living, suffering or loving, when I played, so I did not wait to find the perfect moment, the one that would surely never come, I simply did what I thought I had to do, what I knew I wanted to do. To know him. Or at least try.

I thought of what a good place for two strangers could be to meet for the first time. It had to be a neutral territory, to be in even terms and not give too much personal information in case things got complicated. Because one thing was to be bold and another very different, to run unnecessary risks.

At twenty-two years old the risks are known but unseen. Ever since we are little, they tell us not to trust strangers who offer candy, but if a man comes close with a package of pop-corn, we surely accept. Because living, should not be about measuring the risks, which by the way, are constant and infinite. At my twenty-two years of age, I was debating myself between deciding for a busy street in the middle of day light with the stranger I had been chatting with for the past several weeks and the urge to meet Quim, the guy I liked.

I think about it now with the perspective the years have given me, and I understand that the day I agreed with Quim, any precaution would have been little. But I think of the young girl I was, and I think it terribly unfair that in a time when my desire was mostly centered in the discovery of sex and relationships with the masculine gender, I had to watch my back. I should have been a free spirit, to do and meet with whomever I wanted and instead “the right thing to do” would have been to cancel the date to save myself from potential harm. I was taught to protect myself way too early, when I actuality should have been dedicated to enjoying my youth while others were taught not to do any harm. Which is why I try not to be so unfair with the Elena from twenty years ago and understand that deep down I was using my freedom in the right way, without it inviting someone to hurt, rape or kill me.

Twelve noon seemed like the right time for the meeting because if, in the end it turned out that there was no chemistry between us, we could end the date with coffee and if on the contrary, the company lived up to expectations, we would have the entire Sunday to enjoy it.

We were still on Wednesday and in the days that passed until the meeting in the neutral city, we did not speak again.

Approaching the day, I parked the car in front of the gardens of Dehesa, near the Onyar River. I crossed de Sant Feliu Bridge until entering the old neighborhood, where the statue of a lioness reminded me of the first time, I had visited Girona. It was on a school trip, with a snack in the backpack and dirty shoes, as always. I don’t know the reason of the visit, but I do know what I said to my mother when she asked me at home once if I had liked the city.

- A lot mother – I said – I’ll be back!

- How are you so certain? – She asked as she untied the knots of my tousled hair.

- Because I’ve kissed the lioness’s butt. – I answered.

“You may only return to Girona if you have kissed the butt of the lioness”. That saying came true for me and on that sunny morning on the month of November in which I met up with her again, I thanked her for the return ticket she gave me when life was lived without thinking, without suffering and without fear of loving.

The terraces of the bars on the ancient part of the city where overflowing. The cold had not yet arrived, and people had come out to the streets hoping that that wasn’t the last Sunday without rain of the year. You could hear the rumors of conversations, the laughs, the kids running through the tables. The bells hadn’t announced twelve o’clock, but they were getting ready for it, it was just a matter of minutes, a few minutes. I tied the buttons of my jacket while going up the cobbled slope and I noticed the balcony full of flowers that presided the entrance arch that leads to the cathedral. Living in a place like this, has to make you a better person, by force, I thought, - surrounded by such beauty – and at the end of that phrase I had gotten to our meeting place. There it was, imposing, on its ninety staircases divided into three precise groups of thirty and their respective landings, the Cathedral of Santa María de Girona. I have returned after that day and it still impresses me.

I looked around, without expecting someone with a bouquet of flowers, a red tie or a book in his hand, looking for just one familiar expression that told me that that face, that hair, that body and those brown eyes where Quim’s, the guy that was hiding behind Miuq. I didn’t see that, but the bells kept going without granting him the delay.

I decided to wait for him in front of the main façade and observe whoever entered that small square that was already my visual territory, from any of the four corners that would welcome him. Two in front of me, one on my right and the other one on my left. By this last one, when I was still studying the situation, the four tables of the terrace next to me, the flags on the balconies, the three parked cars, the kid going up and down the stairs before an imminent fall, in that moment, when the ringing of the bells had confirmed his delay and the kid hadn’t already left his milk teeth on the game, I saw him. He was wearing a red sweatshirt, ripped cowboy pants and mountain boots. He walked looking straight ahead, with his hands on his pockets, as if everything surrounding him was only decoration, as if nothing could touch him. I knew immediately that that was him, even if that was the first time I saw him and his description, <<light brown hair and brown eyes>> wasn’t the unmistakable clue that could define him.

I watched him while he came closer to the stairs of the cathedral. He hadn’t see me yet, he didn’t have to recognize in me either, the girl behind Elenh, of that Elena without H. My date came closer every time to the center of the stairs of the cathedral and I was looking at him from the privileged spot in which my early arrival placed me. In front of him, expectantly, I could have walked away, run away if I’d wanted to, to Quim, I would only be another girl walking down the streets of the city on a sunny Sunday, but I didn’t.

On that November morning I was unknown to the reasons for which one night, I accepted to make conversation with a stranger through the screen of my computer. I guess at twenty-two years old one does not think about the why of things, one just simply lets go, without thinking of the consequences or the motives that drive us to do what we do. There is always a why. I think about it now and I believe that Elena, the one who saw change in the little world she was living in when she entered the university she felt lonely. That loneliness that comes when you are not alone. An incomprehensible loneliness, surrounded by people, parties, chores... a loneliness that hurts because it has no justification. I used to have a wonderful life, no economical, academic or health related problems. I had a really great relationship with my mother, with my “forever” friends and with the new friends that came when I stretched the boundaries of my neighborhood. My life flew between classes, study hours, parties, cafes in the port... I didn´t have time for loneliness, but I felt it. Deep inside, from my bones to my smile, sadder every time, less of a smile.

If I could speak with her now, with the Elena I was, I would tell her that the feeling was a part of the evolution she was living. I had to accept changes as part of my personal growth. What was happening to me was merely a way of coping with the fact that I was leaving behind the Elena of funny hairdos to become the adult Elena that I would come to be one day. I was not alone, but I needed to be, that was the only way I had to ask myself questions that only I could have the answer to. The sadness I was feeling was only the goodbye to an era I was leaving behind, a little mourning at the doors of maturity. I didn’t need stich ups for that feeling, no band-aids, only time and honesty, the one I should always have with myself.

In front of the stairs of the Cathedral of Girona, I didn’t think about all of that, I only thought of Quim, which wasn’t more than an excuse to not think about it, to not accept that my world was changing, that I was changing. That’s why when I could leave, forget the sleepless nights in front of the computer, the Sunday date in front of the stairs of the cathedral, forget Quim and get over my fears, I didn’t. I accepted the adventure I was about to live like the eraser of my loneliness and I stayed in the same place, waiting for him to turn, for his distraction to meet my stare and when he did, he saw me smile at him, with my yellow jacket, black pants and brown shoes. Most definitely dirty shoes.

We recognize each other. He was handsome, very handsome. More than I had fantasized.

- Sorry for being late – he said before kissing my cheek – I had a hard time finding a parking space for my van.

I didn’t know him, but I knew well enough to see he was nervous, that he felt out of place, as if this were the first time meeting a stranger and felt quicksands under his feet. Which tranquilized me. He was shy, quiet on a first impression, helpless looking, like a puppy lost in the middle of the city. I felt comfortable with him.

- Do you know Girona? – I asked. That might be a stupid question, I know, he was from Bescanó, only eight kilometers from the city, but that didn’t mean he spent any time in it. For what he had told me, he felt better surrounded by nature than people and even though he could find a million reasons to go to Girona, he could find as many others not to.

- Yes, I studied here for two years, I know it pretty well. – He answered with a rough Catalan accent.

- Well then, you are the guide.

I had failed in my prognostic but that stupid question served to make talk, break the ice and start walking. Something is something. A start.

The shyness didn’t last long, the time to walk through the Jewish neighborhood, talk about the first thing that came into our heads and sit on the only empty table of the many terraces that invaded the sidewalks of the city.

None of us seemed to care about time while we shared a coffee under the noon sun. Words came out of our mouths sounding better than the sound of the keyboard. The looks weren’t imaginary anymore and the complicity grew in the time computers vanished in our memories and left space for contact, the touch of clumsy hands that found each other accidentally, but not really.

Quim was a particular young man; odd, unusual, different from the ordinary. I didn’t take long to discover that, he wasn’t hiding either. He was kind and introverted, with a big private world inside him, few of words and gentle in his eyes. His eyes expressed all of which he seemed unable to speak, not for lack of courage or vocabulary, more for the warmth in his stare, so uniquely his and unaccompanied. He was a lonely guy who used his brown eyes, clear and deep, like a window to the world. Only those who could understand them would enter in them, no fear, no parachute. He spoke little, smoke a lot and when he laughed, he laughed out laugh. He filled the space and I was feeling a bit closer, more inside.

The more I spent by his side, the more I wanted to know him, I wanted to make my own sound track out of his Catalan accent. To look at him on that noon of November, was like staring at the sea. With its indomitable waves and its infinite endlessness.

With time forgotten and the certainty that our date would not end with coffee, we sat and ate at a Basque restaurant and by six in the afternoon, when for the first time since the twelve bell rings we landed in the reality of the day we realized that the table talk had been gone on for too long and we understood why we were the only two costumers in that wooden restaurant, with clean plates and new faces behind the counter. But we still didn’t want to go our separate ways, in spite of the dim light of the afternoon and the cold early winter nights. So, we sat on the terrace of an Irish pub, under the old arches that run along the street of the city. We shared a beer and a hot tea until nine thirty at night, the time at which our first date ended.

- It’s been lovely meeting you, Elena – he said before saying goodbye by my car.

- I really liked meeting you too Quim – I answered-. It´s been a precious Sunday.

It was true, I had enjoyed that Sunday unlike any other before. It’s not that Quim was my first date, at the age of twenty-two I’d had my things and I had been infatuated by different classmates, but it was the first time that I felt the complicity of the smiles, the reflection of someone else’s eyes on my skin. For the first time I felt a desire that went beyond a stolen kiss, a drunken caress or some pants lost under the bed. It was a deeper sort of desire, a passion that didn’t speak from sex but from the heart. I needed to fill a space and Quim opened horizons that I didn’t know yet. I found myself immersed in a sea of unknown feelings that dragged me without knowing where I was going. It was something bigger than I’d ever known, something better.

- We’ll talk later – he said after coming very close with his lips to my mouth. He didn’t kiss me, he barely scrapped me, but that gesture was enough to feel my feet elevate from the ground and the anchor that was holding me to the ground evaporated.

- We´ll talk later – I answered almost in a whisper.

I didn’t stop thinking about him in each one of the kilometers from the high way I went through that night and that separated our date from my house. I was smiling, I couldn’t stop it. When I got to my room, I turned the computer on with my shoes still on, eager to find Quim at the place where it all began. While the screen was slowly turning on in the minutes that felt eternal, my feet were dancing to a nervous rhythm, bumping each other, in an impatient jingle that seemed endless. I refused to give that date for finished, I wanted to know more about him, share my routine with his, be part of his mountains and make a space for him in my city. I wished that the computer was just another tool, not the wall separating us. That the sleepless nights of chatting were just the beginning of an encounter of flesh and bone in which you don’t write kisses, you give them.

When I saw his name appear, like every night during the past weeks, to the right on the screen of my computer, I knew the sea current I had gotten lost in that afternoon, was also dragging him. Quim had waited for my return to the place where it all started, a world online that had nothing resembling the day before. Our conversations had filled up with memories, with desire... we had seen each other at last, we had discovered the sound of words, the eyes hiding behind the glow of a screen, the pauses in the silences, but we refused to let distance write the end of a precious autumn Sunday.

At six thirty in the morning, the alarm that woke me every Monday to go to the university went off and I understood that time had lost its meaning, that the hours were not as such, nor the minutes existed. Dawn broke with my bed made, my jacket hung over the back of my chair and my eyes on the computer. Quim had entered in me in such a way that I stopped the needles, the chronometers, the strings of the clock. He came in to stay and live in me, with his pauses, his eternal seconds, his voice.

That day, Monday, I lived without living, wishing to see him again, to recognize his figure in the distance with the certainty that it wasn’t just another shadow. It was him, in between a million habitants, between thousands of love stories, crossed messages in the internal net but so exposed which is called internet. To enter his look, in the micro world that hid behind it and live in him. With no more responsibilities in which to get lost in, let go, with the rush of my twenty-two years, the typical unconsciousness of age. So young was I, that I didn’t want to wait until five in the afternoon, with the student obligations met, I wrote him.

If I have always lacked something, it’s been patience. Years have taught me that time is a great counselor, a rush and mistakes soother, but at twenty-two, one day is a whole life and a love, the first one, can be crazy, douchebag and blind, but above all is fast.

Many years ago, a friend, used to the celerity of my life, in which one day seemed like twenty years and a love, the love of my life, said to me:

I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now. If elegance and patience go hand in hand, they do it far from me, hidden, avoiding to stump in my way.

I have always wanted everything for the day before yesterday. I’ve jumped instead of walked, I have wanted to reach my destiny without stopping to see the landscape, with the rush of fulfilling the objective, the eagerness to start a new road. I have waited for answers even before I’ve made the question. Even before knowing what I wanted to hear, and I have seen myself crying over a deception that wasn’t. It would have been enough, just a little time, to realize about my own mistakes. So, entertained I was in accumulating memories that I forgot my glasses and I believed that a distorted image, is a real one.

How many ridiculous patience and elegance would have saved me from, if like my friend said, they really do go hand in hand. Only one of them would have been enough, to save me from a bad experience. Fortunately, speed does not discriminate and in the same way it brings me pain, it gives me forgetfulness.

The afternoon in which I proposed to Quim if we should have dinner together, merely twenty hours after saying our goodbyes in Girona the night before, he accepted my proposal and I, in the darkness of a November sunset, got into my car to undertake, almost in full, the route of a Sunday morning in which nothing was as expected, it was better. Its highway, its three tolls, the illuminated gas stations, the ups and downs of a road splashed with tunnels, a musical station that searched for its signal, a trip that abandoned the nerves of the previous day in the gutter but picked up the desire as an adventure companion.

The car’s clock marked twenty hours and nine minutes when a white sign, narrow and rectangular, announced my entry to Bescanó and I remembered the last message Quim had written to me before turning the car’s engine on.

- When you get to town, you’ll see a roundabout. Get out on the last exit to the left and keep going straight for about five minutes. You will see and old abandoned house to your left and then a curve. To the right there will appear three containers on the corner of a little road. Go in. Go slowly because there are a lot of stones and some holes. When you get to the end, you will have two choices, either you turn right or left. Choose the first option and in front of you, you will find a single house with the light on. That’s mine.

When I spoke to my mother about Quim and confessed to her that the day before I met him I went to his house, she called me <<reckless>>. I surely was, although I keep defending that my excess of trust doesn’t give anybody the right to do me any harm. I felt I knew Quim, that the long talks on the sleepless nights were enough to assume that he was not a stranger, he was just Quim and I trusted him. I thought about it and being fair with myself, I still think about it even though you can never completely know anyone enough. If we let fear take over us and quit that which we truly desire, that’s when we make sure that there’s pain. The pain of not having lived. That’s why, if I could go back, to my twenty-two-year-old self and Quim would invite me to his house on our second date, I would say yes. Because no one called him reckless for trusting me, he would never be the victim and I refuse to be one, reckless or not.

Quim lived alone in an old house for which he paid fifteen thousand pesetas a month. The rent had a symbolic price, for the agreement between the owner and Quim was that he would restore it bit by bit, month to month. He would also fix the field surrounding it and build a little personal garden. If at the end of five years of signing the agreement, one had passed already, he didn’t comply with his part, he would have to leave. If on the contrary, he had done of that house a habitable one, the owner would give him every facility so that he could buy it.

When I stopped the engine of the car, at the end of the road, over the dry land, Luna, a brown haired dog came out to greet me. I had barely opened the door, when she put her paws over my legs and with her snout, she pushed my arm inviting me to come out. I petted her back, in an attempt to tell her I had gotten the message and I saw, through the rearview mirror, how in the entrance door, under the lights and the shadows of an illuminated house, Quim was waiting.

The chimney was on, I felt the smell as soon as I walked in. Luna was done being interested by the novelty of my presence and she went to the heat of the fire leaving the two of us in the intimacy of the first few instants. The room was completely restructured, with red tiles on the floor, two ample sofas in front of the television and a gorgeous piece of dark wood furniture. From the kitchen came a smell that awakened my appetite.

- I have prepared lamb, my specialty – he said while he opened the oven door letting me see how the meat was browned together with the potatoes and the red peppers.

- It looks great – I confessed.

- Would you like to accompany dinner with a bottle of red wine? – He asked.

He was calm, relaxed. You could tell he was comfortable, that he played at home and that made him feel save. He handled himself very well in his host position and immediately took out two glasses to toast.

I liked the way that us sounded. It was the first time he talked about him and me like an us and even though I knew it wasn’t more than a simple toast, it wasn’t a declaration of love, I thought I could get used to that word.

- It’s good right? – He asked me after having watered his lips with the wine – a friend of mine makes it. The other day he gave me a box and the truth is, I like it a lot.

- I don’t really understand much about wines, I confess, but I like the taste. It’s not too strong, not too sweet.

- We’ll have dinner in ten minutes. Let me show you the rest of the house.

The table was set. We went to the second floor and I felt the cold and the lack of electricity right away. During the last year he dedicated to restructure the bottom floor – for it is where I spend most of my time -. The main room was in the largest room, with a double bed, two little nightstands and a view hanger. I checked that his wardrobe consisted of two jeans, one tracksuit, three sweatshirts, a work uniform and a dozen T-shirts folded over a little chest of drawers under the window. He had the bathroom in front and next to it a room in which he kept all his work materials.

You had to put a lot of imagination into that mess of paint, woods, plastics and dust to picture a teenager living in it but having seen the work he’d done with the living room and the kitchen, there was hope.

We ate dinner without hurry, enjoying all the flavors and aromas. Our light came from only one yellow light bulb, with the crackle of the flames as our only melody. We talked about the past and the future, of how we imagined ourselves in a few years. Of how time ran faster every year and we felt old without having turned thirty years old. Our lives and our circumstances were completely different, but we shared the illusion for certain things, our taste for silence, calmness and life lived our own way. We didn’t want to be a part of a society that we did not understand and in our own way we created a little community of two inhabitants in the planet of his house.

Each time he smiled, an imperfect denture starred his gesture. He had a broken tooth. An incisor with the slanted corner. It didn’t make him look bad, on the contrary, it broke with the childish beauty of his face, his fine hands and his delicate skin. It was like a symbol, a witness of an imperfect life.

- In the field. I fell while playing when I was little, and I never got it fixed.

- You’re fine like that – I blushed.

Dawn caught us off guard, as well as sleepiness, cuddled under the blanket of his couch. It was seven in the morning and the routine we would have liked to avoid came out of an alarm clock that marked seven o’clock.

We gave each other a strong hug, as if our bodies didn’t want to live alone and we kissed knowing that good bye was just a way of announcing another return, which would arrive impatiently, with the hurry of lost moments, the memory of an instant that lasts.

That’s the way we lived the thirty days of a month in which nothing was like before, where new sensations were an already walked path, a place in which the security of a morning by his side, made every fear go away. We lived dedicated to our newly built world, to the word us that was more beautiful breathed than pronounced. A word that didn’t need to be written, only looked at, pampered, taken care of.

We were waking up with the dew bathing the land of our future, the electronic heat warming our dreams of the second floor and a chimney that illuminated a growing love reserved for a privileged companion whose name was Luna, as beautiful as the moon, as happy as the sun.

We explored our secrets, even those that hurt. We caressed scars, tasted someone else’s tears, we felt the laughter of a happy memory. We traveled through the unlived years, we met the members of a family that we would someday have by our side, and we asked to life that the desires, as they were, like that, serene and radiant, would be granted. We enjoyed every minute without saving distances, undoing suitcases, inventing flavors. We were happy, I was happy. So happy that I did not hesitate.

On December twentieth, we said goodbye on the door of his house until next year. For the first time, Norfolk turned into a faraway destiny, the enemy pulling me apart from the place I thought I belonged to. From Bescanó, from Quim. I would have wished not to go on that trip or at least postpone it, but I knew that the option of spending the fifteen days of Holidays in Barcelona, was out of the question. Never, during my twenty-two years of age was the trip to England every December twenty-first discussed, it simply arrived, and it was assumed.

- Happy Christmas Quim! We’ll have dinner soon, it’s really cold and the rain doesn’t stop. I think about you, about the chimney, about Luna. I miss you.

The table is set on the main room. Grandma Helen had taken out the porcelain tableware, the champaign glasses and the Christmas table top. Four big knitted socks hung form the chimney and seven white candles decorated the main entrance. The table baroquely decorated with pineapples, golden bells, jars of jam and crackers. Grandfather in front of me, with blushed cheeks and a ripped red jersey with a brown reindeer in the middle of his chest, it was all so British. Mother and grandmother were fighting in the kitchen, as always and I was waiting for news from Quim. I had not heard from him for more than twenty-four hours and I was beginning to worry. Maybe something happened to him, maybe at the cottage I didn’t have reception. The fog was low, and it was not the first time it happened, but the phones seemed to work perfectly. It was odd, everything was going so well between us. It was an incipient relationship, but we were both sure that we wanted to keep going, that it was beautiful what we had begun to build and when we said goodbye, we only wished for Christmas to go by fast and that January 6^th would come soon, the day of the reencounter.

During those twenty-four hours that went by without any news from Quim, I cheked the phone every hour. I would carry it everywhere with me, I didn’t want to miss his message or a phone call, his voice. Before his silence, I replayed our goodbye several times, I analized every one of his gestures, the ocnversations... I analized one by one the words we spoke to each other trying to discover a hint, a clue that could explain why Quim had gone silent. But nothing, I couldn’t find any reason that made me understand his silence. – I’m missing something – I thought, but I didn’t know what it was.

Twenty-four hours can be few hours to miss someone, but they are an eternity when you are waiting for a text message that won’t come, when you start to think that maybe it never will.

- Are you ok sweetheart?

My grandfather always called me that, sweet heart.

- Yes, grandpa. Waiting for a text message, that’s all.

- From someone important? – He asked already knowing the answer.

I told him about Quim, of everything we had lived together during the last month, of my desire to show him Norfolk and the cottage, of sharing next Christmas together and adding one more sock under my second chimney. He was my first love and to think about a shared future, was the best way I knew how to dream.

I had never spoken to my grandfather about matters of my heart. He was my confident, I could tell him everything, but until that day, now one had been that important to me. I still hadn’t met the boy who deserved my grandfather’s effort to memorize his name. (My grandfather had a terrible memory for names. He couldn’t even remember the name of his own dog, he called them all Dog).

Both Helens showed up in the room by the time my grandfather and I were finishing up our first champaign glass and we smiled a naughty smile for the shared secret. The big family table soon ran out of space, invaded by smoked salmon, turkey, baked vegetables, cabbage, cranberry sauce and onion soup. The carols played over and over again in a circular and monotonous repetition as the glass of the windows became more and more blurred.

The night didn’t extend too long, the British schedule admitted twelve o’clock as a single curfew and my mother and I shared the bed in the guestroom. One of the things I liked most about Christmas in Norfolk was exactly that, sleeping with her just as I did when I was little, touching the tips of our cold feet and feeling her hand next to mine. It didn’t matter that the bed was a bit too small now, we kept insisting grandma not to separate us, that she would not substitute that nest for two small cots, impersonal and unknown.

But the three of us knew that if it weren’t for the straight and conservative education great-grandmother Helen gave her, she herself would make a nest between us, to the warmth of the family history.

There had been two days of cold and Christmas routines and I still hadn’t heard anything from Quim. He didn’t respond to any of my messages and his phone was always turned off. I thought about calling someone to make sure he was alright, but we lived our thirty days of love isolated from the world and I didn’t know who I could contact. Days passed, I kept calling repetitively and the answer machine would answer me the same thing – the number you are trying to call is either turned off or out of service reach-. I was beginning to worry. I didn’t know what was going on and thinking about the worst thing started to turn into the best option when Norfolk was getting ready for Christmas Eve.

- Hello Elena, It’s Manu. Quim left his phone at my house yesterday, when I see him, I’ll tell him to give you a call.

The morning of the thirty-one of December, that was the response I got on my first call of the day and then I understood that I didn’t understand anything, that maybe I’d never understand anything. Manu, the friend who had given the six wine bottles to Quim, had just informed me, surely not knowing the consequences of his words, that Quim was alright, that at least he was alive. That his phone was working, that so was mine, that there was nothing that stopped him from calling me, nothing was stopping him from answering me, write me, to stop the anguish that had taken over me.

Quim’s call never came. Not even that same day, nor the next ones. Not even when I returned to Barcelona and got tired of calling, of waiting, of crying. It didn’t come when my grandfather suffered for me, for my lack of love, for the burnt illusion in his chimney next to the woolen socks. He didn’t call when my mother stop sleeping to caress my hair, when my grandmother locked herself in the kitchen cooking her best recipes. He didn’t call when the two Helens in my life buried the life hatchet for me. He didn’t call when I returned home, and everything reminded me of him. He didn’t call, ever. He preferred to leave my wound open, my pain oxygenated, my heart in doubt. He chose silence and condemned me to hundreds of unanswered questions. He chose the worst way, that of cowardice and left me helpless in the face of my own doubts.

Tired of crying, of not finding answers, of calling a number that wouldn’t answer, depriving me of such a basic necessity as that of knowing his motives, the reasons for which he one day decided to forget and not give me the right of response. Tired of suffering over a ghost, on a February day I erased his number from the addresses in my phone, but before I did, I wrote it in a piece of paper with blue ink, folded it four times and hid it in a place I knew I could find it in the future; my memory box. I wanted to close a chapter but couldn’t resist to leave a window open. My feelings for Quim were so big, that I refused to let him go completely. I felt it wasn’t fair, that story like ours couldn’t be forgotten just like that.

I needed to release myself from the pain but not from him. I wanted to stop suffering but not loving him. I had been so happy by his side that I clung to memories, ignoring that a person who does not show his face, is a coward and cruel. That if Quim ever loved me the way he decided to vanish disaccredited him completely and that a person who makes you suffer once, will do it for ever, I wanted to stay with the good things, it’s a happier way of living, but I did not learn the lesson Quim was giving me.

It’s been almost twenty years and only few occasions in which I have remembered Quim during this time. There are places: Bescanó, Girona... that remind me of him. Names: Quim, Luna... that when I hear them, referring to other people, have made me relive like little flashes of light, the love of my twenty-two years of age. Small images, innocuous, painless, that had passed in front of me reminding me the way. Small lessons learned, memories that now seem tender and I look with sweetness to the Elena that I was.

Last week, casually, I thought about him. As every year, at the beginning of the month of May, I visited my dentist for an oral hygiene. I have inherited a very bad gingival health from my mother and for my own good, I have to be very strict with the visits I make to my dentist. A female dentist.

Since a year ago, Beatriz, a new addition to the clinic I usually attend to, takes care of my “little problem”. A blonde young woman, thin, with small hands and sweet voice. Despite of her thirty-one years, Beatriz looks like a girl. She works behind garnet glasses that combine with a uniform of the same color and transmits the illusion of the first jobs, the moment in which the world of work gives you an opportunity and you receive the reward for so many hours of study. She’s been working in the clinical for a short time, but she seems to have adapted well, at least that was my impression the first time I saw her, the day she told me that she was organizing her wedding to the one who had been her partner for the last six years. Of course, on that day, she didn’t imagine that our appointment, one year later, would announce the end of all her plans.

- Good morning Elena. Nice to see you again. How are you?

- Fine, thank you – I answered – sleepy – it was eight in the morning – but alright. And you?

It was one of those questions that you don’t really expect an answer or at least nothing beyond an <<Fine, thank you>>. That would have sufficed. Not to her.

- Well... - she said showing me a pair of sad eyes behind those myopic glasses – I don’t know if I told you I was getting married – I nodded with my head as the automatic chair reclined leaving me in a helpless position – Well, as it turns out, my fiance disappeared last month. Just like that – she said snapping her fingers – he vanished.

- I am so sorry – I confessed. I felt uncomfortable at that statement, I didn’t know how to comfort the girl, not even if that was the role that belonged to me.

- And he left to Mexico with another woman – she finished off.

I didn’t ask her how she was feeling, because I could guess the answer and I decided that to skip that could help her forget the suffering she had been withstanding these last few weeks. I remembered how I felt when Quim simply stopped calling. The worst is not accepting that the person you love stops being a part of your life, the worst part is not knowing why. To think that you don’t deserve that, that it isn’t fair, that you have behaved correctly, that you have earned at least the right know, of understanding why the other person one day simply decides to disappear.

Doubt doesn’t even allow you to hate, get angry, call and shout. The doubt leaves you an emptiness and walks away.

- How’s my mouth? – I asked. In the end, that was a dentist’s office and I was laying on a chair, with an enormous lamp shining on my opened mouth.

- Not so good, to tell the truth – I got scared – just imagine, I’ve had to cancel the entire wedding on my own.

I understood that Beatriz needed to talk, that her world had just been reduced to her pain and that there was no hole to escape from it. So, I got on her side and listened. She told me that two years ago, four months after her partner proposed during some vacation in New York, he got cold feet and decided to terminate the engagement. She went to Thailand for fifteen days to think while he decided to do the contrary, not think, in the bed of some other woman of which she didn’t know the name of. Before her plane landed in Barcelona again, Beatriz, started to receive text messages from a repented ex-fiancé that confessed to her his business in unknown sheets and was begging for a new chance.

- Only you can understand me, there is no one that knows me better than you. I just needed to be away from you to see it. Please – he was begging – come back to me.

She had two options, to believe him or not. She chose the first. Even though she knew he was a man who only loved himself, that marriage and the possibility of putting his own wellbeing in second place, didn’t enter his plans and that a son, or a daughter, were just a subtraction in the calculator of his bank account. The ex-fiancé, whom she never referred to by his real name, is, as she told me, a selfish, narcissistic and superficial man. A serial manipulator, if there is such a thing. His professional career is the big love of his life and the rest, merely secondary actors coming in and out of the scene to his convenience. A man lacking empathy to whom the feelings of others are worth nothing.

- You know? I have always wanted to be a mother – Beatriz told me – to me, the only objective of getting married was to create a family, which is why when he came back asking for a second chance, I told him that if I agreed it was to pull forward completely. That I wasn’t willing to go back, like when we were twenty-five years old and we lived in separate houses. My only objective was to create a family. All or nothing.

It seemed, that he accepted the “all”, even though deep down, they both knew he wouldn’t give anything.

She believed him, because the idea of not fulfilling her dream to become a mother and create a family was harder than the sadness of failure. She believed him because not to do so meant renouncing to what she wanted, even when she knew he was not the right person, even though deep inside herself there was the certainty that she was making a mistake and maybe she could even intuit the drama that would explode in her face a few months later.

She forgave him because she had been educated to do so, because in romantic movies the happy ending always comes after a break up or a deception. She forgave him because she thought that he would change for her. She forgave him and forgot to ask herself the most important. Am I happy by his side?

If she had made herself that question the day she arrived from Thailand, with her skin suitcase in her hand and went straight to the house they were sharing, she would have saved herself the tears that came later. But she didn’t, because sometimes the fear of feeling like we failed forces us to keep going, thinking wrongfully that unhappiness is just another part of the way towards success and only now, in her consultory, sharing her sadness with a stranger, she confessed to herself that actually, she hadn’t been happy at his side for several years.

- I know you must’ve been told a million times in the last few days and most certainly you won’t be able to see it right now – I told her – but believe me, it’s the best thing that could happen to you. Marry him, having a child with him, would have been your damnation.

She nodded sadly. She believed me, she wanted to believe me but her body was still aching from all the suffering and even if she knew that time would heal her, she felt tired of waiting.

That morning, while I was walking towards the office, I thought about why, a woman like Beatriz, independent, resolute, working and economically stable woman, was renouncing her happiness for the false love of a man. I thought about why we try to give second chances that we know are going to fail. I thought about why we fight for a wrong, lost beforehand, cause. Thinking... I thought of Quim and in the young woman that decided to give him the chance he did not deserve. Me.

At my twenty-three years old, recently celebrated, on a Friday on the month of June in which I got out from the university, I came home, took a good nap woke up with a craving for chips, I wrote to Quim. It had been six months since the Christmas at Norfolk, four since I decided to delete his number and save it in a memory box. I had become stronger, but I still thought about him at least a couple of times a week. There was always something, a song, a stare, a smell... that reminded me of Quim. His memory didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t gone either. I stopped asking myself questions even though some nights, when I closed my eyes, I used to take a walk through my memory and repeat that feeling, young and innocent, that had conquered me the previous autumn.

Sometimes I doubt if throughout my life I have fallen in love with the people or with the history I have built around them. Of whether it was the other person conquering me or if I fell in love with the feeling that was being born inside me. It’s just so nice to be in love that I think I let myself go. Maybe the men I loved weren’t as interesting as I thought they were, but it was pretty while I loved them, the time my mental derangement lasted.

My story with Quim was one of those wonderful tragicomedies. A story that was almost a muse. It was worth to write a few hundred poems, a musical album, a play and even a thriller, if things got twisted. Surely, he, Quim, was much simpler than all of that, but how to give up such a story?

The day I wrote him, six months after our last encounter, I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was searching for one last try that confirmed the death of that story and allowed me to get rid of his number and forget him at last. Or maybe, I refused to spend summer without a pretty adventure to tell.

I liked being in love, to feel identified with the songs I listened, to dream with a <<for ever>> that was not eternal, a fire that was born and died in me. A feeling of my own, that filled the minutes of my day to day. It is not that I was not afraid to love, it was that I was a kamikaze. I wanted to love, even more than I wished to be loved. That is why I wrote to Quim, because I didn’t want to renounce to that feeling I liked so much.

I came close to the little metallic box, in which a little green butterfly with open wings, protected my memories. There, I kept my first subway bill from London, a string bracelet I made at school, the starfish my father gave me when I was born, my first student card... in the box I kept everything that deserved to be remembered in my life and it was there, where I kept Quim. I opened the box and took out the folded paper in which I had written, in blue ink, his phone number. Without his name, I didn’t need that, I knew exactly to whom those nine numbers belong. The exact place in planet earth where a phone would announce my message, with or without my name.

- Hi Quim. How long it’s been! I know it may seem strange for me to write you and surely it is, but today I thought of you and I just wanted to write and know how you are doing. I hope everything goes well. Elena.

It was seven o’clock in the morning when the sound of the phone ringing woke me up. I still didn’t want to wake up, I half turned in my bed wanting to keep dreaming, but I didn’t make it. I was not thinking about Quim, it’s not that I forgot the message of the previous afternoon but when the phone rang, I supposed it was a friend telling me something about the party last Thursday. But I was already awake, so I picked up the cellphone to clear any doubt and I saw the stranger number of some <<Hello Elena>>. Quim had answered.

- Hello Elena. I really liked receiving your message. I have thought many times about writing you but never had the courage to do it, thanks for being braver than me. I hope you are doing well. Quim.

Now what? – I thought. I felt as if I had a bomb in my hands and I didn’t know what to do with it. To write to him had been reckless, a mistake, it didn’t make any sense... but he had responded. Why now? Why now he did and six months ago he didn’t? could I trust him? No, that’s for sure... did I want to trust him? Yes, why if I hadn’t written to him? I read and reread the message dozens of times. I checked that the phone number was his and not someone making a mean joke. I could not believe that after six months, of all the unanswered calls, text messages, the suffering, that after all that happened was so easy as to write him on a Friday and get an answer on Saturday. Really? Was it everything that easy? So simple? What had happened during all this time? What had changed? Above all, I had two big questions, why did he leave? And, why did he choose to come back?

I arrived to Bescanó at twelve o’clock in the afternoon with the tranquility of the familiar road. I felt serene, strong, confident. That morning, even from my bed, I texted Quim back and after exchanging several rutinary phrases such as <<everything well>>, <<as usual>>, <<enjoying the summer>>... I proposed seing each other. after everything we lived, what was the point of writing? There was a story to close (or open). We couldn’t just go back to texting, to write as if nothing had happened. We could ignore what happened but then it was better for us to ignore also whatever was about to happen. Time may heal wounds, but it does not make magic, it does not forgive, and it does not have the ability to cancel what happened.

None of us knew what we could expect from the other and to see each other on tha june morning, was the only way to found out.

When I reached the containers on the corner and turned onto the cobblestone road that lead to his house, I stopped in my tracks. The memory of the suffering made me ask myself a dozen times if I was sure of what I was doing. I opened the door to the January storm, to a love I had obviously not forgotten and that was presented in an open field, in front of me, with the light of the house turned off and the mystery of what I would find after so many months of silence. Was I really ready to open the Pandora’s box?

For some strange reason I had left a window opened the day I closed his door and that reason, reasonable or not, had to be resolved. If I was wrong, I would at least do it with my boots on.

I accelerated without worrying for the stones and the holes in the road, I accelerated so that I wouldn’t think and arrive as soon as possible. Whatever it was, whatever happened, I needed to live it, I had to try.

My heart was beating very strongly, I had a nervous laugh, a sudden warmth. I turned off the radio, pulled the car windows down and breathed deeply. I was returning to Bescanó. It had only been six months and I had the sensation that it had been a lifetime. The memories seemed far away even though I had the impression of been on friendly land.

There, everything was still the same. The trees shaded the road, the Ter River was tranquilly descending, the sky was clear, and the sun was shining up high. While I deaccelerated to turn into the last curve, I filled my lungs with air, got my pulse back and remembered the polar circle lovers. – Brave... brave, brave... Jump brave! - .

Luna came to greet me and behind her he showed up. Even more handsome than before, painfully handsome and I was inevitably lost.

He had lost weight since the last time I saw him, I noticed as soon as I saw him. He wore a white T-shirt, with half a sleeve, that showed the tan of his skin. He had traded the mountain boots for more summery shoes, but he was still faithful to his ripped jeans. His hair had cleared up, it looked almost blonde under the noon sun. He had a more childish look but when he looked at me and smiled, I checked he was still as handsome as before, even more. If that, ever, seemed possible.

Quim had prepared an appetizer on the garden with two beers, olives and a pack of chips. We saluted each other with care and we erased the past with a hug, as if November had been yesterday and the heat of that noon in June, a strange pre-Christmas phenomenon. Nothing indicated a finished relationship, my tears, perhaps his or a great unknown. Nothing. It was all so perfect, so “as before”, that we let each other go and postponed the pending conversation.

-I don’t have any food at home – he said when there were a few minutes until for two in the afternoon – if you feel like it, I invite you to eat at the grill of a friend of mine.

I sat on the copilot seat of his white fur wagon, the one that brought me so many and great memories. We took the curves of the road interchanging smiles, avoiding to talk about the things we had to say. We left all reproaches aside, simply enjoying that moment, that new opportunity which we didn’t know where it would take us, traveling to the only destiny that was guaranteed at that moment, the restaurant.

It was ten minutes in which we barely spoke. We were close but far away. We looked at each other once in a while but could not stop thinking about all the stuff we needed to say. That pending conversation was like a ghost, a shadow that was persecuting us.

I knew I had to ask for explanations, that he could not go unpunished. I couldn’t smile and make as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t but I did. I let myself because of the memory, because of the feeling I hadn’t forgotten, because of his voice, the way he looked at me. I let myself go and I wanted to give myself that instant. Whatever happened after, whatever his excuse was, it would have to wait. After so many tears, I deserved to enjoy that moment.

I have always been a sea person. Not that I had a choice either << may the waves bring you, may the waves carry you, and may they never force you the way to go>>. My life has always been attached to the sea, to the Mediterranean coast. I have visited many countries, wonderful countries, cultures that have given me great life lessons, but after every journey, I have come invariably, back home, back to my sea. I haven’t been able to find a place where I feel better at. Bescanó is a lot more rural. Sweet water land, willows, poplars and Alamo trees. Over there, the horizon has an end and it’s not blue, it’s green. Bescanó is the back of my house. It is north but not mine. I could get lost a few instants, days, even years, but I would always come back to my sea.

The restaurant was an ancient house with a wooden roof. You could barely read the entry sing and if Quim hadn’t come forward to open the door and invite me in, I would have just passed it. His friend greeted him with a hug.

- Long time without seeing you Quim! What’s up with your life?

- I know... I’m a mess, it’s been month without me coming by to say hello. I’ve had a rough winter but oh well... - he stopped explaining right away, protecting his stare from mine – I’m here! This is Elena.

Elena, nothing else. He didn’t say who Elena was to him. If it was his ex-partner, a friend or a third cousin... he only said Elena.

- Enchanted.

- Likewise – I answered.

We sat on the last table of the restaurant, just like we did at that basque restaurant on our first date. Away from the world, the corner of our intimacy. There was not many people in the room, barely two tables having dessert and coffee. It was three past a quarter in the afternoon and we assumed we were the last two customers from the morning shift.

Out of the kitchen came the smell of grilled meat. A couple of years after that encounter, I would become vegetarian but at twenty-three years old I couldn’t resist a good chop. I listened Quim’s advice for the menu’s choice and the wine. The waiter took out a plate of sausages from earth with coca bread to liven up the wait. It was a tranquil meal, we talked without going too deeply into the chores of our lives during the last months, dodging any sensitive matter that could remind us of the conversation we still had pending and that we both avoided. He talked about the works in his house, of the project of opening his own gardening company.

We had not lost a shred of past complicity. I was still amused by his sarcasm, his refined humor, the way he mixed up the two languages when he spoke. Sometimes he used Catalan and sometimes Spanish. He was not aware that he did it and I did not tell him. It was nice to hear him speak awkwardly, searching for the right words to surrender later and let go. I didn’t talk much during dinner, I dedicated myself to observe him, to try to understand what had happened. I kept resisting to make the damn question but could not get it out of my head. Neither when we toasted, and Quim repeated the “us” of the first encounters.

We extended the after-lunch with the confidence of being in a familiar place, so familiar that for a second, it was also indiscreet.

I had left the table to go to the bathroom, when the waiter and friend approached him. I heard the voice from the open window of the services and I stood motionless waiting for his answer.

- We were together for some time and then... - he stopped. I couldn’t see his gestures, his eyes, the place where he supported his hands while talking about me, of that us that had sounded so good once, before the tears, the deception and the suffering of a silence dissolved in smoke and waiting – we are giving ourselves a second chance.

That confession, if it could be called that, caught me by surprise. I think that deep down that was what I wanted, although I still hadn’t stopped to think about it. Why else had I gone there? For what reason had I decided to break with the tranquility of my routine and go back to the known and announced storm that could not possibly catch me by surprise? I had to do it with conscience, however unconscious that decision was.

I waited a few seconds before returning to the table, trying to put an I-didn’t-hear-anything face, a face that didn’t show I had smiled in the intimacy of the bathroom. I felt a slight satisfaction at that answer. As if I had won a war, a victory I was not expecting.

We had eaten so much that we needed to take a walk to lighten up the body. On our return to Bescanó, we picked up Luna, she was always running ahead of us and then she was forced to stop and wait. We walked without a path, letting ourselves be carried along the path of green, the furrow that the wheels of the tractors leave in the earth. Their print.

We were back there again, in the joy of a November dream, the illusion of two lovers that still have everything ahead to discover. Our hands, clumsy, would caress each other accidentally on every step and the looks confirmed the pleasure of our reencounter. If the past hadn’t been so hurtful, this would have been a precious start. The best way to rewrite our story.

Even though I wanted to ignore it, to struggle to forget it, if I wished with all my heart to ignore the gratuitous suffering Quim caused me, I couldn’t. An alarm was sounding inside me, a distrust that was coming from the past.

I only wanted to live that day as a gift, without looking back, without thinking of the future, without remembering or dreaming. To breathe every moment andlet myself go. I was only twenty-three years old, I had earned the right to make a mistake if I wanted to and pick myself back up.

The sun was setting over the mountains. I knew that was the time to leave, but I didn’t want to be caught by nightfall in his house if I stayed and it was better to return to mine while the light of day illuminated the highway, but I begged for the sun to hide soon so I’d be surprised by an anticipated darkness, the trap of my return home.

We made up conversations to cheat time and any excuse was good to steal the watch the minutes we wanted to ourselves alone. We were “us” again and we didn’t want to get rid of that word. He showed me the improvements he had made to the house, the orange room his little sister helped him paint, the almost grown orchard that surrounded the garden.

Quim, his house, life in the countryside, Luna... they represented everything I wanted at that age. It was easy to dream by his side, with the complicity of his stubborn words, his rough accent and his childish look. His hands were almost virginal, unknowing of the earthly work that was not just his profession, but also his passion or more, his way of communicating. He was a wild animal in the skin of a lamb, kindness translated into apathy, into a sentimental handicap hidden under key, hidden between sweet glances, awkward gestures and a tormented, subtle and irresistible beauty. Quim was an indelible mark, a hard drug with sweet taste and a persistent hangover.

It was the worst of all the questions. I should have left, start the engine and leave that dream for the nights of insomnia, but I didn’t.

- I don’t know...- I answered looking at the clock on my right hand – it’s almost nine... - how to end that phrase?

- Come on, I’ll put a couple of pizzas in the oven, take out a few beers and we’ll have dinner here.

Sitting on the couch, face to face, with an empty chimney and Luna searching for her hole. With dirty dishes over the table and breadcrumbs on the floor, I decided that the moment had arrived. We needed to talk. To pronounce the unpronounceable, to uncover the ghost that had been chasing us the entire day.

He must have seen how the expression on my face changed. I had a harder gesture, a crude look. He understood the moment had come and he didn’t let me ask the question. He went ahead and started with the explanation I had been waiting for six months.

- Elena, about what happened in January – I knew that moment needed to come, that no wound would be closed without explanations, but I was afraid to break the calmness, the silent reconstruction that we had started that same morning on the garden of his house. I was afraid that the excuses, if there were any, the justifications, believable or not, would break the spell of that summer day – I want to apologize – he concluded.

Quim told me that during the Christmas holidays he had suffered a kind of depression. He began to get drunk, to sleep in the sofa and to let the house be filled with dust and garbage until one morning, his friend Manu, after a week without answering the calls, pounded on the door on his search for answers and when he saw him sunk and defeated, he put him in the bathtub, washed him and emptied all the bottles of rum and whiskey down the kitchen sink. Quim didn’t know where the reaction had come from, or what was it exactly that provoked that depression, but he felt the need to get away from everything and everybody, to isolate himself, to rewrite himself.

- What hurt me the most of all was losing you, because you were the best thing that has happened to me in the last few years. You are so special that next to you, I feel small, gray. – his voice was shaking, crying. The feeling of guilt that was bigger than him and was crushing him – you did not deserve what I did to you Elena but I pushed you away, like I pushed my parents away, my sisters and my friends. I could have trusted you, asked you for help... - he moved his body closer to mine, giving himself a little truce, a breath – but I didn’t. I burned my pain with alcohol, with a lot of alcohol. It has taken me several months to recover, I have gotten in shape, I started to exercise, to recover little by little my social life and I’ve thought a million times of call you. But what to say? After how bad I behaved with you... I had no right to call you!

I decided to believe him, same way my dentist decided to believe her ex-fiancé, and I kissed him.

It was a salty kiss, of sea water, of regret, of hope. We forgave the damage produced, we licked our wounds and body to body we started to pick ourselves up again, stronger than before, better. There was nothing that made me think that this time everything would turn out fine, but I thought about it. I thought it because I chose to believe him, because again I saw the way he was looking at me, because I needed to believe that the world was a good place to live in, that the pain he caused me was not unjustified or free, that to grow, not in height, but in soul, was a cruel process. I needed to believe that loving was not dangerous and that Antonio Gala wasn’t lying he said that <<the one who loves wins every time>>, because I had lost I January and I didn’t want to lose again in June.

That night of incipient summer and mid darkness, Quim and I didn’t promise anything to each other because kisses spoke for the two of us and the next morning, disheveled, tired and happy, we said goodbye with the caresses of the first love and the rush of reencounter.

Mi plane to Mahón, was leaving the next morning. I had organized a trip to Menorca to visit some friends who had just opened up a bar on the beach and I couldn’t postpone it, they were waiting for me. Again, a trip separated us, but this time, the wait would be short, on Thursday evening I’d be back in Barcelona and on Friday I would return to Bescanó to spend the weekend with Quim. That’s what we talked about when we said goodbye and that is what I thought it would happen.

Throughout my life, I have made many trips and almost all have been at the wrong time. The need to book air tickets in advance and my craze for living every minute with the greatest intensity, have made my plans to run over me and that what one day seemed the best option, barely two weeks later prevented me from making an even more appetizing plan. Actually, I don’t know of the trips have condemned me or saved me, of what I am sure is that they have never left me indifferent.

Menorca was and still is one of my favorite destinies. To lose myself, to find me, to cleanse me and above all, to breath. I had a room reserved in the house of a friend of friends, the typical favor with which everybody, even intermediaries, come out winning. Silvia, the proprietor of the first floor of a little house in the middle of Mahón, lived with Yan, her eight-year-old son. She was working as a waitress to pay for the unending expenses of a single mother and the three thousand pesetas a night that I would pay for her guest room, no tax, no bill and no commitement, it wasn’t gold but it wasn’t a negligible amount either. We would share the bathroom, the hallway and if I wanted dinner, it was enough to notify before six o’clock.

My friends were at Son Bou, twenty kilometers from the capitol and it would not be until the next day, on Tuesday, when I would come by to say hello and see the place they had mounted. I had the entire afternoon free to walk around the city, enjoy its lights, its streets and its sea.

- I am sitting watching the lights of the harbor reflected in the water, the Mediterranean is so beautiful that I think it’s stupid that it can separate us. Same sea, different landscape. Bona nit Quim.

- Enjoy Menorca Elena. You are privileged, there is no prettier island in the whole world. Especially if you are on it. Bona nit.

The next day I woke up early, the light of the sun came in from the window and invited me to come out of bed.

- Bon dia Quim. I’m going to the beach – I wrote – I’m leaving my phone in the room, we’ll talk when I get back. Have a nice day.

I went out wearing shorts, a tiny black T-shirt, the bikini, a towel and a few coins in my pocket. I picked up my hair using the rubber Quim lent me in his house, the one that since we said farewell had been on my left wrist. I had coffee with milk and a ham and tomato sandwich for breakfast on a terrace while watching people go by. I had decided not to bring music or books, to focus on myself and the landscape.

The wind was not blowing that morning, at least not among the narrow city streets. The palm trees that protected the monument of a cabaret singer, hid their shadows between the windows still closed. Bicycles rattled among the stones, letting their selves fall down the avenues, dodging boys and girls who, free of school obligations, savagely approached the parks, shouting and laughing, letting go of the hands of their tired mothers, and the day hadn’t done anything more than start. Summer had not done anything but to start. I imagined their desire – that September would arrive soon – and I rejected it – let September never come -.

At ten o’clock I picked up the bus that would take me to Son Bou and before eleven in the morning I was presuming my friends from the beach. They had mounted a beautiful place with big crystal windows and several spaces divided with clear wood lamins that broke the white walls. We knew each other from the first temporary jobs we took to pay for university and even though they had left Barcelona to travel the whole world, we never lost contact. They had worked in a fish market in Norway, in the kitchen of an hotel south of Ireland, I a pirate ship that sank inexplicably in the tranquil waters of Cerdeña and the last time I saw them, they were walking barefooted over the cement of the city, with their feet black and their hair full of salt. I used to call them my errant princes because once, I received a letter from India, they had climbed on the back of an elephant that said <<we can’t promise you a thousand and one night at the palace, but if you want, every morning when you wake up, you will have fresh orange juice on the table>>. Nobody ever made a better statement to me, and that among all the existing ways of loving, we loved each other in every way but not in any way. Ours was a feeling reclining in another dimension, where neither heart nor touch had ever been invited.

I arrived at Son Bou to collect a promise made from a faraway sea and ended up using their salt to cicatrize my wounds. It was beautiful to be there, being part of their dream. There are other’s joys that can heal you more than your own.

The happiness of reunion was overwhelmed by insatiable tourists who demanded their turn and I, proud friend, gave my chair and occupied another discreet place. I knew that my friends were not destined to always occupy the same place and that today was Menorca and tomorrow it will be seen, but it was so nice to have them near...

There weren’t many people on the beach, to be Menorca and summer, of course. Right away I found a place to extend my towel on the sand. The landscape was gorgeous but I needed to reunite myself with my sea. I folded my pants, took my t-shirt off and went to the shore.

- The rubber – I thought – I was wearing my hair even tighter and I didn’t want it to get wet. It was silly, but since that Sunday morning in which Quim lent me that rubber in front of the bathroom mirror to pick my hair up, I felt as if that little elastic fabric was a part of him, as if by having it over my skin I could feel his arm, to believe that he still existed, that what we lived on Saturday had actually happened, that it wasn’t a dream. That Quim was real. I didn’t want to ruin the rubber with sea salt, I wanted to protect it as if that way I was protecting him, me, us.

I stepped back with my bare feet over the sand and saved the purple colored rubber in the pocket of my shorts. Under the towel.

It was a peaceful, long bath, in which I enjoyed my body, the lightness of the waves, the taste of salt on my lips. The sun was burning my hair, which moved to the same rhythm of the sea, underneath soft, turquese water. Life gives us many pleasures and that was one of them. I wasn’t in a hurry, nobody was waiting for me, nothing was keeping me from taking my time, manage it to my liking, controle my freedom. What a nice sensation! The sea and my like two lovers, no witnesses, dedicated to pleasure.

I was there for a long time. My fingers got wrinkled, my skin widened, and when I came back to the towel I abandoned who knows how long ago, I brushed my hair and took out the shorts from their hiding place to get Quim’s rubber back but it wasn’t there anymore. It was gone. I searched for it in the sand, in the folds of my trousers, underneath every towel surrounding me. I looked for it in places I knew I wasn’t going to find it. I removed every obstabcle, every grain of sand but I didn’t find it. What was left of Quim had gone missing, just like him. It was like a premonition, his way of saying goodbye. I knew in that instant that Quim would never respond to my last text, that when I got back to the room I rented, my phone would still be over the bed, but I wouldn’t find his answer. I knew it and it didn’t hurt.

There would be no more absences, no more excuses, no more tears. Nothing I had to understand. Quim did not disappear; he was actually never there. The reencounter was his goodbye, my goodbye, the farewell that I, at least, deserved. I had tried, I was at peace.

I came back to my sea, to what heals every all wounds. It was itchy, yes... it burned, yes... but everything that itches, it heals.

I went walking back to Mahón, with the saltpeter tattooed on my skin. It still hurt but pain only shows one thing, that we are alive. The contrary is to die, in death or alive. I walked so I could say goodbye to him, to mourn in silence, in the tranquility of a landscape with success guaranteed, in an island in which nothing can go wrong. We need to say goodbye to things, to people, to mourn so we can forget them. Ignoring the problems is never an option, overcoming them is.

I walked the twenty kilometers that separate Son Bou from Mahón without shedding a single tear, without screaming, without hating, redecorating my heart, changing the feelings around, creating a new home in which my illusions could lived.

When I arrived to the room, at night, my phone confirmed what I already knew, but life kept going, more beautiful, wiser, more lived. I went back to Barcelona with a new scar, a war memory, a love mark.

Quim was my first heartbreak. A life lesson. Him, without wanting, taught me that I am not to blame for the decisions others make, that what other people do is exclusively their responsibility and that I have the right to live and love my way, without any one telling me what to feel. He taught me that to get excited and trust, is not a mistake. It doesn’t matter if things turn out right or wrong. It is not our objective the end of the road, but the way. He taught me that my heart is strong, that it has the virtu to love and to forgive. That resentment hinders and that in time, what really matters, is having lived. Thanks to Quim, I learned that Antonio Gala was right, that the one who loves always wins and that on that summer, at twenty-three years old, I had won.

When I saw him, on the morning of my fortieth birthday, it was hard for me to recognize him. I saw a man walking towards me looking at the ground, as if the city didn’t have much to offer him, as if life was incapable of surprising him.there had been seventeen years since Quim and I said goodbye at the door of his house in Bescanó and if I wasn’t the same Elena as before, then he did not look at all the same to the young twenty-six year old man I fell in love with. He was an older, gray version of himself.

I am the kind of people who believe in Karma, that every cause has an effect. I like to think that if at forty years old I was at the best moment in my life, it was because I deserved it. Nothing is free, nothing comes out free. Living is a bottom race where the winner is not the one who arrives first to the finish line, but the one who enjoyed the race the most. To arrive at the end and not having anyone to share the victory with, is worse than to give up before the first obstacle.

I can’t say that Quim’s aspect was a consequence of the mistakes of his past, it would not be fair on my part to judge someone over a punctual fact. He made a decision, he chose a path and I made mine. It was fine that way. We were both free to choose. I chose to love him and he chose to disappear. But either karma had played a bad move on him or life had treated him very badly.

Nothing about him would have called for my attention if not because when he went pass next to me I felt an odor, a sensation, a distant memory coming back to me, as if that sad looking man, had had the ability to transport me to a place where I hadn’t gone back in years.

It was just one second. We crossed paths in front of a closed blind of a shop that hadn’t opened its doors yet. The city was slowly waking up, without the hurries of a normal Tuesday. The street was narrow and Quim was close enough to ignore him. I stared at him. He must have been more than forty-five years old, almost fifty I thougth. He was thin, small. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his back inclined, in an almost imperceptible gesture of submission. As if nothing could touch him anymore, hurt him.

It was just one second. The time it lasted with his eyes on mine. Just one second a needed to remember our first date in front of the stair case of the Girona Cathedral, the chimney smell of his house in Bescanó, 1999 christmas in Norkolf, Menorca, a war scar, a love scar.

I knew Quim had recognized me way before I remembered who he was and when I did, I imitated his silence. There was nothing to say, time had not healed everything but aging had taught me to ignore the pains of the past.

Before we went our separate ways again, in the eternal second in which I recognized him, while his stare was still part of mine, I smiled at him. I didn’t have anything to say to him but he was part of the Elena I was, of the Elena I am. Quim was not my enemy, he was only my past. One more chapter, a memory, a travel mate.

The second lasted only that, one second and after him, my path continued just as it was. It was my birthday, it was a Tuesday in the month of May. My life was that which was in front of me, the past, like Quim, was already behind my back.

Barcelona has always been my city. My anchor, the place to return to. A most faithful and pacient friend that has known how to understand my quirks, respect my spaces. i have lost myself in the natural order of its geography, in the colors of a city that bathes itself in the dawn of a peaceful mediterraneum, like the architecture of its forms.

Trips have always been a part of my life and Barcelona the smell of my childhood, of memories, the place to feel safe. When airports were the elevator of my routine, my city was my anchor. I’ve always lived in the same neighborhood, trying to measure distances, to know every footprint of my day to day, protect myself from time passing, the advances, the works and the tourists. My neighborhood has been my kingdom and I have defended it staying true to my bakery, to the florist who decorates the balconies of the neighborhood, the kiosk that informs itself of the literally novelties to share them with me and offer me warm novels like bread that just came out of the oven. My movie theatre, my school, the thousand colors market, the corner bar with the homemade pastries and the fresh coffee. In my neighborhood have resided all my smells and no matter how far I traveled, a wind, a perfume, the instinct of something known, were my return home. To my city, to a Barcelona that has taken care of me even when I didn’t deserve it.

How nice it is to feel we belong some place, even when the streets may confuse us sometimes and the signs change when the wind blows. Being a part of something, it’s easier not to feel alone when you go inside a restaurant and the chair in front of you is empty, when someone in a hotel lobby pities the empty side of your double bed or whenever you exit a movie theatre you don’t have anyone to comment the movie with. We are not used to loneliness and this is what condemn us to repeat fears, mistakes, because deep down we usually think that it is better to be in bad company than to be alone. Even when the saying states the contrary. I belong to Barcelona and that, a lot of times, has given me a sense. It has been the other half of my orange, my lemon and all the fruit juices in the supermarket. The love of my life. The I will always love you, the only one that guarantees me to eat partridges and be happy. My city, my home.

No... it couldn’t be him... that man that was walking towards me, with his jacket opened and the first button of his white shirt untied, it could not be him.

I narrowed my eyes trying to disguise my myopia, waiting for my pupils to be able to comfort me, to tell me I was making a mistake, that my past was not just crossing the corner to be placed in front of me.

That way of walking, with the legs slightly arched, feets pointing in almost opposite directions, the light arms, one hand in his pocket, the other hand enjoying the ride, the wind, the movement.

We were only fifteen meters away when he looked at me and my mouth responded to his look with a smile. I felt the desire again of years ago. It had been more than a decade since we last saw each other and he was still just as handsome as I remembered.

He recognized me instantly too, he tried to pronounce my name, to greet me in the most impersonal way, but a past history united us forever, the memory of who we were. The tears, the passion...

He hugged me. In silence, I breathed deeply, I felt again the power of his hugs, the smell of a perfume that transported me back to London, to the Barcelona of my youth, to the hotel nights, the office hours text messages, the forbidden love and the passion. A lot of passion.