Excerpt:
Return. Second. Third. Fourth. I get up. Early morning. I go to the bathroom. I urinate. Three hours without being able to sleep. Maybe more. I don’t know. There are no noises in the house. Everyone is sleeping. I open the curtains. Darkness. Moon. There isn’t one. Silence. It’s cold. Silence. There is no one shouting, no one reprimanding, no one saying anything. There are no prohibitions. Silence. Blue hour. I can’t sleep. A car passing sounds in the distance. A siren sounds. Someone must be dying. Maybe someone is going to prison. Maybe someone just wants to turn on their siren. I get up. I go out. I sit. On the stairs. I look through the window. Lights. Street. Garbage truck. Garbage collectors. Only at this hour. It disappears. The truck. Contemplate the tree on the corner. Try to recognize some tree that I climbed as a child. See how everything changes at this hour. I recognize the most important one. It seems like it was in another place, as if it had been another time when I sat on those branches. A dirty tree. A dirty park. I rest my head on the wall. I curl up.
When was the first time I did this? When did I decide to spend the whole night looking out a window? Deep down I am still a scared child. Scared of what? I didn’t know then. Now I do. I am afraid of living with a huge emptiness for the rest of my life. An emptiness created by anxiety that eats me from within. A kind of beast that needs to create to feed itself, and if it doesn’t create, it will eat me alive. I look at the sky again. When did I decide to spend the whole night looking out a window?
Back then I went to sleep very, very early. It wasn’t to be awake at dawn, it wasn’t to look through the window and see dark trees, it wasn’t to try to imagine a different time or place. It was to be awake when no one else was. To be alone. Without anyone who thinks they know what is best for me better than I do. Do I know what is best for me? Now I do. If not, I wouldn’t feel this now.
Freedom.
With the window wide open to see the sky. I close my eyes. I try to sleep. If they find me sleeping here, what will they say? I can’t sleep. I open my eyes. I can see. What was I doing before at these moments? Playing, playing and playing. Hidden in my room. Without making much noise; not after the times I have been hit.
Shit.
Why do I keep thinking about this? Almost everyone I know doesn’t get caught up in these kinds of things. I don’t know anyone who gets caught up in these kinds of things. They go on with their lives without the flu chasing them. Maybe they feel the same as me. Maybe they go through the same thing. Maybe they don’t dare to tell anyone either. Maybe we all try to fool ourselves. I hold my right shoulder. I lean more.
I want to sleep.
Quietly, I played and no one disturbed me. At least until the sun was fully up. It’s part of a process. Feeling like this is part of a process. It has to be that. At some point I will stop sitting on the stairs at dawn. I will sleep. I will wake up. After that, back to school, back to the noise, back to existence, back to being someone, back to being vomited into the world. Silence. Lights. Street. Tree. The love for silence. I sigh.
I want to sleep.
I hope tiredness finally conquers me. I love silence. Other people get uncomfortable when I stay silent. They have to learn to enjoy it. One star. Two stars. Three stars. I don’t see any more. There are never more. The silence during the early mornings was the only thing I considered mine until I lost that too. Maybe I didn’t need it anymore. Why again now? No, it was last year that I started this again. I should have finished already. Where is that child? What happened to him? When did I lose myself? When did I stop being like that? Before I only enjoyed. Why can’t I look outside now like I did before without having to think about something sooner or later? Why do I always have to end up remembering what I used to do or who I was knowing I already stopped doing it or I am no longer like that?
Shit.
At some point, innocence disappeared for some reason or someone. They sent it to hell. Maybe I don’t feel comfortable noticing all the years that have passed and I don’t remember anything important, nothing significant I have done. No, she is important, she means something. My drawings, my creations are important too. It’s this hour that makes me feel like this. I could share this moment with her. No, not this one. Another different one. One in which I don’t feel lost. One in which I don’t lock myself in. I could tell her all this. Would she understand?
I hope so.
It’s a bond I don’t have with her. It’s that special relationship that exists between the first moments of the day and me. It’s sitting on the stairs leaning against the wall and feeling how I have been in this same place at different ages. That’s it. But this sky always reflects the emptiness I have. No, I don’t have emptiness.
What do I have?
Maybe it is the knowledge that I cannot decide what to do with my life. That in truth it never depended on me. Yet still being naive. And thinking I could choose. Reality is very harsh. Why is this society like this? What do I have that is really mine?
I have to create the bond with her. Maybe I am afraid. Knowing that I could have wasted time. But I am with her now. That is not wasted time. It will never be. I keep feeling that I am clinging to a past. Believing that any moment in which I was more innocent is better. That has nothing to do with her anymore. That is a problem I don’t know how to solve.
Believing that being unconscious, being ignorant, realizing only tiny things is the best way of living there is. I think the more I know or understand the worse I feel. Even love disappears. It always disappears. No, this love remains. It stays.
At this hour is when I doubt whether I really love someone or not. But I am thinking of her. If her image doesn’t come to my mind, I don’t care, it is a silly relationship doomed to die; if her image appears, I care. Only her image has appeared at this moment.
–Read more in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source Spanish community of writers–