“I am perfectly aware that she was beautiful on the outside, but a dark and haunted forest on the inside. However, the mixture between her undeniable beauty and emotional intensity has left her image burnt into my soul.”
Rather unexpected and driven more by luck and casualty, she bumbed into me and gave me a warm smile. Her big eyes, infinte, starred at me reflecting the neon lights around us. The music and noise of the crowd went mute as we stood there silently looking at each other as we drew closely. An unplanned rencounter at the end of the summer,out of a cheezy movie script. And then we kissed, when I realized that my past & future didn’t matter and that for now on I could feel free and once again my heart took the wheel for the upcomming ride, a ride where my fingers slided through her blonde hair and my lips followed hers in an almost syncrhonized dance.
Stockholm, September 2018
I’m sitting in a meeting room, wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt without a tie. Actions plans are discussed, a budget plan is proposed and a connection with our international partners is made. My colleagues speak and even though I am listening, my view is lost in one of the big windows. We are sitting in one of the tallest buildings of the city (which if you compre it to any industrial city is not that tall) in one of the upper floors and due to the flatness of the skyline and the lack of ugly glass skyscrapers I am able to see how the city spreads with its black metal roofs through the islands that and beyond them the archipiélago seems not to end in the distance.
A plan is made, a critical path is analysed, someone is worried about the deadlines, the schedule is changed, their voices fade as my sight is lost between the boats sailing, the blue trains going back and forth in between the islands, and the people that look like little dots. I’m sitting here, but I am not really here. I have pursued to be here, but a side of thought of be somewhere.
I comment, collaborate, propose and discuss, yet I am a preconceived version of myself. The water reflects the white clouds and the birds fly down and up the water hunting for distracted fishes, while a part of my consciusness flies with them, away from what I call my life, away from who I am supposed to be.
Hands are shaken, roles are proposed, and everybody leaves the meeting room. As I walk through the corridor I look once again into the distance behind the glass window. I’m here but I am also there, because that is how I have always been, nowhere.
I’m sitting in the restaurant car of a train. The window reflects a landscape I can’t name. It could be the mountains of the Sierra Madre, but the signs inside the carriage are written in Cyrillic, and the air is too cold for summer. I’m wearing a slim black suit, sipping a gin and tonic that tastes better than it should. My head feels ready to burst, my heart beating too fast, as if I’d just snorted two clean lines of Peruvian snow. The train is empty. Time isn’t moving; only the train is. I don’t know where it’s going, but it feels like I’ve been here before.
You’re sitting across from me in a blue dress, your hair falling over your shoulders. You stare without expression. I can almost see your sadness floating behind your eyes. I reach for your hand, but you slip away and laugh instead, lifting a glass of red wine that wasn’t there a moment ago. The train begins to move faster. The cold turns into heat, unbearable and slow, and yet you seem untouched. The world outside shifts into an endless desert, pale and trembling under the sun.
From somewhere, “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by Iggy Pop starts playing through the speakers. You laugh again and take my hand, this time with a grip that burns. I want to kiss you, but I can’t move. My body feels like glass. You’re still laughing when confetti begins to fall from nowhere, spinning in the air like dying snowflakes. The train races forward, and the desert outside catches fire.
“It’s the last time,” you say, almost whispering. “But not like the other last times. This is truly the last.”
“I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to happen,” I tell you. “Or if I can promise it ever was.” Tears gather in my eyes, but I can’t cry. I just smile, as if smiling could make it easier.
You tilt your head and sigh. “There isn’t much to say. Things become what they were always meant to be. You should go wherever this ride takes you…with or without me.”
You rise and come closer, kiss me like you did the first time: quick, sudden, full of light. Then the confetti burns into ash. The air smells like iron and smoke.
“There are no goodbyes,” you say as you walk toward the next car, already swallowed by fire. “Only jumps into different futures that sometimes meet again.”
You step into the flames. They don’t consume you. They just absorb your shape until you disappear completely.
Now I’m alone. The train rushes into a tunnel. Fire covers everything, but it’s cold, like snow that burns without smoke. My heart hurts, but I can’t move. Darkness fills the windows. I know I can’t follow you.
I start crying because I remember—I’ve been here before. I always reach the station alone. The train breaks through the tunnel and stops. The flames vanish. I find myself in an unnamed Eastern European city, the kind that doesn’t exist on any map. I wait for the next train to arrive, though I already know it never really does.
Then I wake up. The ceiling above me is white. The bed beside me is warm, but it isn’t you. I wonder if you wake beside someone else, and if, in the quiet moment before morning, you ever think of me…or if I’ve faded, like the confetti, into the air.
I make coffee and move through the day. The world feels distant, as if it’s still shaking from the rails. By evening, the memory begins to dissolve, until it returns again, uninvited, on another nameless night when I’ll find myself back on that same train.
Maybe you’ll be there.
Maybe not
Sonríes, nos sonreímos, sin dejarnos de mirar y entonces nuestras penas se desvanecen, nuestra razón desaparece, nuestros corazones se calientan, nos acercamos y no dejamos de sonreír, nos sonreímos mutuamente como unos locos, nos miramos y todo a nuestro alrededor se vuelve más tenue, el ruido cambia a un silencio temporal en el que sólo escucho tu corazón y sólo veo tu cara, te paso los dedos por los labios y después entre tu pelo, cruzo caminos a través de él, caminos que ya habían sido trazados, como si mis dedos tuvieran su propia memoria. Nuestros ojos se miran y se acercan, nuestras miradas se encajan una a la otra como si estuvieran conectadas por una cuerda que se vuelve más chica. Las bocas se encuentra e inician a luchar entre ellas, con pequeños roces entre sus labios, como si siguieran una coreografía planeada y se juntan, se muerden suavemente dejando pequeños instantes entre los cuales pequeños suspiros van y vienen intercambiando el calor que llevamos dentro. Mis manos se deslizan en tu cuerpo al igual que las tuyas en el mío en armonía y tu pelo cae sobre mi cara como una suave ventisca de primavera en la que siento su olor dulce. Nuestro calor se vuelve uno, se enciende y siento como tu piel arde cuando roza la mía.
Dejamos los imperfectos y las penas arder entre las flamas que nacen cuando nos besamos, como si estuvieran llenas de fuegos artificiales que no dejan de volar en todas direcciones. El “tú”y el “yo” se vuelve un nosotros y aquello que somos queda en pausa para dejar paso a aquella llamarada en la que nuestros almas se convierten.
Te veo, me ves y las llamas siguen, pero nosotros no las seguimos, las dejamos estar en el fondo de nuestros ojos sin dejarlas explotar, ya que nuestro fuego al prenderse quema todo y no deja espacio a quienes somos, tan sólo a aquello en lo que nos convertimos y una vez extintas nos dejan con las cenizas de lo que momentáneamente podemos ser, mas no aquello que permanentemente somos.
It bothers us that we don’t look in our pictures as we see ourselves in the mirror.
Just like the impression others have from us isn’t like the one we want others to have.
We hide our weaknesses through our strengths, we show little of ourselves.
After spending a lot of time in my corporate job, I decided to change the way my life was going and look for a different career path. No, I am not talking about leaving my life and travel as a hippie bump around third world countries like a lot of folks do. I decided to go “green” in my career and moved to the other side of the world for studies and that is how I ended up moving to Stockholm.
Why Sweden? I used to have a fascination for Scandinavian culture when I was a young kid, reading about the cold north and its vikings, but that wouldn’t be a good excuse as the modern swede is usually a leftist, politically correct modern man quite different of its ancestors. Sweden is considered the leader in green technologies; as for environmental engineering is one of the best countries in Europe for a degree, the quality of life is high, and the work benefits huge, …and why not say it open; Swedish women are famously consider to be beautiful. I packed my clothes ,and my passport; took the plane to the land of Alfred Nobel, Abba and the one Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
I was in the other side of the world again; this time older and with a different perspective of life; for those reasons I decided to start again here in this corner of the internet.
Stockholm view form Södermalm Island
Stockholm, October 2016
The leaves on the trees slowly shifted from green to yellow-brown gradients… gathering quietly in the corners of the city. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t really warm either; strong winds began to sweep through the streets, and the clothes people wore changed with them. Everyone seemed to slip into a grayscale palette… and in a way, so did their faces; fewer smiles, slower steps, and one by one, the outdoor areas of bars and restaurants began to close.
I wasn’t used to such a collective change in mood caused by the weather. Back home, people didn’t really change depending on how hot or cold it was outside… but this wasn’t home, and from the moment I applied to come here, I somehow knew that the closer you are to the poles, the colder people become too.
By then, I had already formed a small group of friends from school; a mix of locals and foreigners who didn’t want to spend all their time studying. We wanted to live a little… to experience something outside the usual student routines. One evening we planned to go to a trendy rooftop bar in the old slaughterhouse district, south of the city; it would close soon due to the weather, so it felt like the right time. A friend and I decided to have a few drinks beforehand in a nearby park… the closer to the metro, the better.
We walked up Götgatan and stopped at a small park called Björnsträdgården. It had concrete stairs where people sat facing a patch of green with a playground and a skatepark in the background; it seemed like a perfectly normal place to gather.
We texted our local friends, who sounded slightly confused as to why we had chosen to drink there… yet they still agreed to come. We didn’t really understand their hesitation; what could be wrong with it? Soon after, though, we were approached by junkies asking for beer, Roma women asking for money, the girls were catcalled by young North African migrants… and a few other strange people wandered around. We left as soon as our friends arrived.
That brief episode stayed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how that part of town, which had always seemed decent to me, changed so abruptly once the sun went down. It wasn’t that I didn’t know my neighborhood… but rather that I hadn’t truly seen it. Somehow, the invisible had become visible; the city’s hidden face revealed itself in the half-light of evening. It gave the streets a quiet melancholy… but most people seemed to ignore it.
It was oddly fascinating to see how the beautiful and the broken coexisted in the same space; like two parallel realities brushing past each other without meeting. Every time they crossed paths, it felt as if they existed in different dimensions… the elegant blondes in Chanel coats blocking out the Roma girl asking for coins. They were there and not there at the same time; and as days passed, they became invisible to me too… as if their existence were a glitch in the fabric of the city. Their pain drifted somewhere beyond our world, too distant to matter.
Everyone kept walking with headphones on and their thoughts far away; everyone passed without looking, and in a metaphysical sense they were only shadows of something we know exists… but prefer not to recognize.
Later that year, the city invested in a new lighting system to cover the same area where we had first sat. Slowly, those people disappeared; replaced by community service officers patrolling more often. Their corners were gone… their presence erased. Their suffering was moved elsewhere, somewhere unseen; a place less unpleasant to the eye, where people could again focus on their Instagram notifications, their Tinder dates… and not on the sound of coins rattling inside a Pressbyrån coffee cup
On the distance 