No happy endings

   After it happened, I went right into the bathroom and pretended I was doing what people do in a bathroom. Of course, I had closed the door properly and, after a few minutes, I turned the faucet on to make water run and make them think I was washing my hands. But the truth was that I wasn’t doing any of that. I was staring at myself in the mirror, looking at a person that I knew but not really that well. I got closer to the glass and really tried to get in there, I really tried to see if there was a human behind those eyes. Maybe the one I thought I knew or maybe another, a new person that I had to get to know better.

 But no, it was me. It was me there, naked on a bathroom in which I had never been in. I decided right there that I wanted to leave but, after what was happening in there, I had no idea if anyone was going to let me leave. To be fair, they both looked like decent people, not the kind that put a lock on the door and then do something unspeakable. No, they really seemed like any other people or at least like any others that liked what they had started doing after a lot of drinks. But I did want to leave so that had to be my priority. In this day and age, I couldn’t just do as they pleased and forget myself in seconds.

 However, that was exactly what I did. I tried to forget myself for a while, trying to pretend I was some other person or that I was in some other place. It worked for short periods of time but then I had an interruption from reality and I had to start over again. But that had been a very good idea because, not much long after my escape to the bathroom, everything finished and we found ourselves catching our breaths. It was then I stepped out of that place, after arranging myself properly that is and checking that I had all my belongings on me. I know very well how rude that was of me, but there was no other way.

As I walked towards the bus stop, I tried to convince myself that was the best thing to do. After all, I didn’t even know them. I hardly knew their names and not so much more about them. I did not know what they did for a living and had no idea of the dog’s name, the one that had been sleeping in his little bed for all the time I had been in there. I didn’t get to ask how was it possible that they could afford such a nice place in such an expensive neighborhood, being only two people with, as far as I knew, fairly common incomes. But none of that was ever mention at any moment, as alcohol had played too much a role.

 I sat down at the bus stop. The place was lonely and freezing. Luckily, the next bus would pass in just a few minutes and I would be home in a rather short time, or so I hoped because of the late hour. When the bus got there, I noticed there were very few people in it at that time and the only ones there were all alone, not talking to anyone or having any kind of interaction. Somehow, I felt I belonged there at that moment, in that exact place in the world.

 When I got home, I checked my cellphone as I took off my clothes off for a second time that night. They had written me that they had loved their evening with me and would have loved for me to stay. I felt strange, wrong somehow. It was all made even weirder by the fact that the guy that wrote had a picture of their wedding as his profile picture on the app he used to contact me. It made me feel like an invader, like someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. And also, it made me feel lonely and not worthy of anything.

 I spent a few minutes in the dark, sitting on the edge of my bed, only wearing socks and briefs. I wondered about my life, my shitty little place, my horrible job and my absolute lack of friendships and real love possibilities. Instead of spending a fun night, which had been my intention all along, I was feeling horrible. Feelings of loneliness and sadness invaded my body and it was then when I moved to get under the covers and tuck myself in tightly in order for the warmth of the fabrics to make me feel a little less horrible.

 However, the mind always works more when left alone. So, I started thinking about the cute couple that I had met earlier. They had seen me at the bar, and we started drinking right then, drinking and drinking a lot. We did that for only a couple of hours and then they talked about their place and I just said “yes”, without any hesitation or doubt. I just pushed myself into something I didn’t know about, without measuring any possibility of danger or any outcomes. They had chosen me as their person for a while and it was just when I entered their place when I realized what I had become, at least that night.

 I was just a guy. I wasn’t me, with my personality and all the things that make myself the person that I am. They weren’t interested in that, so the alcohol collaborated with some part of my unconscious brain to just hide all that was me and “enjoy” myself that way. And I did, I cannot pretend I did not feel pleasure or happiness in different amounts. But it was right before running to the bathroom when I realized they just wanted a body there to be with them. I was not myself in the sense that there was no one inside that body, at least not the full me controlling everything, as it should always be the case.

 One has to do what one has to do, so I did. I made them happy or at least did exactly what they had probably thought about for a long time. I was the vessel for their imagination, for their pleasures and fantasies. And that was nice, I guess, but I have to believe someone, only one person, can also feel something for me and not only for the me that moves around the world but for the me that lives inside this body, the me that thinks and hurts and feels insane sometimes. Maybe someone can find a way to actually love me for who I am.

 But I won’t keep my hopes up. This is life, not a silly movie. There are no real happy endings.

Lost and never found

   What was once deemed to be the center of all known civilization, the epitome of culture and grandiosity, fell in one day. The rain did the rest and the jungle became the one to truly make the city a myth. Where people one traded, lived and loved, an entanglement of branches and leaves now existed. Animals now thrived were ancient philosophers had posed the most interesting questions and had also attempted to answer them. Fish swam up the streets that people had once used daily, not even noticing them.

 The cataclysm was so abrupt and effective, that no one else in the entire world ever knew about that city. And even those who had once visited now thought they could have been mistaken. Maybe they had been somewhere else and not there, not the city of myth. Forgotten, its walls and stone sculptures fell to the ground and were promptly consumed by the jungle. After a while, only the strongest pillars and rocks where still there, but it would have been very difficult to prove a city had stood there.

 The indigenous peoples that inhabited the jungle preserved the ideas behind the city, but they were so entrenched after years and years, that they really couldn’t say what was theirs and what had been borrowed from those people in the past. Maybe it was their ways of hunting or maybe they had inherited all of their cosmology from those ancient humans. Their villages were much smaller and their people did not have the same kind of vision of their world, but it would have been very sad if nothing had remained.

 Explorers had come every so often, thinking they would be to unwrap the mystery and reveal to the world some magnificent new discovery. However, they only had ancient writing and stories to navigate the jungle with, and that wasn’t nearly enough. They would often get lost and then be found starving to death, or the jungle and its animals would defend their existence against them with the maximum sentence. Bodies were known to be seen floating down the river, sometimes only parts of them.

 However, some of those explorers were able to find bits and pieces that made the possibility of the city being rediscovered a reality. The first one to find something was a foreigner that had no intention to become an explorer but did nevertheless. He was eleven years old and had been visiting the area with his parents, on a river cruise. The boy fell in the rapids, were the boats had difficulties navigating, and he was found to be alive only a few kilometers down the river. The most fascinating thing was the object he was holding when rescued from a lonely rock on one side of the river.

 At first glance, it was a long object, kind of white but also yellowish, with holes on one side and a larger hole on one end. Clearly, it was some kind of musical instrument resembling a flute. However, when the kid’s parents checked the object, they realized it wasn’t made out of wood or something similar. The flute was made with bone. Of course, the parents were disgusted by that and thought instantly that it was something belonging to one of the tribes living in the vicinity.

 When they reached civilization, they left the object in a museum. There, it was proven to be a musical instrument but not one used by the indigenous peoples. It was too advanced for them and too refined for their tastes, which were much simpler. The flute the kid had discovered had been carefully carved and its holes had been drilled with a magnificent precision. The discovery was a revolution, because it was something found on an area that had no relation to such craftsmanship.

 The museum officials asked the kid’s parents to interview the boy before they left for their country. He told them that he had found the flute by accident, when kicking and tossing and turning after he had fallen of the boat. He said that he had felt the object just after falling, so among the rapids. The kid grabbed thinking it could help him hold on to something, but the flute was freed from the bottom of the river and then floated with the boy until boat reached the rock where they were found.

 The kid was then interviewed by several news outlets of the country, as the flute had become a very interesting subject for them. Yet, people from other places seemed to be a little bit doubtful of the whole thing. Granted, no real tests had been done to the flute and the kid’s story could be a very elaborate lie. For all that they knew, the parents could have been liars trying to get some attention out of the whole thing. The fact that they were actors in Hollywood didn’t really help their case at all.

 But the museum continued its research, trying not to pay attention to the barrage of critics and doubts everyone was pouring in. They tested the object with carbon and were able to prove the flute was much older than any of the objects used by any of the tribes living in the jungle. Even the ones that lived deep inside it all could not have been the creators of such a piece. The bone was then analyzed and it didn’t really surprise anyone when it was revealed it was actually a human bone. It was a humerus, to be more precise. Someone had used it to create music, entertainment.

 Now, that discovery really traveled the globe. Of course, other people in the world had created musical instruments from bones too but this was such an interesting story that it was just too much not to exploit it. Everyone in the planet was talking about the flute made out of human bone that a kid had discovered deep in a secluded jungle. It was an interesting thing to hear about and speculations started to pop up from every single corner. Everyone had just become an expert.

Some thought that it was maybe not an ancient piece of history but some prank. Others thought it had been made by the lone survivor of some doomed expedition. Some even proposed the theory that aliens, beings from some unknown world, could have been the creators of the object. And all of those were some of the most common ideas that people had, with the one about the aliens being the most repeated one in social media and all over the Internet. People loved to have a mystery in their hands.

 Meanwhile, the experts kept on working. They soon discovered something even more mysterious, that they couldn’t just corroborate: the bone had been proven to be one from a Caucasian man, an actual man from the Caucasus region. That place was thousands and thousands of kilometers away and, somehow, and ancient bone from that region had been discovered in a jungle with holes to make music with. It did make any sense but it was what it was, and they checked their results several times.

 They even lend the object to other museums and scientists, also inviting them to visit the flute and sharing knowledge. But after the last discovery, they had nothing. They even sent explorer to the area where the kid had found the flute in order to comb the area. It was a very difficult job and also dangerous, but they did it and spent several months there. Nothing came out of it. Only people affected by spider and snake venom, attacks by eels and confrontations with very angry indigenous peoples.

 They would never know how a young kid, a girl, had once owned that flute. She had used it to entertain herself. When the cataclysm came, and they all had to abandon their city, the girl took the flute with her but sadly dropped it in the river, hundreds of kilometers away from the place where it was found.

 The flute was made from the bone of a man they had brought into the city as a slave. He had been shown around, like an animal, for people to see what existed beyond their borders. The man eventually died and his caretaker, the girl’s father, took one of his bones from the funeral pyre for himself.