Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta world. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta world. Mostrar todas las entradas

lunes, 7 de agosto de 2017

They speak to us

   If you stand in the bridge, you wouldn’t be able to see it. You have to walk south, by the great way. It’s a rather short walk. On the left bank, you will see a beautiful meadow plagued with trees that are not tall or especially beautiful. However, if you walk across the meadow, close to a wall that limits the growth of plants, you will see a small hill and three trees on top of it. The one with the straightest trunk, clean leaves, and no roots on sight, is the one I want to tell you about.

 Beneath that tree, a friend of mine was buried a long time ago. He was not especially strong or fit or brave. He was not particularly remarkable in any way. He was just my friend and that is the reason why that tree is so special to me. I’ve been there many times, at night and during the day, a few minutes and also several hours. And every single time I visit that place, I talk to my friend. Sometimes there is nothing to say, other times it’s different. It changes, as life happens to be.

 I like that meadow because the sunset look gorgeous from it, the golden rays from the sun seem to be touching your body in such a magical way. Even when it rains, the green field looks as if it had escaped a book of fantastical stories. It’s the kind of place where, in stories, ladies and lords encounter beautiful white unicorns and heroes lift a sword out of a stone. I wonder if thing like that have actually happened there but maybe it’s best not to know for certain and just imagine.

 It feels good to be there, laying on the grass and just hearing the wind caressing the greenery. Flowers are scarce but when you find one, it is sure to be one of the most beautiful botanical being your eyes have ever seen. So many colors and such beautiful designs. They make you realize how perfect nature is and how intricate life can be in order to create things that have apparently little to no value. That’s how simpleminded and stupid humans are, because we just do not understand.

 I’m not saying I do understand but, when I’m there, I do feel different than usual. Sometimes I feel my muscles are stronger than ever and some other times I feel it is my mind that has grown one full size, in intellectual terms. I have attributed this particular feeling to the fact that my friend is there, beneath the tree or maybe inside of it. I have a special connection with that place, that goes far beyond it’s location or the many ways the sun touches the leaves and the rain flows down the small hills. It’s just something that I will never be able to understand or explain.

 I never go to two of my favorite places at once but I do have another natural space where I like to relax my aching bones. It’s a prairie, many hours away by walking from the meadow. It’s on the outskirts of civilization and maybe that’s the reason why it feels so special. It might also be the fact that many great people died there a long time ago and the place became a graveyard, although not on purpose. There’s not a sign labeling it as such and there are not tombstones to read.

 You feel the presence of thousands of soul when you enter the prairie. That one, different from the meadow, is filled with flowers all over. As trees are scarce, flowers grow on the ground, big as the fists of a mighty warrior. The colors are unimaginable if one has never been there and the sound of many birds creates a wall of sound that no scream or weapon can pierce. It is very beautiful but it can also be a little bit too much, if the person doesn’t know how to handle it.

 I’ve gone there for many years, from a very young age. Family members were buried there for generations and I feel that my body will also lay beneath the many flowers of the prairie. It’s not a nice thought on my head, but it comforts me that, at the very least, my final resting place could be that beautiful place full of all many of the things that people in other places don’t really have anymore. Birds and flowers are considered wild nowadays and people don’t like that too much.

 There are no hills, no real elevations on that never-ending prairie. There’s just a road on one side and a road on the other. The rest is grass and flowers and birds’ songs. Nothing much besides that. I relax on the meadow but not on the prairie. The prairie makes me think too much sometimes, about my own mortality and about the many things I have yet to do in this life. It makes me feels I have little time, which is true, but I suddenly hear the clock ticking and it’s unbearable.

 When I go, I only stay for a couple of hours and then leave without a prayer or a word. I don’t talk to anyone there, even if a good part of my family’s bones has fed the flowers that live there. I don’t feel comfortable or happy there. But I don’t feel sad or persecuted. It’s just a very strange feeling of not being quite there somehow… I don’t understand it and I just go there when I feel I need to pay my respects, which happens when I take the road north in order to get home after several days of hard labor. I go because I have to, in a certain way, not because I want to.

 My final spot is not very far from home. I live in a beautiful mountain, which oversees the most amazing green valley you have ever seen. Only a small amount of farms break a beautiful natural landscape. The sound of the stream is the one that always tells me I’m only a few minutes away from seeing the faces of my family. When I pass the rushing waters, I can almost feel their skin on my hands, their perfume on my noise and their happy laughs on my ears. It really is home.

 When I’m there, I often take my family to the other side of the mountain. It’s a bit colder and rockier than the place we live in but somehow I really like it. It happens to be the border that separates our country, if one can call it that, from the rest of the world. Beyond the rocks, you can only see the tallest and greenest trees in existence. They make a kind of fabric that extends for several kilometers and then some more. Water can be heard but not seen and animals are the only ones populating it.

 There are no roads that cross it. No one really dares to go through the maze that is the forest. Some daring neighbors love to go there in the summer to pick up grapes, the wild kind, that grow on the outskirts. The yare very sweet and have a beautiful purple color and kind smell. However, wolves have been known to attack people that stay there for too long. It is not a place for humans to thrive. But it’s nice to look at all those leaves from above, while having a warm drink.

 I enjoy the view alone or with my family. We spread mother’s ashes there some three years ago and I still remember how the wind carried the dust the deepest parts of the forest. I stayed there, waiting for the cloud that was my mother to fall on top of the trees but the wind kept on carrying it away, farther and farther away from everything that woman had ever known. It made me think about her and about every single person I had ever met that was not in this world anymore.

 Those are my favorite places on this Earth. They are so different the one from the other but they do share the fact that I feel my people on them, I feel their hearts and minds and, certainly, they souls. They guide me still in this wretched world.


 I know I will become one of them someday. It might be today or tomorrow or in several years. But I know it will happen. In a very strange way, it calms me to know that they are going to be there, on the other side. And I will still be able to visit all my favorite spots.

miércoles, 19 de julio de 2017

Detective Klein

  The room was one chaotic scene. Not only there was paint all over the walls, but also two bodies were lying on the floor, faces down and covered with white blankets, that seemed really out of place for some reason. They weren’t a strange sight as that room had been the scene of a violent crime. The people from the police had been working there for a whole day now. As they ate something or had a smoke, two detectives had decided to enter the premises and begin the investigation formally.

 Of course, the stench of the massacre had not cleared the room yet. All the doors had been opened but not the windows, as a gust of wind could disturb the scene or bring in foreign components. They wanted everything to be as it had been for the week or so since the murders had occurred. It was a shame for the police to only now realize what had happened in that poor neighborhood, which so often appeared in the news being portrayed as some kind of doorway to the flames of hell.

 However, every comparison to the reign of Satan was very accurate at the moment. The scene was hellish and there was no surprise when Detective Keaton couldn’t hold his breakfast after looking at the room once. Klein, on the other side, was made of a stronger material. He had seen so many gruesome scenes like this one; it just didn’t do anything for him. He could even eat in front of an open body, a fact that had always shocked all of his peers, even the coroners.

 As Keaton was tended by some of the men that had been eating outside, Klein decided to put on some plastic slippers and just have a tour of the room. It was actually a one-bedroom apartment. On one end, there was the door he had entered through. On the opposite side, another door was open, revealing a very dirty shower. The bathroom appeared no to have been the most taken care of place in that building. In the main room, there was a bed on the corner and the bodies were lying next to it.

 The blood, as said before, was all over the place: on the bed, the walls, the bathroom floor, the alarm clock on the only table in the premises and also on the sole electric heater, which would have been used to cook food with the help of the only wall socket in the room. It was really a dreary scene. Klein bent his knees next to the bodies and lifted one of the white blankets. Beneath it, he saw what he had always hated to see in the job: the body of a young human being. It made him mad and hopeless. Next to it was a woman, possibly the mother. Both covered in blood.

 Keaton was on the door, covering his nose with a handkerchief. It was very like him to have such an item that only older people use at the time. He was younger than Klein but somehow he felt like a grandfather of sorts. He had apparently recuperated from watching the scene and was now trying to focus his attention on Klein. He told him that the coroner had sent for the bodies and that the ambulances would be there in a short time. Klein nodded but said nothing, still looking at the scene.

 They had been partners for quite a long time, so Keaton knew exactly which face meant what. Right then, it was clear to him that Klein was thinking hard about the facts of the incident and it was best not to interrupt him as he hated people to do that. It was him who stopped the silence and asked his companion if he had asked the people from the police department about all the details of the scene, every object they had found and anything related to the corpses, as well as the apartment.

 Keaton handed his partner a folder where it said, quite clearly, that the woman and the child were not the owners of the apartment. Furthermore, none of them had any type of contract with the owner to live there. At least, no official contract had been recorded. So the first visit they had to make was to the owner. They could have gone to some family member of the victims but heir names had not been found yet. No identity cards, no data at all. It was as if they had been forgotten by the world.

 Minutes later, they were hopping in the car, rushing through the streets towards a more quiet, peaceful suburb. It had a lot of similar houses, like in the movies. Getting to the house that they were looking for was very tricky as most of the streets ended on a roundabout, with four or five houses sitting around. They saw children laughing, people playing with their dogs and couples holding hands. It was always awkward to see that after witnessing the scene of a murder.

 Life suddenly seemed meaningless for some reason. If someone could eliminate people in that fashion, it was clear that humans have the awful capacity to exterminate themselves. And what policemen do is to defend some humans against the rest. People always say good always wins but it was sometimes difficult to believe such a claim when, several times a week, you see proof that mankind is just made out of slightly evolved animals. But animals anyway. Keaton and Klein finally found the house, walked to the door and rang.

 A little girl opened the door. Her face was covered in chocolate and she just laughed. The two men were petrified right on the spot by this action. They had been taken by surprise by the sheer happiness of a child who is innocent and has not had a way of knowing how the world really works. The mother came in running, also laughing for some reason. She asked for their business and they asked for her husband. She offered them entrance but they refused, preferring to stay by the door.

 The man was called several times until he descended the stairs. It was clearly a day off for him as he was wearing boxers and a t-shirt tainted with grease and few mustard stains. They asked if he was named Victor Gould and he said yes. They asked if he owned an apartment building in the city and he said yes. Apparently, it had belonged to his father for years but he had received the place as a gift when the man had died some years ago. He confesses soon he rarely visited the place.

 The detectives promptly explained the reason for their visit. The man was appalled by what he heard and his wife, who had been listening close by, ran to her children and tried to keep them busy, away from the awful conversation. The man told them he had no idea a family had been living in that apartment. He had a man to go and collect rent but he kept papers on the building, which he showed to the police. He had no way of knowing a mother and her child had been living there illegally.

 That’s when Keaton realized what was going on. They rushed to the morgue, on the basement of the police department. There, the coroner explained to them that there was indeed no way of telling who the victims were but he could tell them that they had suffered for days before actually dying. They had been starving for a while, maybe even up to a month. They had little inside of them when he checked the stomachs. He concluded the kid was dead when it had been stabbed. But not the mother.

 Someone knew they were there. Someone had let them in and was possibly blackmailing them, threatening to call the deportation office and get them sent back to wherever they had come from. That same someone possibly stabbed them for some crazy reason.


 When he entered his own tiny apartment that night, Klein went straight for the bottle of scotch he kept in the kitchen. Booze was the only thing that could help him sleep when the realization of how much a dump the world was came to his mind. It happened very often, judging by the number of empty bottles crammed in a box.

martes, 18 de octubre de 2016

About dreams

   This time, I really thought I was living my dream. Everything looked so real, the people and their concerns. They didn’t seem to be following whatever I wanted them to do; they actually seemed to be doing what they wanted. The places looked so authentic, real and well crafted. I have no idea how my brain created that place I was in just some minutes ago but I think I wouldn’t mind going back some day. The difficult thing is that I have to be really tired and not being able to sleep a lot in order to go so deep into my dreams.

 Waking up gets so much harder like that… I would love to be able to choose everything inside a dream. Not only who appears and how, but also the setting and the story and, of course, the length of it all. They are some delicious dreams that make you believe you are on top of the world and, often, they only last a few minutes or at least feel like it. I would love to be able to choose everything because dreams are the best doors to access when the eyes are getting closed and resting is the prime objective of the evening. I love when it happens.

 Thankfully, I haven’t had a bad dream in a very long time. I actually don’t remember when that happened and I think it’s better if I don’t try to recall that event. Nightmares are awful and populated by the most disgusting creatures our mind could ever control. Nightmares are chaotic and that feeling of not being able to get hold of anything is the one that really makes us wake up sweating or screaming. Is not what actually happens, which we know is false, but rather the sense that we are not safe anywhere, even inside our heads.

 But yeah, nightmares have been off the table for a while or at least the ones that are openly awful. I have had dreams that are strange and difficult to understand. Even there, in the middle of the dream, I know that nothing is real but at the same time I know that there’s nothing that makes sense and that makes it worse somehow. Knowing that you are dreaming makes everything a little bit more real, for the better or for worse. But I think I prefer it most of the time, it kind of gives me the idea that I am a little bit more in control.

 Right now, my body hurts a little bit but that’s because I didn’t slept a right amount of time. I push myself to do things no one is asking me to do and they have this negative effects on me. Feeling like crap when I wake up is nothing really knew for me but it’s even harder and more painful when I push too hard and when there’s a dream involved. I feel I slept during a movie and now I will never know the end because it was a one time in my life kind of thing.

 What I like about dreams is that, if your head is up to it, anything can happen. You might have one of those dreams in which you fall and fall and fall through a various array of holes but you could also meet someone you haven’t seen for many years. I think the brain creates whatever is better for us at that moment: if we need a hug, it will create someone that can give it to us. If we want to feel smart, our brain will go back to a moment we felt exceedingly brilliant. Of course, things can be a lot more complex than that. Just like in real life.

 I believe that in every single dream, you have the capacity to intervene and make it yours. Many people thing they are passive subjects when they dream, having to go through some determined events in order to get to the final part of the dream where you may have some kind of revelation or maybe just wake up thinking nothing at all. I do think you can use your mind to affect the outcome of any dream and I even think you can decide when it should end, all of this in the right sleeping conditions, as they are not all ideal.

 For me, dreams are the base of what I try to do. I have been creating things out of them for a long time and if it wasn’t for that subconscious part of my brain, I wouldn’t have as many ideas as I have. I’m not saying that they are all amazing ideas that have to go somewhere but I do like that my brain keeps creating, even if just changing a little bit of some ideas that I have had before or even twisting stories that I have read or heard about. I have to admit that I am probably not one hundred percent original at all times. It would be very hard.

 What I don’t like about waking up from a not satisfying night of sleeping is that, for the rest of the day, I feel like there’s something missing and I’m right. Because what I miss is rest and what I have is an unfulfilling dream and there is nothing in the world that can make that feeling go away. That feeling of being tired and not fulfilled by anything. In those cases, dreaming come too close to actual living and, I have to say, I don’t care about that one bit. If dreams become as heavy as life, then the magic is lifted and everything goes to dust.

 I already have a real life and, although it’s fun when dreams imitate life, I know how to tell apart the imitation from the actual thing. If they both become the same thing, a very essential way to cope disappears into the world. It’s scary to think that we might, one day, not be able to dream again. Some people actively try to eliminate that experience from the nights because they think it makes them feel weak, because it scares them. They don’t want to face themselves and they hide behind any possibility in order not to do it.

 I think it makes us very human, although it also makes us a little bit paranoid from time to time but I do not think that’s always something wrong. I think it’s great when there’s something in life that can shake us so much. And who better to do that than ourselves. We are the ones creating those dreams after all and we cannot be afraid of our own selves. It is simply ridiculous to hide away from who we really are, whoever that person might be. People have to stop living in fear and embrace whatever character may lurk in the darkness.

 Of course, the word “darkness” doesn’t mean that everything buried deep inside us has to be bad or anything. There can be very good things in the dark too but we will never find out if we don’t dare to take a look. And the perfect place to do it is in a dream, where nothing can really hurt us. We have to learn to be scared and to cry and even to scream. We have to accept that some parts of life are more difficult than others. We have to learn how to look at ourselves in the mirror, without any fear but with our eyes wide open.

 All of this sounds so weird, so insane. But anyone that has ever dreamed can easily understand what I’m saying. It is a world of wonder but also a place where we can learn so much about who we really are. We don’t find out about that going to the other end of the world but just hearing and watching what our brain is telling us, all those things buried below the surface of our own personalities. Everything that we area is there, waiting to be able to surface or at least the be represented in some capacity in the real world.

 We all have bad thing and good things. No one is saying that we are going to like every single thing about our personality that we find deep inside our subconscious. But we have to acknowledge its existence in order to be able to handle it correctly. If life gives us the possibility of learning more and maybe improve in some areas of our lives, I think the smart choice is to take that chance and exploit it as much as we can. Knowledge has never really been a curse, only for the ignorant and the ones that live in fear but not for the brave.


 And brave we shall be. Yes, even when we go to bed and close our eyes or when we open them and realize we are in a brand new day. No matter where we are sleeping or who is next to us. We have to be brave in order to accept who we are and dreams are made of us. Their fabric is our life and our thoughts, so we have to learn to embrace it in order to have a stable mind and heart. No one says dreaming is easy, it never is. But it’s the first step to greater things.

sábado, 13 de agosto de 2016

The secret of Moon Bay

   The massive ship entered the silent waters of the Moon Bay. The silent fishermen villages could be seen from it, waiting to be attacked and pillaged. The pirates aboard the ship were getting ready to do what they did best, drinking wine and recalling past victories. However, their captain was on the observation deck, contemplating the bay were he had been born all those years ago. It was his first time back and he was thinking about telling his men to stand down and retire to the open ocean.

 Captain Fox was renowned as one of the most vicious pirates in all the seven seas. But that night, he felt as a kid, unprotected and filled with emotion because of the place he was in. He had been taken from his home from a very young age and he had never known what it was to have a family. His crew was his family but he felt that wasn’t the same thing, especially when he had seen true family love in his past raids.

 When the men were ready, he was unable to say anything. Captain Fox authorized them to set the first town on fire and take all they wanted from it. There were only a few houses there, so not many people. Fox stayed on his ship as he saw his men rowing in the silent night, slowly taking the town by surprised. From his place, he was able to see the houses catch on fire, he heard the screams and he even felt something strange, a certain uneasy feeling that he had never felt before as a pirate.

 As expected, the men returned almost empty handed.  Village of fishermen was not an interesting target and Captain Fox was sure of it. He told his men that they needed to go back to the open ocean and then plan the raid of a real big city or at least of towns that had something more to offer than rotten fish. But his men argued that they were hungry and that they needed the fish to survive. None of them was smart enough to make a net and use it a way to get food.

 Without permission, the pirates attacked the second village. That one took longer to fully take over but they did. When they came back from the shore, Fox noticed they had brought someone with them. It was an elder, and old woman who was shaking and seemed to be on the edge of dying of how scared she was. Fox told his men to hold her in the empty cabin and not in the lower cells.

 His men obliged as they ate and celebrated the fact that they had a decent dinner for the first time in a month. The captain when to his room and tried to sleep but the noise his men made was difficult to ignore. Besides, he just couldn’t rest. There was something pressing his chest. Maybe it was being in Moon Bay again or maybe it was realizing he was becoming a very weak captain.

 He decided to join his men for a beer and some fish, seeing he wasn’t going to be sleeping for the next few hours. On his way to the staircase, he passed the cabin where the old woman was and the door there was wide open. He returned to see the woman sitting on the bed, in complete silence and darkness. However, he could feel something was wrong. Fox decided to enter the place and talk to her. Maybe she needed to know she wasn’t going to die there. When he was about to touch her shoulder, the woman looked at him with glowing red eyes.

 In some strange tongue, she said various words. She began saying them in a normal register but then she raised her voice and look upward, to the bridge. The captain then heard some noises above but he didn’t move because he wasn’t able to. He was very scared and wanted to do something, whether it was running away or stabbing the old woman with his sword. But he just couldn’t do any of those things. Something was preventing him from doing so.

 The woman had stopped speaking but her eyed were still very much red. After a moment, she spoke again, her voice amplified a thousand times. It was like receiving a massive wave on the face and being pushed a long distance by it. She told him he was a sun of the bay and that he shouldn’t have come back.

 That made Fox less scared somehow. How did she knew that he had been born there and why shouldn’t he be there? The woman then stood up from the bed and stretched out a hand towards him, as if she was going to grab something. And it felt like she did: the captain couldn’t properly breath, his eyes going blurry and his legs feeling very weak. It hurt a lot inside his chest and he still couldn’t move at all. It was torture, the worst kind.

 When she finally stopped, he was very dizzy. The old woman had driven him very close to the edge of death. She moved her hand again and then he was able to move but only to collapse on the floor like a bunch rocks. His breathing was heavy and he couldn’t talk but he knew he had been very close to the end. He looked at her and she looked at him. It was a strange connection that they maintained for a while.

 The witch told him Moon Bay was a haunted place. The villages there were nothing but illusions. All those things his men had done that night were scenes played out in their heads. There were no real villagers or fish or wine. It was all her, as she was the last surviving inhabitant of the area. No one else there lived and it was because someone else had been there before the pirates, setting everything on fire.

 She told Fox that it was that warrior, that creature made in hell itself, which had entered the bay in a similar night and had set on fire every single soul there except her. She was able to hold him for a while but he was too powerful to be stopped by an older woman. Her magic tricks were nothing against his darkness and villainy. However, he spared her life and made her stay there forever, attached to the waters of the bay, waiting for any adventurers trying to take what that devil had taken.

 Captain Fox was able to speak, even if his chest was aching too much. He wanted to know why that creature, if real, had left her there. Why her and for what purpose? The woman laughed like mad. She was surprised he didn’t realize she was a slave of the devil that had burned those waters. By magic, she was attached to the place and obliged to kill anyone who entered the bay. She had to offer their lives to his cause. That would make him stronger for his return.

 So he was going to come back and set the world on fire once and for all. She said it was not going to happen for another couple of hundreds of years but that his reign was unstoppable. There was no way to prevent it from happening. The captain asked the woman if she could be able to break free from the shackles she had been put in. Her expression went somber and turned away from him. The answer was obvious.

 The old woman changed the subject, telling the pirate that she had only let his men take her to the boat because she wanted to speak with him, as she had an idea to try and tilt everything in her favor, at least once. He didn’t understand. She explained that she knew his parents very well, the witch knew exactly who he was and remembered the day he had been taken away by a group of pirates. She told him about the tears they cried and how they did during the creature’s first raid.

 They had been very brave and had asked her, just as the monster neared, to cast a special spell making their boy immune to the powers of hell. After all that time since he had been gone, they still loved him and wanted to protect him against the outmost evil. She did so and that’s why she was onboard, to tell him he had a chance, a long shot at making the devil pay.


 Before he could ask anything of her, she said some more words and vanished, turning into thick black fog that disappeared in seconds. The captain ran to the bridge of his vessel to see if he could call her back but he was stopped as he saw the bodies of all his men. It had been her but only because It had ordered it. It was then when Fox realized he had to think his next step very well.