Ashes of a burning love

It was a traditional day, of stressful airports, lectures in geomatic English and low back pain from the heavy Toshiba that was denting right in the right shoulder. After a couple of hours of delayed flight I had tasted two coffees and a bar of chocolate. To waste time I had bought a special version of Live to tell-From García Márquez-, act by which the clerk gave me an interestingly designed separator on which I rehearsed my name, trying a marker that I finally didn't buy. Resigned to waiting, I had sat in a room where there seemed to be people who had nothing else to do.

When I heard the call to approach Terminal 27, I got up like a soldier and went immediately looking for a nearby chair. When I took out my book, which had devoured about 43 pages, I realized that the separator was missing, I remembered seeing it fall from my chair, so I hurriedly returned to look for it.

When I arrived I was familiar with the face of a lady who with her legs crossed and a strange green suitcase had settled on the chair. I could see the divider down below, I hurried over and politely asked him to allow me to pick something up under his chair. He shot me a quick, blank look and immediately bent his torso to do it on his own. He took the separator and looked at it for a few seconds, then he saw me with his right eyebrow and at that very moment my life froze like a charamusca.

For months I had dedicated my hidden gifts to writing commissioned letters to a couple of classmates from the first year, one from the second year and one from school, who for fifty cents hired 17 of my lines for girls who fell in love with my lyrics and fell in love with their names. Those were those years when I believed that my face, hidden behind a lousy side hairstyle and the pejorative of not being from the capital, would never allow me a positive response from a girl, less than the one that lit my eyes three chairs ahead of me. my row. Willing to never deliver her, he had written her a letter with the care of this same story, with words that I never put in the mercenary missives. He had folded it as the format said and very delicately had interwoven the initials of our names.

One day I decided to give it to him, the excuse was childish but it took me days to plan. In the morning I asked her to lend me the Social Studies notebook, in the middle she had placed the letter, right in the section that she had to study so as not to fall into the ridicule of the Elementary proficiency with his annoying 7 question in the morning.

"Your notebook," I said, shaking my hand as if I was getting into the boarding school an ounce of drug or half pornographic magazine.

She extended her hand and as she looked at me with a polite smile, we both witnessed the letter fall to the floor. I trembled like when the father of Cucaracho He found us stealing cane, I caught his eyes and I could see how his brow furrowed, then he bent down to pick up the missive and then his eyebrows extended, lengthened and frowned again while with his hand he closed the letter. Then her eyebrow sagged and she saw me as her delicate lips gave a smile of curiosity, bewilderment and magic.

It was the reason why I accurately recognized his expression when I picked up the separator, it immediately transported me kilometers in a single second almost 23 years later. He must have read my name -sure no one else is wearing-. He furrowed both eyebrows in the center, curled them, and looked up at me in a timing that only fate could have arranged. Her pretty eyebrows expanded in bewilderment, immediately her two eyes sparkled, trembled, and her delicate mouth made the same expression as that afternoon in class. Civic education.

I froze, I extended my hand like a zombie to ask for the separator and when his fingers touched mine an electric current went through my heart and my legs shook like vertical blinds. A lump got in my throat and half a tear formed at the end of my eye as I saw that face kept in sector 1 of my album for years. Her cheekbones were the same, with some makeup, eyelid shadows and salon blow drying that seemed not to be her custom but gave a slightly different touch to what the boarding school prohibited. But she was herself.

Then as we held hands, ignorant of the place, the suitcases, and noises from the loudspeakers, the time capsule opened. The six months of that year ran through my memories, after my little letter touched his heart and he decided to answer me words that left me a whole week with pain in my sternum. I longed for the class to come to see her come in, tidy with her skirt to pegs, flawless brown hair, so she would catch me with that look that would give me life all morning and death at night. Then I was looking forward to the afternoon session so that he would give me the notebook with the little letter that was going to end up in my pocket. The class lasted an eternity, impatiently he endured inert, to go read it seven leisurely times, with tears in his stomach and pain inside -very deep inside- Of bones. So I wanted it to be night so they could turn off the light. I closed my eyes and literally saw his face with a half smile, his eyebrows furrowed, sagging, smiling.

Time did not seem to pass, things had no sense of being, classes, people, just her and me. No one ever asked about the secret of the notebook that carried two outbound and two outbound letters each week, with phrases that he had never written on request and answers that until then I never imagined could come from his soul.

That's how that life was in boarding school, we loved with all our soul a face that we would never touch, eyes that we would never kiss, lips that we only kissed with luck. The few contacts stolen were in the class of the Teacher, when I let her use the chisel to ruin my wooden cart while I gave her a lesson that only had the objective of touching her hands, an act to which she responded with little squeezes on the tips of my fingers. Those were the most sublime moments of romance, she said -on the cards- that melted his soul while at 13 years old the sensation was so strong that it caused me slight ejaculations of lubricant and a desire to die inside from the euphoria of shouting his name on Saturn on a Monday morning. At this point I no longer feel sorry to confess it so crude, but in those pubertos years, of course, everything was a completely legitimate chaos.

But no one can imagine if the ashes of that can be transposed beyond the complications that we acquire and give meaning to this life.

That moment of illumination barely gave us time to cross a couple of words at the airport, it didn't seem necessary and we didn't even realize how long the finger grip lasted. Her delicate nails, without polish, squeezed my fingers again and the hug was intense. I kissed her neck near her earrings with the desire to cry, while smelling her perfume of roses in water, I could feel a pitiful moan when I told her the name -what was his name?- Right in the ear, while I felt her breasts pressing on my chest.

Then the loudspeaker announced my name, warning that the door was about to close. I felt angry and in an impulsive second I asked him his email, he wrote it down in the separator, I dictated mine but I understood his poor ability with the at sign when he could not interpret the word gmail.

"Do not worry, I have yours," I said, to which he replied insistently.
-Don't lose it, you should write it to me-

But there was no time, so I took the separator, I put it in the book and left with a short hug and the impact of his bite on my neck.

I got on the plane, eager for the race to lose it and the scare of the furtive encounter. I held the book against my chest as if it were part of my being, as if my life were there, while I was preparing to dream. A few seconds later the traveling companion started talking like a machine gun, he seemed to be a guy who couldn't stop talking. I did not want to lose that moment with a charlatan who told me about a thousand things in six paragraphs without indentation, so I took him to the topic of García Márquez. Right in my plans I seemed to have read each of his books, I preferred Litter,so I offered him my copy, which, as expected, he hadn't read yet.

I took the bookmark, put it in my pocket like I did with the little cards, then I closed my eyes… and I saw it again. There, where he sat on the other side of the court, under the window of the Prof. Raquel Ramos, with crossed legs and a lost look. I, from the other side, on the wooden bench, until our eyes were connected in a virtual thread that seemed to ignore the basketball game, the counselor's whistle, the parrots next door or the final score. I remembered that trip to The Relief, by the pool Azulera, when she wore a tight-fitting aqua green blouse ... her smile must have been the same but the unique and unforgettable impact. Then I remembered the trip to San Jose del Potrero, –More paddock than San José-. This time in the light blue uniform of the choir of Profe Nancy ... like angels.

-Esdras prepared his heart, to inquire into his law ...

they really did it like the angels.

His divine face finally caressed me, and with two sleepless nights he literally drove me on a walk in the clouds.

The departure from the airport was quick, the taxi took me to the hotel and at one point I was comfortably seated in a Louis XV style chair looking for the wireless connection. I put my hand in my pocket to look for the separator and couldn't find it. I put my hand in the other, I didn't find it either. A fear invaded my heart and I began to look in other places: in the book, in my wallet, in my shirt, in my passport… it was not there!

Slowly, one, another, and again I went through each brief in my luggage, as I discarded each piece, a pain in my chest began to grow. Then I took off each garment until I was naked, I felt like an idiot for the second time and as I unconsciously began to make spoons I came to the fateful conclusion.

-What Trash! - I screamed with my esophagus. While pulling my hair out, I pouted into the air and released other profanities unworthy of this blog.

That was a few years ago. I no longer know whether to recriminate my stubbornness, whether to question fate, assume that we are both complicated or doubt if it really happened.

I can only be grateful to her for allowing me to love her beyond dreams, more than once. It could not be more fleeting, but in both cases, with the sole reason to remind me that I exist.

Thanks, again.

Taken from there, almost with the same ink, for a few readers who know that there is not only OpenSource.