It Only Takes A Moment For Everything To Change

It is a normal day, calm in the midst of people who walk in opposite directions, oblivious to the instant that will come and that will change everything. We have returned to Barcelona before. Next week the holidays are over and a new year begins. That so individual, which for many begins in September.

I try to walk slowly, so as not to wake her up. He does not like the heat that at that moment and at that time the Sun still imposes from the sky. Luckily there are shadows. They all seem to follow them, looking for a truce. The bracelet is too big for me and dances on my wrist. I remember the last walk on the beach: the sand burned, the air not so much.

All faces have a message written on them: perhaps having left home too soon, or from the hotel, the boarding house or the apartment. From the house of some friends. Around me the whole world seems represented. A world distracted by the shop windows, in the flowers or on the terraces that are solicitous to be an inn, at least for a few minutes, of a conversation in any language.

That street that seems to unite Spain with Europe, but also with America and the enigmatic East. For Hemingway, the most beautiful line that his eyes contemplated, with or without shadows. And while love walks hand in hand, held together in very different ways, a cry breaks the calm, like the lightning that precedes any storm …

In an instant, terror drives away the tranquility

A van drives where it shouldn’t. Very fast, cut off lives, causing pain and leaving bodies lying on the ground that will never walk on any continent again. In an instant what is reflected on all faces is bewilderment, then panic. I run and the girl wakes up, and cries, and screams, because like the others she does not know what is happening, what has awakened her from her dream. In the air he breathes neither sea nor salt, but blood and fear.

In an instant, everything has changed …

I run, tightly grasping the cart, as if there were no tomorrow – “who knows if there will be?”, A truth that has seldom given me chills, ignored, with my heartbeat shooting and my heart sinking. I just want to get out of there. Suddenly something hits me and I fall, a thud, the cart keeps fleeing and gets lost as my eyes close. In my head the distant echo of the last desperate cries sounds. Love has fallen to the ground because no one is holding it by the hand anymore, and it has been broken into a thousand pieces.

All roses, in an instant, turn black …

I notice how they turn me around and how a thud runs through my entire body. I have a hard time thinking. I try to order my eyes to open, but they won’t obey me. I ask you and then I implore you, I want you to allow me to rescue that hope that has escaped from my hands in the midst of horror.

The noise of the sirens pierces my temples like daggers, the pain ceases to be that of a nightmare and becomes real even for the most incredulous. Someone tries to drag me with difficulty, but cannot. It leaves me on the ground, now there are two people who are trying. One has small, soft hands, the other’s seem to have traveled the world lifting anchors.

I try to say Amaia, as if invoking a spell, to make her come back. I sense that they have reached a safe place, because they are no longer moving me and someone gently takes me by the wrist. They take my pulse, barely perceptible, despite the tension around me. Someone talks to him, they try to wake me up. They hit me in shame in the face and repeat my name.

A moment to see again, a lifetime to explain

I also want to see again because somewhere outside there is something that is more important than me. It is something that happens to you the day you are a mother. That day you feel that you will never be the first again, in addition to releasing fears. A long list, terrifying if you think about it in detail. But I did not imagine this, that I could be the one who was in that place surrounded by tapes and police in which a tragedy had just been chewed. That in an instant I could lose so much …

I open my eyes and the pain intensifies. It is the arm, but also the hip, the back and the right leg. I try to catch my breath and then yes, I say Amaia, it is my answer, the only one I have at the moment for my name. Right now I don’t remember, I’m just looking for the sky blue with white polka dots. I have always hated the cart that now longs to find. I close my eyes and pull myself together. In the background I see it. I point to it and someone runs and brings it closer: one of the wheels has broken and it does it with difficulty.

Amaia. I gave it that name because in it I saw the same freshness and the same life as in a Basque landscape. Green, intense, rainy and mysterious. I do not listen, I only search with my eyes, any noise seems far away. They release my hand and push against the ground. The same blood that fills my throat makes my efforts slip.

I want to lean out and then he hears her scream. That scream throws a question at me, how am I going to explain to her when she grows up what has happened, how am I going to tell her that someone tried to kill her before she could make her first mistake or utter a word.

However, first she would have to understand it, that she had committed many … and that at that moment they all seemed too small for what she could have lost in a blink of her eyes, that now they could close in peace.

Amaia …