Sitting on the most battered or the most comfortable seat, what matters to me is to be beside a window of a bus or a train, one of the places I like the most.
I sit down, I take a look at who is around, sometimes a smile to those who are sitting next to me and when the driver turns on the engine and the journey with its miles begin the show starts.
The world flows fascinatingly out of the glass and observing it is a marvel.
The architectures, the green landscapes and the desolate ones, the people and their clothes and their frenetic coming and going, the sometimes really bizarre means of transport and all that they stack on, the streets that lead to who knows where, the construction sites and the masked people (to protect themselves from the sun and dust) that works to build entire cities from scratch, absurd overtaking in blind corners and accidents avoided by granting of one the deities they believe in, shops that sell and repair everything, the few centimeters that divide the wheel of the bus from the precipice on a dirt Himalayan road, the old ladies carrying in their backs the products of their crops and handicrafts from their villages to the local market, the students in uniform who leave school, smiling, on their bikes in the dusty streets. Businessmen coming out of their gigantic luxurious cars entering the restaurants for a business meeting, super serious, the children running on the sidewalk … barefoot and happy.
I wear earphones and start to listen to some music: an album I was listening to when I was living with a girl with burning eyes.
The present, outside the window, begins to mix with the past of the memories.
I see her smile, the light in the room, what she was telling me. The television was on and in the apartment it was hot, suddenly the noise of the fan was the only sound that I felt, as in the distance, as slowed. I still remember the color of the sky at that moment, I remember the warmth of your hand in mine, I remember the sound of your breath next to mine, the moment is frozen staring into the infinity of your eyes.
We never promised anything, we never said who we were.
I remember the day I roughly pushed my few things into the backpack and left, greeting you like a stranger.
The smoke of a lady’s banquet who is cooking sweet potatoes on the street surrounds the customers who are waiting to eat the freshly prepared delight.
One of the things that enchant me the most is to look at the eyes of the people in the streets, sitting on a step or leaning against a wall, as locked in their thoughts that transport them and me to distant images. There is something really profound in those moments.
The reflections of the sky in the puddles of a just finished downpour are canceled by the wheel of a passing bicycle.
The streets that pass, the skies and the seas with their colors full of shades, people everywhere and you’re gone.
