A very short story

The sun was not shining. There was no soft breeze that caressed a cheek and far from the birds singing, not a sound could be heard coming out of their mouths. They were dead.

Somewhere else, the sea seemed angry, infuriated by something inexplicable.

No human being walked through the streets. Some cats were meowing in the park, hopelessly searching for who knows what.

Paradise had disappeared.

The man rubbed his eyes. Very bad start for a story. How could he continue? First paragraphs were too hard. He exhaled deeply. He had to turn it in by the weekend, and he wasn’t even close to getting to what he really wanted to say. They had asked for something light, comical, and he was empty inside. All he could come up with were depressing themes. He shouldn’t listen to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen so much. But he wanted to trust his first instincts. You didn’t always have to follow other people’s rules when you had a really good idea.

How could he give it a light touch without throwing away his first inspiration? An Apocalypse that was only a dream? Corny. No, nothing occurred to him. This would have to wait, a foetus in the womb, until the right time. He started again.

Once upon a time there were a boy and a girl. Although they loved each other very much, they never found the time to get together forever.

Corny? He had to admit that he had never written anything so horrible in his life. It was useless. There was no way. The sad clown? The dog with five legs? Well, maybe he could make comedy out of that… No. Think. Return to the basics. The couple gets together, and then goes through several quasi-comical situations to finally reach a better understanding.

Enough already! And you call yourself a writer? Genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. Oscar Wilde. Be professional for the love of god. Sweat now.

He approached the window, stretching, trying to clear the cobwebs from his mind. And he saw something. Neither depressing nor comical. He was stunned. Amazed. Nothing mattered anymore. He returned to the desk, now actually sweating, breathing heavily, with a strange feeling in his gut. Taking one last look at what he had just witnessed, he crouched down and began to write. After two sentences, he stopped. He had a light in his eyes and even his own body shone with the reflected light. Getting up, he frantically searched for the record, the vinyl. It was under a pile of papers, and when he found it he kissed it like an old friend. Accompanied now by the main theme of The Mission, he knuckled down.

The glory, magic and triumph of music inspired him. It was like seeing sunlight after an eternal winter. He had always been certain that his life should be accompanied by a soundtrack and now in reality he was living that truth. He no longer cared about his editor.

The feeling that we experience only a few times in life, of wanting to cry, laugh, love and, above all, live, at the same time, is something that I thought I would never be able to relate. I just saw the light. Now I can tell of it. Never in my life have I felt so full of emotions, so small and so huge at the same moment, so human. I’m alone, but I have just felt like the king of creation. I have seen a sunset. I lie. I have experienced a sunset. As soon as I opened my eyes, I realized that I have spent my life blindfolded. Unreal colors, shadows and lights playing with each other. A breeze that did caress my cheek and silence, pure silence, as if all of nature was holding its breath. A perfect circle, an impossibly orange colour descending before my poor eyes. I have never felt so alive, even though the day was dying. Tomorrow I will get up as usual. The world will continue. That’s why I have to write it now. Everything disappears. But for the first time in my life, I know that this is the good, leaving room for the new, the unknown and of course, the best.

And my editor be damned.

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Episode Twenty-Five: Curious Words V to X