An Escape To The Night

At five a.m. in the morning I woke up. It was a nice morning with all the warmth and sunlight coming through the window. I packed my things in two bags and took the money I got when selling the house and the car. I helped my little daughter to get dressed; it was going to be a hard and long road to go to another country, to leave that nation which nothing was left to us in it. After my younger brother, who I raised with my own hands and treated him like my own son, was murdered for no known reason; and after my beloved wife died from cancer, nothing has left for us now.

As soon as I prepared myself a car came to pick us up. It took us to the place where we were supposed to wait and meet the Man. The Man is the one who was going to help us run away. He is like the angel of death, who will take our souls and leave our bodies behind, left on the ground with no dignity. During these moments, these long moments, I was standing still on my feet, not moving, thinking of the future; like a straw trying to defeat the strong wind and stand still. It was like being standing in the court in front all of the judges and the jury, being accused for big and unknown crime. I looked at my little daughter. She was holding the little doll her mother gave her with both of her hands; as if she had no one to hold and get warm from on their lap. Like a white paper has no lines or words, just flying in the air alone. It was cold, and I felt the need to hold my other hand and rub them together in the hope of feeling warmer. But my daughter didn’t let me finish my job of rubbing these two hands, she held one of my hands, and I felt she was cold too. After a long wait, which passed like years of wars and despair, the Man came and took us to the boat. The boat was red and relatively small, it seemed as if we were going to paddle in the water, just doing some good sport. Other people came along with us, who were also trying to run away, who also lost some valuable item in this place, and had nothing left. Most of them had kids, young kids just like my daughter, Sarah, and even younger, as if they just came to life yesterday. It seemed as if life just wanted more people to get accused of this unknown crime, that hunger and greediness of life of adding more souls that have done nothing into the circle of tragedy.

We got on the boat, and we started leaving. I gave a last look to my homeland, the land that I grew up at and made a life there, a life that won’t be forgotten. In that look I said goodbye, goodbye to my brother, which I don’t even know where is he buried at, but at least he got buried somewhere. And goodbye to my wife, who lies with her beauty 6 feet under the ground. They both died taking my soul with them. I turned my head to the left and I just kept staring at Sarah. I remembered that I put some cookies in her little pink backpack. I opened it and took out some, I gave some of it to Sarah. While eating the cookies a million ideas came to my head, striking my brain like lightning on a rainy day. I asked myself “Does this cookie have any fault to be eaten like that? What is it?” A delusional crime, I ate it while staring at it getting less and less, staring like a homeless in the street looking for food. I was eating it carefully, afraid of everything that was around me, even the cookie. Afraid that it might starts screaming, just as the babies around us on the boat. They were crying to minimize the nothing crime, where this didn’t work at all. During this time, night came along shouting to prepare ourselves for what’s next. The unknown next.

I didn’t care for this at all as much as I cared for the picture that stuck in my head; the picture of a child that got dropped in the water by a wave bump, running away from her mother’s hands, accelerating toward the bottom with no desire to life. The baby drowned deeply as a heavy rock that was thrown from the top of a hill. That baby was the first victim for the crime of nothing. As soon as she drowned, I could feel the rope of death orbiting around the boat, just as a hungry shark who waits patiently for his lunch. That picture is still between my memory cells, killing my nerves and executing them, one by one. I have become a body with no soul, a body with beats but no heart or soul.

We have arrived after this long, desperate journey. I got down from the boat with my daughter Sarah, to live our miserable lives in a new misery. And there, while I was staring at the beautiful sky, breathing the fresh air, with a cigarette between my lips, I hit the windshield and I said to myself: “I regret not getting a ticket for Mars, probably there is a better life than the hell on Earth.”