Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren't You and I

Albert Espinosa

Fragmento

Prólogo

PROLOGUE

«The Fascinating Boy»

our tigers drink milk

our falcons go on foot

our sharks drown in water

our wolves yawn in front of open cages

No, I didn’t write it, but every time I think of him this poem comes into my head and I feel happy and brave, I feel safe, comfortable and in peace. It makes me smile widely, the number 3 smile, one of my favorites that he knows so well. He has the gift of knowing how many faces you have, how many looks, breaths, gestures and smiles and the meaning of each one. Another of his gifts is being able to distribute humility, happiness, sincerity, love and life to the people who surround him and whom he loves. He always finds the right words for each moment and the faces to go with them. He is fascinating and surprising.

When I saw him for the first time, I didn’t know who he was, just that he moved at an advanced pace for a human being, that he was a teenager fascinated by life in the body of an older boy, who always expressed himself with 5 points, taking more time to explain and make himself understood to the other person in the 1st and 2nd points, then go directly to the 3rd, 4th and finally the 5th; accompanying that explanation with drawings and scribbles on the corners of pages, newspapers and napkins.

The first time you meet he will greet you with a handshake or a kiss on the cheek, although when that first meeting is over it will surely end with a huge bear hug.

I haven’t known him for long, but during this intense time we’ve shared—filled with work, laughter, magical moments and words, hugs, gifts and the occasional sob—I have gotten to know him better. To the point where just by hearing each other’s voice on the telephone we know what is going on with the other; it is the beginning of a long and immortal friendship. One day, swimming underwater through this vast sea that is life, I opened an oyster and found this fascinating, brilliant and multicolored pearl called Albert Espinosa.

Albert has managed to write a novel filled with magic and love where people’s lives have no limits for being with the person they want to be with. A world of fascinating people able to stop dreaming but never to stop loving: Everything You and I Could Have Been If We Weren’t You and I.

According to him, life is turning doorknobs; I only hope, throughout my life, to find myself in front of many doors that transport me to new places, paths and experiences. I know that every time I’m in front of each of those doors, I will have a trusted friend to take my hand and go through it with me, and if at some point he can’t come with me I will ask him for advice. Don’t ever let go of my hand, Albert.


ROGER BERRUEZO, your first stranger

Actor

1. Ciervos con cabeza de águila

1

DEER WITH EAGLE HEADS

I like sleeping, it’s probably what I like best in this life. And maybe I like it so much because it’s so hard for me to fall asleep.

I’m not one of those people that conks out as soon as they get into bed. I can’t sleep in a car, or in an airport chair, not even lying out on the beach half-drunk.

But after the news I’d received a few days earlier, I really needed some sleep. Ever since I was a kid I’ve thought sleeping distanced you from the world, made you immune to its attacks. People can only harm the awake, the ones with their eyes open. When we disappear into dreams, we are safe.

But I have a hard time falling asleep. I have to confess that I’ve always needed to sleep in a bed, and it has to be my bed. That’s why I’ve always admired those people who are deeply asleep two seconds after putting their head down on any surface. I admire them and I envy them… Is it even possible to admire something you don’t envy? Or envy something you don’t admire?

I always need my bed, I think that’s a good definition of me, well, maybe of my sleeping habits. I’d even go so far as to say that your bed, wait, I mean your pillow, is the most important element in a person’s life.

Sometimes I’ve asked myself that ridiculous question: What would you take with you to a desert island? And I always think: my pillow. Even though, I don’t know why, I always end up saying: a good book and an excellent wine, using those two adjectives that have lost almost all meaning.

And the truth is that you take years in making a pillow yours; hundreds of nights to give it its special shape that is so enticing to you and lulls you off to sleep.

In the end, you know how to fold the pillow to get the perfect night’s sleep, how to turn it so that it doesn’t get hotter than your perfect temperature. You even know how it smells after a good night. If only we could know the people we love so well, the ones who sleep beside us.

I have to tell you, I don’t believe in love, I’m going to lay it out there, so that there’s no doubt whatsoever. I don’t believe in falling in love, I don’t believe in dying for love, I don’t believe in sighing over someone, or in not eating for some special person.

But what I have always believed is that pillows hold a part of your nightmares inside them, part of your problems and your dreams. And that’s why we put those cases on them: so we won’t have to look at those traces of our lives. Nobody likes seeing themselves reflected in an object. Our cars, our cell phones, our clothes, they all say so much about us.

I think I’d been sleeping for four hours that night when they knocked on the door. I almost never leave on any “open sound” while I’m sleeping.

There are many sounds open in our lives when we disappear into dreams: the telephone, the cell phone, the intercom, the alarm clock, the dripping faucets, computers… They are sounds that never rest, that are always alert. And either you turn them off or they invade your sleep.

I don’t know why I left the intercom on that Sunday. Well, I do know why, because I knew a package would arrive that would change my life. And I’ve never been a patient person.

Ever since I was a kid, if I knew that something good was going to happen the next day, I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I’d leave the blinds all the way up so that the dawn would smack me in the face and the new day would arrive so quickly that my dream would be as short as a commerci

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