The Best Thing About Leaving is Coming Back

Albert Espinosa
Albert Espinosa

Fragmento

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When I used to read Josep Pla, he struck me as someone anchored in a time that no longer existed, but nowadays I understand him perfectly. When the world modernizes and advances at an incomprehensible speed, all you have left are your long-lost habits. If you hold onto them, you’re more modern than any innovator.

Innovation always ends up being totally redundant; it has nowhere to go because it is doomed to be swapped out by the following generation.

Everything I write in this book has to do with my life and my life alone, but I have the feeling it won’t be that different from yours.

Every life has those sixteen dusks when everything changes, and then there are five hundred or two thousand dawns that appear after each key day so that you may learn to accept that change. The universe is very generous so that you can get over any pain or loss.

We all have sixteen days when everything spins. All we have to get us through them is our intelligence. And incredible as it sounds, it’s often harder to get over the good things that come to you than the bad things that bowl you over.

The last key day, the seventeenth, is the end, your death. It doesn’t need you to accept your loss yourself; instead it becomes one of those sixteen key days for the people who love you and have accompanied you throughout your life.

And it’s hard to claim possession to that seventeenth day. It’s so easy to pull away from those we’ve loved for a whole lifetime. We lose so many without any clear reason…

My name is Rosana. There was a time when that was modern. Now, a hundred years later, for many young people it’s a typical older person’s name. Just like Asunción or Pepita. But what do they know, the ones who have only lived three or four key days?

I don’t care if this generation doesn’t understand me. With the years, I’ve learned that growing is accepting what you’ve lost. Growing is also accepting that, in this life, you won’t get everything you want.

Growing is synonymous with resignation. Even if we don’t say so publicly, at the end of our lives, we’ve all resigned ourselves many times for our own good.

And normally, after the seventh decisive day, you get indignant and you stop resigning. This instant arrives when you’re around fifty-two years old and coincides with the death of someone close to you. Their death changes you radically. But that shock doesn’t last long, you grow again, and you resign yourself again.

And I am so certain and I give such concrete information because all lives are similar. We all have our limitations. We also all have wars that we lose and towels that we throw in at one moment or another because we were conscious of what we were lacking.

In the end, you accept that you can’t hack this or that, or that someone was out of your reach. We are our limitations. If we didn’t have them, we’d be someone else.

And I too am my limitations. I was born on April 23 in 1971. I never expected I would make it to one hundred. And here I am, on April 23, 2071, waiting for artificial karma.

A hundred damned years on this planet. No one told me to live with a number, or with two, let alone with three. Everything important you’ve got to learn on your own. You’re always alone with the big decisions in life. Trusting your own judgment is the only valid advice I would dare to give.

You never imagine you’ll get old. No one visualizes themselves with an old person’s face. It catches you off guard, from one day to the next, when you see your face in the mirror.

Now I am an old woman. People call me Miss. I’d like there to be something transitional, an intermediate way of talking to someone between “Hey, you!” and “Excuse me, Miss,” something subtle but respectable, a way to tell the ages apart.

I have to tell you all that this world I inhabit is very different from the world I was born into, in 1971. My father died at seventy-nine years of age and my mother at ninety-two. I made it beyond their frontiers, and that means bearing many losses and transforming my notion of time. Now my days are shorter and my nights fraught. Sleep means thinking I won’t wake up tomorrow.

But today, at last, I have reached the age of artificial karma. Yes, turning a hundred is known as reaching “the age of artificial karma.” Others call it the “payback age.” And the reason is that the state decides to show you a bit of deference.

Old people have been very important since the great war. The Unexpected War, as everyone calls it. Too many people died in that madness and getting old became something worth valuing.

No, I don’t want to talk about it. There’s already been too much arguing about the causes that led to it and why all the countries decided to jump in, turning a small commercial war between neighboring countries into a new world war.

This book isn’t about the Unexpected War or about how a single country now rules over all of us; it is about a small life, absurd and rather long, that is now receiving its recompense.

I would never have dreamt of living this long and having so much past behind me. The past is what makes us what we are.

The first memory anchored in my mind is the time my family traveled to Paris when I was five. That first memory is the beginning of my past. Whenever I want, I can go back there and anchor myself in that first innocent image, together with my parents, who will never return. Pure happiness.

The last memory that took root in my mind is of something that occurred this morning, when I got the news that I had lost a friend. Well, she wasn’t one anymore, but a friendship, if it really mattered, always lasts inside you. Knowing I have to go to the funeral home hurts.

But really, it’s when we’re free of memories that we’re truly free and happy. I’ve always thought if you don’t have memories, you’re happy. Memories are a burden, worries start to appear when you have a past and you can compare your experiences with others. You aspire to something, you think one or another thing will happen, and that’s when the problems start.

Little children don’t have a past to compare, and barely any experiences, and that’s why they smile from ear to

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