Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta people. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta people. Mostrar todas las entradas

miércoles, 27 de septiembre de 2017

Words from within

   I have found myself without words, without a real need to speak out, to talk to anyone. I find every person to be utterly dull, to be devoid of anything really interesting to say, of anything that means something to me. Granted, it is my fault and my perception. I cannot explain why it happens and exactly how, but I realize it is something that is part of me and I cannot shake it off and continue my path through this world. Is not as simple as many people things. Demons are stronger, always.

 That does not mean they win every single time. It means the battles are always hard, filled with blood and sweat. And you will lose some of them, hopefully the ones that don’t really matter. If you lose, you learn. And that’s always good but not really. Because when you learn you have to have a good brain inside your skull. If you don’t, well, learning all you want won’t change a thing. You will always have a narrow-minded view of the world and that may not be the best in your life.

 I have learned a lot of things, I believe, both useful and useless. I know the names of all countries in the world and their capital cities but I have no idea how to use numbers beyond the most essential calculations. I know some things, here and there, about some of the world’s personalities, about animals and things all over the cosmos. But I have no idea what love is or what responsibility means for most of the people. I don’t even know if I want to know, but it’s clearly frowned upon.

 Not talking in a world that yells at you every single second of the day could even be dangerous. How to counter all of that crap that enters your ears and body? By talking, by having opinions and thinking. I do all that except the talking because I have found myself noticing there’s no one there to actually listen. And talking is only worth something when someone is listening and maybe they change their views on a subject because of what you said. That’s not happening to me.

 Granted, I’m not saying every single thing I say is worth something, anything for that matter. But I have realized that, as humans, we do need to be listened and for people to care, in any way possible. We need to feel we matter, that the world would be different if we suddenly disappeared. Sadly enough, the world wouldn’t really change if I died now, only a small fraction of it and only for a small amount of time. That’s not drama but a reality and the truth is not always something we want to listen to. But truth does not care about us, only about what is.

 Yet, I may be too much of a drama queen. Maybe every single thing that I’m thinking and writing right now is just in my mind. Maybe I’m worth much more than I feel to, maybe the world would change if I died right this moment. But something in me does not think so. Something inside of me, in my heart or brain or lungs, is trying to tell me that I’m hollow and that I simply don’t matter. Because another truth is that we don’t all matter and we’re just too afraid to realize that.

 So many billions of humans have lived, many more are alive right now and others are being born right now and in the future. Of all that cluster of human souls, only some of them really matter in some way. Maybe they discovered something or they made feel people good. It is possible they fought wars or their love, branded by words, transcended the borders of speech and time and truth. But those people are such a small group in such a vast amount of people. Just people.

 Yes, we all matter to someone, in a way. We all have parents and sisters and brothers and more family. Many have daughters and sons, lovers and pets. There’s always someone that remembers you. However, that may not be enough to some of us, especially when life has decided to make your life different, to make you the one to go through a path that not many people travel. And you don’t feel honored at all because it pisses you off how you feel like a gamble.

 I don’t speak that much because I hate my life. I don’t hate the people in it, because they have done their best. That’s another truth. But I do fucking hate that I have learned so much and really know so little. I hate that this world doesn’t seem to have a place for me. Each second that passes the air around me seems to be getting thinner and thinner. In some ways, I feel like an astronaut that has started drifting away from the spaceship and only has a limit amount of time left.

 I hear the clock ticking and ticking, passing too fast. Because people think there’s torture when time goes slow but that’s not the real nightmare. It is much worse when hours and minutes and days and years pass in the blink of an eye and you feel you’re still in the exact same place, as everyone else moved around and achieved so much. And you, me in this case, are drifting away more and more. Alarms make sounds all around you but there’s nothing really you can do besides waiting. You try to reach, to live, but life doesn’t really want you anymore.

 That’s how it feels. It feels as if you’re drowning slowly and no one should live through that. Not physically or figuratively. We don’t deserve to be killed in the slowest of fashions, as the world looks at us and judges us for not being brave enough to do things that we have no idea how to do. This world is wild, is a rabid animal that has to be tamed. It’s just a savage beast that wants more and more and more and we cannot all comply with its wishes. Maybe we’re too weak.

 That’s a factor, I guess. We might be too weak for this life or, at least, for the way we handle ourselves and everything around us. I find myself to weak write anything more right now. Every single thing takes a toll on our heads and it’s just too difficult to try to handle everything at the same time. It’s too hard and we’re not the same people that before, year ago. Those rugged men and women are not here anymore, maybe in some places thought. Most of us surrendered to our feelings.

 I just wanted you to think a little bit about the state of your mind, about how you really feel and how you live. Reality is a bitch but it’s the one we have to live in for the time we remain on this planet.


 If you can, help someone else live through this. If you can, help me.

viernes, 11 de agosto de 2017

Too late

   Rain would fall for hours and hours. It seemed it would never end. The storm had been lashing out against the land for many days now and only from time to time it would feel like it stopped being so harsh. But then it seemed to restart again, twice as strong, relentless against anything living in the land. Even the oceans and lakes were in turmoil. Everything was upside down and people had begun to suffer serious shortages and problems, mostly related to food and general supplies.

 What families did was to ration food and try to consume as little as they could. They hardest hit groups were the ones where grandparents and small children shared a household. No one had the capacity to feed such a large amount of people and it wasn’t unheard of that so many people lived under one roof in that region. After all, it was very far away any big cities and that was the way people had lived for generations. Rain had never changed that before and this storm was no exception.

 So they had to make what they could with what they had, which wasn’t a lot but they made it last as long as they could. Fish, chicken and beef were kept like treasures and mostly vegetables were eaten because people could still try to recover some of those from beneath the mud. Some were pretty resistant like celery or carrots. So they consumed that first with maybe a little piece of actual animal fat every day. Pieces were slightly larger for children but that was not enough.

 Many children lived in those mountains and they were seriously affected by the rain. The poor quality of water to make their food and the amount of nutrients from what their parents could give them was simply not enough for them to be correctly nourished. After the first week, many children started feeling bad and many parents did the trip beneath the rain towards the small town nearby, where the only doctor in the region lived. He always had bad news for the concerned parents.

 They had malnourishing problems, very serious cases of infections and lack of proper hygiene because of the water being contaminated by damages to water pipes and so on. Many children died instantly, the others filled the few rooms the doctor had available on his small practice. He asked for help from other parts of the country but the roads were under water or severely damaged and no trains or planes could reach the remote location. They had been driven out of the world by the storm and had been let to die or starve for who know how long.

 When the elders started feeling as bad or worse than the young, people were in a general state of panic. It didn’t felt real that it was happening all at once. Some thought of the storm as a punishment from the Gods but others thought it was simply the chaotic weather changes happening all over the world. They might have not been the most well connected people in the world but many had television sets and they knew very well about climate change and what it had done in other parts of the world.

 After three weeks, an emergency team was able to reach them through the forest and then taking a very long path that made them penetrate a nature preserve. It was the only way to reach the small town and that was only because they studied several maps of the region in order to find that hidden way in. When they reached the only settlement in the mountains, they were able to tell people that a couple of helicopters had been sent before they left for their mission, but they had never called back.

 People were only shocked to hear this but only for a few minutes, because their families were suffering and it was too much to start caring for others at the moment. They needed the help the group brought them and that was the only way they could think of to change the state of things. So the volunteers, a group of fifteen men and women, got installed at the doctor’s house and started helping with vaccines and other treatments they had brought on big crates that had been carried by mules and themselves.

 Sadly, all they did was not enough to really ensure that everything was going to be fine. The rain wouldn’t stop and sick people from the most remote areas of the mountain range would come in at all time, very wet and sicker than they had left. It was a really sad thing to see for the volunteers and it was difficult for them not to be sick as well just by looking at all the despair and the human condition that was in display on that small community. It was hard and a test to their abilities.

 After a couple of days, it was decided that most of the group would go back to civilization. Only five people would remain with the doctor, in order to help with all the patients arriving and leaving every day. Besides, the townspeople needed hands to bury the people that had died and they also needed appropriate bags to do that because contamination of the water had to be avoided at all costs. The group also had to bring more people and medicines, a whole lot more than before. They left early one morning and expect to reach their destination in two days.

 And they did. However, they also encountered the crash site of one of the helicopters. The scene was gruesome and some of the helpers had to vomit right besides the wreckage because of the stench and the sight of things. They had to mark the place on a map, on their electronic devices, in order to go back there in future in order to collect the corpses and any valuables that could shed a light on the cause of the accident. But thunders above them reminded the group that the storm was the culprit, no matter the details.

 Meanwhile, in town, another tragedy happened at night and there had been no way to escape it: the mountain itself collapsed and carried several homes from almost the summit to the foot of the hill were the most densely populated part of the region was located. So bad it was, that the patients at the doctor’s house felt the rumble in the middle of the night and they alerted others in order to evacuate. But that didn’t happen because there was no other place to go besides there.

 The volunteers that had been left there had the very difficult task to find survivors. However, they soon realized that was not going to happen. They started finding bodies, after some of the mud and dirt had been washed away by the rain. It was gruesome to see their faces covered in brown or grey and their expressions of fear forever imprinted on their faces. That had been their last thing to do and it looked horrible. The volunteers, however, did what they had to do.

 People from town helped with blankets and also tablecloths and the dead were covered with those and then lined up in front of the doctor’s office. Then, one body at a time, they were carried to a clearing in the woods where the ground was firm. They had to spend several hours digging for a hole, but they did so anyways, in order to provide a dignified place to rest for the many people that had died at night, never expect nature would turn against them after so many years living there.

 It took one more week for more help to arrive. The condition of the trail they had used had decreased and the amount of things they brought was not easy to transport. Besides, many people on the outside world wanted to help, to do something for those poor souls.


 The storm ended two weeks after than, suddenly one afternoon. Clouds slowly floated away and the sun came back. But the lives of that community had changed forever. Death had covered them with its veil and now they couldn’t see a proper future in what had been their home for such a long time.

viernes, 28 de julio de 2017

Mirrors

   He took off the condom carelessly, threw it on the bin and look at himself in the mirror. For years, he had known he was a very attractive man. Men and women always made comments about how good he looked and how educated and well dressed he always was in parties, even if they weren’t the kind of parties to dress up to. His hair had always been shiny, his teeth white and his muscles very well toned and defined. He didn’t really have much to complain on the front.

 However, as he saw closed the door to pee in privacy, he looked at himself again on the mirror but saw someone else. He was suddenly looking at a short kid, kind of chubby and with a serious acne problem, which was odd because he seemed too young to be having acne problems. That was him when he was about ten years old, maybe a little younger or a little older. Maybe it wasn’t really him but the image he had of himself after so many years of looking at himself in mirrors.

 The man looked on, even after being done in the toilet. He looked at himself naked and saw beyond what people saw every single day. They loved his ripped abdomen but then he recalled he had worked for that body, day and night, paying month after month of a gym membership his parents had bought him to help his poor self-esteem. They had taken the advice of a teacher and the boy just ran with it, going every single day for a couple of hours. He was thirteen back then.

 Outside the bathroom, shuffling could be heard. He was back in the real world, a place he hated to be in but had to love in, like everyone else. Looking at mirrors had always been a way for him to be at ease, because that way he could see beyond everything. His goals were always clearer when he looked at himself on a mirror. It didn’t matter if it was the elevator of an old building or the wet toilet of a very rundown cruising bar; he felt mirror gave him a door, a way to escape.

 Sadly, there was no one to talk about what he felt. People always seem to now what he wanted and how he was going to get it. It was because he was better looking and a success romantically. They only knew the cover story but they were fascinated by that man that paid a great apartment, a car and many other things, only by modeling in underwear for several companies. And to be fair, he was very successful that way. But not enough. There were always younger, hotter models to be in advertisements of any kind, and they didn’t mind doing whatever the job needed them to do.

 That was how he started performing sexual favors in order to get money. However, at first he only did it to gain the contracts he needed so badly to keep having a stable income. But then, as he gained popularity, he started to do to win more money, to keep his lifestyle alive. It was impossible to live properly by only putting on a speedo. He needed to do more than that and he did. He took off every single piece of clothing and became an escort for the rich and wealthy who visited the city.

 He let water flow on the sink and looked at the water for a while. He put his hands under it for a bit and then used the humidity to comb his hair. It was a calming motion, to pull his hair back and forth, to get it just right on his head. It made his head quieter, better for thinking about what he was doing to do next. But the conclusion he reached was always the same: he needed the money, so he would keep going out with those rich men until he had enough saved to stop having sex with them.

 However, saving was not something he did, not as often as he wanted at least. Most of the money came and went, spent mostly on clothing, skincare, his gym membership and the payment of his debts, of which he mad many. All of that wasn’t cheap at all and only a very small amount of money was spared every month. That tiny amount went to his savings account but it almost didn’t grow at all. The last time he checked, he wasn’t close to live a really freed life. Not by a long shot.

 There was a knock on the door and then a deep voice. The man outside told him that he needed to get going, so he wanted to know if the younger man needed a ride. He answered “No”, bluntly. The man answered back with: “I had a great time. You can stay the rest of the night of you want”. When he heard the door of the bedroom closing, the young man stepped outside and noticed his client had left everything in a very neat order, except the bed sheets, which were a mess.

 He let himself fall on the bed and lay there naked for five minutes or so. It almost never happened that his clients just left. They normally wanted to talk or play some creepy old fantasy that they had. Even after the sex was done, they still wanted the charade to go on for as long as they wanted. They thought that time is money and when paying a room in a luxury hotel for a whole night, they wanted to get their money’s worth. The same was applied to him. He was no better than something like a room, a thing. He was very well aware of that analogy.

 He was merchandise. After all, it had been him who had started everything, even asking clients to recommend his services to others and so on. He had a website with pictures and videos, not showing his face of course, and it was visited daily by hundreds of lonely men. Only a handful could actually pay the price to spend a night with him, as he had several rules and conditions to actually let them even look at him. He used his looks in his own advantage and he did very well.

 However, he had heard of competition and there were many young men in need of money who delivered the same services for cheaper. They were mostly college or high school students who needed money to pay for education. And they were younger and better looking than him, at least in the eyes of his clients. He had to take care for them in the world of modeling and also in the world of escorts. His life was tougher than many would have thought so, but he had chosen and he always reminded himself of that.

 He got on his feet and walked towards the window. He looked outside: the sun was rising and, in a few hours, the streets would be filled with people going from one place to the other. He grabbed his jacket, which he had put on a chair just by the window, and took a lighter and a cigarette from one of the pockets. It wasn’t allowed but he didn’t care at all. He opened the window and started smoking, feeling the cold wind of the morning on his thighs, penis, abdomen and chest.

 He looked down, towards the people, and he kept thinking of other ways to achieve his ultimate goal, which was to live like a superstar without having to do everything that he did to live like that. He could learn a proper skill, but that meant spending money on education. That way was a no go from the start. He could create some kind of enterprise but he had no ideas of what to do. His body was all he had and it was already difficult enough to be a model in such a crowded industry.

 The cigarette fell to the ground when he finished smoking, when he realized there was no way out and he had to keep doing what he did, until something else happened and changed his world. There was no other way about it, no matter what people thought about his so-called advantages.


 He put on his clothes, looked at himself on the mirror once again and then stepped outside the room. In the elevator, he saw that kid from his past again but he closed his eyes until the machine stopped and he walked fast towards the exit, into the cold streets of an uninviting city.

miércoles, 19 de julio de 2017

Detective Klein

  The room was one chaotic scene. Not only there was paint all over the walls, but also two bodies were lying on the floor, faces down and covered with white blankets, that seemed really out of place for some reason. They weren’t a strange sight as that room had been the scene of a violent crime. The people from the police had been working there for a whole day now. As they ate something or had a smoke, two detectives had decided to enter the premises and begin the investigation formally.

 Of course, the stench of the massacre had not cleared the room yet. All the doors had been opened but not the windows, as a gust of wind could disturb the scene or bring in foreign components. They wanted everything to be as it had been for the week or so since the murders had occurred. It was a shame for the police to only now realize what had happened in that poor neighborhood, which so often appeared in the news being portrayed as some kind of doorway to the flames of hell.

 However, every comparison to the reign of Satan was very accurate at the moment. The scene was hellish and there was no surprise when Detective Keaton couldn’t hold his breakfast after looking at the room once. Klein, on the other side, was made of a stronger material. He had seen so many gruesome scenes like this one; it just didn’t do anything for him. He could even eat in front of an open body, a fact that had always shocked all of his peers, even the coroners.

 As Keaton was tended by some of the men that had been eating outside, Klein decided to put on some plastic slippers and just have a tour of the room. It was actually a one-bedroom apartment. On one end, there was the door he had entered through. On the opposite side, another door was open, revealing a very dirty shower. The bathroom appeared no to have been the most taken care of place in that building. In the main room, there was a bed on the corner and the bodies were lying next to it.

 The blood, as said before, was all over the place: on the bed, the walls, the bathroom floor, the alarm clock on the only table in the premises and also on the sole electric heater, which would have been used to cook food with the help of the only wall socket in the room. It was really a dreary scene. Klein bent his knees next to the bodies and lifted one of the white blankets. Beneath it, he saw what he had always hated to see in the job: the body of a young human being. It made him mad and hopeless. Next to it was a woman, possibly the mother. Both covered in blood.

 Keaton was on the door, covering his nose with a handkerchief. It was very like him to have such an item that only older people use at the time. He was younger than Klein but somehow he felt like a grandfather of sorts. He had apparently recuperated from watching the scene and was now trying to focus his attention on Klein. He told him that the coroner had sent for the bodies and that the ambulances would be there in a short time. Klein nodded but said nothing, still looking at the scene.

 They had been partners for quite a long time, so Keaton knew exactly which face meant what. Right then, it was clear to him that Klein was thinking hard about the facts of the incident and it was best not to interrupt him as he hated people to do that. It was him who stopped the silence and asked his companion if he had asked the people from the police department about all the details of the scene, every object they had found and anything related to the corpses, as well as the apartment.

 Keaton handed his partner a folder where it said, quite clearly, that the woman and the child were not the owners of the apartment. Furthermore, none of them had any type of contract with the owner to live there. At least, no official contract had been recorded. So the first visit they had to make was to the owner. They could have gone to some family member of the victims but heir names had not been found yet. No identity cards, no data at all. It was as if they had been forgotten by the world.

 Minutes later, they were hopping in the car, rushing through the streets towards a more quiet, peaceful suburb. It had a lot of similar houses, like in the movies. Getting to the house that they were looking for was very tricky as most of the streets ended on a roundabout, with four or five houses sitting around. They saw children laughing, people playing with their dogs and couples holding hands. It was always awkward to see that after witnessing the scene of a murder.

 Life suddenly seemed meaningless for some reason. If someone could eliminate people in that fashion, it was clear that humans have the awful capacity to exterminate themselves. And what policemen do is to defend some humans against the rest. People always say good always wins but it was sometimes difficult to believe such a claim when, several times a week, you see proof that mankind is just made out of slightly evolved animals. But animals anyway. Keaton and Klein finally found the house, walked to the door and rang.

 A little girl opened the door. Her face was covered in chocolate and she just laughed. The two men were petrified right on the spot by this action. They had been taken by surprise by the sheer happiness of a child who is innocent and has not had a way of knowing how the world really works. The mother came in running, also laughing for some reason. She asked for their business and they asked for her husband. She offered them entrance but they refused, preferring to stay by the door.

 The man was called several times until he descended the stairs. It was clearly a day off for him as he was wearing boxers and a t-shirt tainted with grease and few mustard stains. They asked if he was named Victor Gould and he said yes. They asked if he owned an apartment building in the city and he said yes. Apparently, it had belonged to his father for years but he had received the place as a gift when the man had died some years ago. He confesses soon he rarely visited the place.

 The detectives promptly explained the reason for their visit. The man was appalled by what he heard and his wife, who had been listening close by, ran to her children and tried to keep them busy, away from the awful conversation. The man told them he had no idea a family had been living in that apartment. He had a man to go and collect rent but he kept papers on the building, which he showed to the police. He had no way of knowing a mother and her child had been living there illegally.

 That’s when Keaton realized what was going on. They rushed to the morgue, on the basement of the police department. There, the coroner explained to them that there was indeed no way of telling who the victims were but he could tell them that they had suffered for days before actually dying. They had been starving for a while, maybe even up to a month. They had little inside of them when he checked the stomachs. He concluded the kid was dead when it had been stabbed. But not the mother.

 Someone knew they were there. Someone had let them in and was possibly blackmailing them, threatening to call the deportation office and get them sent back to wherever they had come from. That same someone possibly stabbed them for some crazy reason.


 When he entered his own tiny apartment that night, Klein went straight for the bottle of scotch he kept in the kitchen. Booze was the only thing that could help him sleep when the realization of how much a dump the world was came to his mind. It happened very often, judging by the number of empty bottles crammed in a box.