A single drop of blood drips down from the white wooden frame of the bedroom door, adding itself silently to the pool in which I lie. I fix my eyes on the white wood and glass panels of the tall door and try to decipher meaning in the bloody hieroglyphics as they shift and dance across their path, charting the course of my impending mortality. A generator hums loudly in the square outside the half-opened terrace door. Bottles are rattled together as they are deposited in the outside bin at the back of the bar on the corner. From the kitchen of my flat comes the clock-worked, rhythmic groan of the ancient refrigerator.
I see myself looking out onto the square from the small terrace of my room. It is a typical day of brilliant blue sky and sun. A surge of panic overwhelms me. The innocence of this picture is drowning in the horror and the ferocity of the next. I am fighting to escape the inexorable pressure that denies the sanctity of my past and pulls me into the breathless reality of now. My whole life led up to this place and the awful finality of this time.
It is no longer a summer’s day. The sky has shifted to the muted lavender of a Barcelona night. It is a warm evening and not yet dark enough for the cockroaches to be brave enough to come out and play. The pain is not physical, but all-consuming and immense. Lights begin to flicker on in the windows that frame the lives of the strangers that are my neighbours. The lights trace out an intermittent path I know it is time to climb; up on through the antennae blitzed roof top and high toward the indeterminate hue at the edge of the sky that even now I fail to recognise as my own. The future is written and already extinguished. It implodes silently in the chaos of a newly born star. I am afraid to follow my path into that oblivion. I do not want to go.
I do not want to go.
