The InkWell Writing Challenge | MOTIVATION

Hello to everybody, here I leave my participation for this Writing Challenge, Season 2 Week 8 by @theinkwell

Pixabay

Red. Orange. Grey. Black. The screen in his eyes was changing color. Then the street seemed to fade away. He blinked repeatedly. Increasingly so. As if in the firmness of her eyelids the clarity was gone and now, as they collided, she could bring it back. He opened his eyes as wide as he could. The darkness seemed a meek animal. Fear ran down her back like a snail. He shook himself gently. He blew his hands. He closed his eyes. He remembered God in a short prayer that he knew by heart. He looked up and the light seemed to be back. He looked into a corner where a dog was sleeping. He looked back over the city. The narrow street of uninhabited stores. Even on the benches there were no lines of people. Everything seemed desolate. Although from time to time the sunny road was crossed by a motorcycle that seemed to be in all the hurry in the world.

Nothing seemed to surprise him before this mishap, this macabre move his eyes were making. He had never paid so much attention to the color of things, the firmness and texture of materials as he does now. Everything seemed new. And it was, in a way. That sensation of discovery of the world in light acquired a force that overwhelmed him and was transformed into something uncontainable and explosive at the same time. Inexplicable and at the same time pleasant.

The street was a dead gray snake. It breathed in the air. He was trying to recover the world in his breathing. He took a few steps with some indecision towards a wall. He was trying to regain some energy. You're screwed, he thought, when his body was still shaking.

He mentally reviewed all the things in the world that he would miss with his vision. I'm not blind yet, he said to himself. And he started walking down that unpopulated street towards his apartment in middle of the city. He walked as if he were being filmed, so he tried to show serenity. He held back so as not to bring his hands to the face. He was afraid to close his eyes and not open them again. Or at least not to regain the light.

He continued walking without hurry. He passed in front of an empty school that had been invaded by weeds. He crossed the sidewalk without being disturbed by motorcycles or cars. He stared at the cracks in the asphalt and the dusty toe of his shoes. He counted the steps from the road to the building where he lived as he watched his feet walk. He opened the gate to the street. He walked down the short corridor to the door leading to his living room. He took a couple of long steps to the couch and started crying.

Then he went to rummage through the kitchen shelves and found out a bottle of rum with the contents halfway through. He drank directly from the spout of the bottle trying to blur the images that had made him shiver a couple of hours earlier. He poured another bit of rum into a glass and drank it in its entirety. He felt the liquid run down his throat and warm his stomach. He was absorbed, thoughtful, distracted. He repeated the operation with the glass until he felt the rum burning his tongue. He had felt nostalgic in the last days and started thinking about banal things in life that are not taken into account until they are missed.

He drank his eighth shot of rum and sensed that the liquor was somehow replacing the hugs of Mary, the dead bride, and the shared sleeplessness of the last few days, the stays on the soccer field in Merida running after the ball, the wise words and manifest affection of the father who was also dead and in whose funeral he did not cry, the goodbyes to the cousins who were leaving the city or the country, the spite for Caroline, the one who married an old barber and left him waiting at the bus terminal to escape, the memory of friends and goodbyes at the promotion, the stays at school and the sworn love to the teachers and girls in the class, the pleasure of reading funny stories at night, watching soccer games on TV, Bruce Lee movies or the american police series; all the things he had loved and forgotten and that returned with the drink of that opaque, bitter concoction that made the tongue dull, warmed the brain, caressed the stomach and made it change its mind.

When he felt drowsy he struggled with himself not to fall asleep, so he took off his clothes and went into the bathroom, humming a song about the relationship between David and God. From the idea of God came the remembrance of his suffering until he fell asleep in the tub. Then he dreamed of Mary. He told her that he could no longer recognize things, opening his eyes as wide as possible and looking at her as a divine revelation. She asked if he was feeling well. Like a little Bacchic god, he said, trying to get up, showing some difficulty. Feeling the air with his hands, he approached the girl. Take off your clothes. And come closer, he said. The girl was resisting a little, so he said: I need to see. Or touch. I want to take advantage of my opportunities, the little light I have left. I would like to exhaust my sight in the nakedness of your body.

Mary took off her clothes until she was completely naked. Then he ran his hands over the girl's nakedness as if recognizing the world for the first time. The dark brown hair fell wavy, curly, because of the white, very white complexion of his shoulders. Her tits and legs were perfectly shaped. Her hips were a divine tafanarium. Her eyes were inviting and tender, and her lips were fleshy and moist, representing desire.

She lay down on the bed. He wanted to describe, to graph with words, the information he received from her hands and from the little light that entered her eyes, and which mixed with her thoughts. Trying to give some coherence to those emotions, he thought to himself that he was contemplating the vigorous and unexpected work of a master. But one of those works that moves the thought and leaves us dreaming for a long time, although it brought him back to reality.

Pixabay

After taking a shower, he passed by the room and looked at a pack of cigarettes that some of his housemates would have forgotten, or more probably some lover of the girl in the room across the street, a film student who rarely goes to the house, but who brings a different boyfriend every time he is seen. He was tempted to turn one on. Resist, he said to himself. he shook him head and continued on to the kitchen. He checked the refrigerator and found some rice from the day before, reheated it in a pan, threw a couple of eggs at it and stirred the contents trying to mix them up until they were confused. He put a piece of fresh cheese on top and added some spice. He then went into the living room, threw himself on the couch and put on the news channel. He thought for a couple of minutes. He decided to try to make up the time and do, or finish doing, what he could not do without vision. He turned on his laptop and listed the writing projects, the unfinished works, the ones that were pending review, the ones that lacked details and the ones that he had to start. He looked like a general reviewing defeated troops. He reproached himself. He felt a little sorry and ashamed of himself. A reflection of himself made him look thin, somewhat hunched, with a sloppy beard that seemed to hang down and climb up and populate some areas of his cheeks. He passed his hand over his face. He felt the impropriety of those dissimilar, amorphous hairs on his face. He sketched a brief smile: let's write!