A strange situation

To my friend, Roberto who helped me through a particularly hard time in my recent life without understanding how or really, when.

It was at his house one day, that I arrived, a cold stormy August evening. A house that was as humble, as it was to me, un-homely. Yet nevertheless welcome and by no means unappreciated. Three rooms on the bottom floor of a block of Cholulan flats in the student quarter of this Mexican town, departed in some rather intriguing way from Mexico itself. And then again, not really. A rustic table and benches accompanied an energy-saving fridge (second hand, reclaimed from a family that had not, at some time in the past, been able to pay the loan for it) in an otherwise bare living-room / kitchen. The guest room, a bare, empty room at the side of the house that apparently was waiting, begging, for someone to occupy it, to give it melancholic purpose: a shelter for a soul during the cold, dark nights.

And then there was Roberto: a tall thin 19 year-old, tall and proud. Tall proud and happy, I think, though one could never be sure. Emotions with him were like the tides of an incessant ocean: at times rough and impulsive, other times, serene and wonderous. Some days, inspiration and warmth radiated from his presence and mood, yet others pulled the very vitality of the world inwards and away. Or at least to me it seemed this way at times. And it was into this sea of emotions and thought, that I found myself plunged from my 6 month vessel of semi-stability and safety.

Mexico, the land of troubles from which I had performed a quick escape, months earlier, from a certain desperation and sordid gloom that had engulfed my existence. An existence that now, was teetering on the brink of stability and regression. And there was Roberto, somehow, caught up in this surreal cascade of emotions and feelings that overwhelmed me as I set foot in this now alien country. Roberto, who seemed not to understand my presence though nevertheless accepted it and for that I was grateful. Neither did he understand the hollowness that accompanied my self - became my self - when I returned home at night to the lonely flat, behind a neglected church in the dirty blackness of the humid summer. Yet not without total exculpation on my part. The fact of the matter is, I was intimidated by uncertainty and machinations that choked my heart and so he never saw the struggle within, to keep afloat, manifested only discreetly by the emptiness my consciousness presented him when I poked my head round the door in the evening and said hello.

There he would be sitting, reading, listening to the same songs of romance, passion and despair, as the nights before, and there I, absorbed and vanquished. And then one day, no more. It must have been strange to see this person who had once shared a part of his life more fully, though in happier times, a ghost now. A phantom of the past. Gone.