Chapter Four: This Is My Pain (#4)

That night, returning home, his body seemed to have doubled in weight. His legs ached, his back muscles complained, and every step was a silent drag. At Santa Gracia, the work had been exhausting, yes, but never as frantic as it was at Big Root. There, they didn't cook like in a typical restaurant; they survived, as if each day were a pitched battle against time, fire, and exhaustion.

He crossed the entrance and hung his soaked coat on the rack. The house was silent. Daniela wasn't there, and his mother was probably already in her room. He headed straight to the kitchen.

He washed the dishes accumulated in the sink, without thinking much about it. The aroma floating in the air made him suspect that Amelie had eaten everything again. Or maybe Daniela. It was impossible to know for sure. But he preferred to believe it had been his mother. Not out of naiveté, but out of necessity. Because there was something deeply sad in imagining that she ate what he prepared without a word, without thanking him, without even looking at him, and yet, she kept eating it every night.

He cooked quickly and left everything ready, as he did every day. When he went upstairs towards his room, his mother's bedroom door opened, and she peered out just barely.

His mother's voice stopped him.

"Where were you until this hour?"

He turned, exhausted to the bone, but serene.

"I'm sorry... I forgot to say I started my new job today."

Amelie frowned. She had never liked Tomás working. To her, it was unnecessary. A foolish pride perhaps, or an idea she couldn't let go of: that her son shouldn't carry responsibilities that weren't his.

"Don't forget... again."

She was about to close the door when Tomás stopped her, in a softer tone.

"I have a shift tomorrow too."

His mother's face, in the dim light of the hallway, was a rigid, expressionless mask. Cold.

"Alright... but don't neglect your studies. And don't take so many shifts. You should be home."

"I won't take too many, I'll try," he replied, just before the door closed with a muffled click.

He entered his room. The desk was a chaos of papers, open books, and sheets crossed out with red ink. He stood for a moment, contemplating the mess, wondering if he really had the strength to sit down. But he did. He forced himself to.

He turned on the desk lamp. The manuscript lay open, scribbled on, corrected, marked by fingers that had written with desperation. With rage. With pain. It was like a mirror of his inner self.

He remained there, in silence, and then began to write. He ruthlessly deleted the final chapter. He had written it in an emotional outburst, but now it no longer belonged to him. He rewrote everything. This time, his characters didn't die, nor were they destroyed; they simply... got lost. Like him. They slowly strayed, until stripped of joy. Not by a great drama, but by life itself. Just like that.

When he finished, it was almost two in the morning. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He was exhausted. His body screamed for rest. But there was something else he needed to do. A ritual, one he performed every night in solitude.

He turned off the desk lamp. He carefully closed his laptop. He walked to the bed and knelt beside it. He felt around until he found, under the frame, his small chest. He pulled it out slowly, as if something sacred rested inside.

He sat on the floor, crossed his legs, and placed the chest on the bed.

He opened it.

Inside, two sole objects. A photograph and a hair ribbon, faded blue from time.

The image showed a young woman, about twenty years old, holding a child in her arms. She was laughing, carefree. Her beauty was serene, as if the world completely belonged to her in that instant. The child—himself, barely two or three years old—was not looking at the camera. He was nestled against his mother's chest. A corner of the photograph was missing, roughly torn, as if someone had deliberately tried to erase whoever had once been there.

The bow, simple and dull, still held a faint trace of the perfume Tomás believed he remembered. Perhaps it was just his mind, clinging to an impossible memory.

Without taking anything out of the chest, he began to speak softly.

"Today I started my new job, Mom... they seem like good people, but the work is pretty hard... I wish you were here, you surely would have laughed... I'm tired, Mom, sometimes I feel tired of everything... 'Don't give up'? Don't worry, it's just a saying... I love you, always."

He was silent for a few seconds. Then, he added in a whisper:

"I love you. Always."

He gently closed the chest, as if returning a secret to its place. He slid it back under the bed and slowly stood up. He looked at the calendar hanging on the wall. There were no marked days. No written dates. But he knew.

It wouldn't be long now.

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That night, perhaps due to the weight of recent days, perhaps because that date was approaching—the one he never needed to check on a calendar to know it was there—Tomás dreamt of that moment again. A lost fragment of his childhood that always returned with the force of an icy wave, tearing at the shore of his tranquility.

The dream began with a warm light, filtered by the dirty windshield of an old car. He saw himself, a five-year-old boy, strapped into his small car seat in the back. He wore a striped t-shirt and velcro sneakers, his expression of absolute innocence, without any suspicion of what was to come. Outside the car, the afternoon held a golden hue, one of those that announce the end of something, even if you don't know what.

His mother was driving. Her face was clearly reflected in the rearview mirror. Her hair was tied in a loose ponytail, as she often did when she was in a hurry, but she still managed to smile at him.

"We're going to surprise Daddy," she would say sweetly, as if the whole world were an exciting and safe game.

"Really?" little Tomás asked in his hesitant, small voice.

"Yes, he's probably already leaving work... we're going to catch up with him," she added with a strange mix of excitement and nervousness.

The child didn't fully understand, but he nodded with that loving obedience that only one has at that age.

"Let's go," he repeated with a smile, unaware that what was coming was not a surprise, but a breaking point.

The scene shifted, as it always did, without clear transitions. They were parked in front of a gray building, with large windows and narrow stairs. His mother kept her hands firm on the steering wheel, but her knuckles were white. In her eyes, through the mirror, something had changed.

Then he came out. Tomás's father.

They watched him descend the steps, talking to a woman who must have been barely twenty. She laughed exaggeratedly and clung to his arm as if the world didn't exist. The man didn't pull away. He let himself be adored. And in that moment, his mother's heart shattered.

She started the engine with a sudden gesture, and the sound of the ignition shook little Tomás.

"Mom?" he asked, uneasy at the tension in the air.

"It's nothing, darling. It's nothing," she replied, her voice breaking, as the car began to follow the taxi the other two had gotten into.

She sped up too fast.

She ran red lights.

Horns blared, drivers yelled.

Tomás could only repeat in a trembling voice:

"Mom, what's happening? Mom?"

Then the turn.

A car at the intersection.

His mother's scream as she spun the steering wheel at full speed.

The hand letting go of the wheel.

The crash.

And everything began to spin.

The world turned upside down. The dream became dizzying. As always. The child tied to his seat, seeing the world inverted. The air filled with dust. Glass floating in slow motion like dead fireflies. Everything was confusion, and light suddenly turned gray, red, and mist crossed his eyes.

"Tomás!" his mother's voice reached him muffled, as if underwater.

"Tomás! Are you okay? Answer!"

But he couldn't. He couldn't see. He couldn't understand. He only felt.

Then, the sound of sirens, like metal laments.

And his mother's voice dissolved into sobs and whimpers.

Darkness began to close in on the world.

And the last thing he remembered was the smell of gasoline and blood.

Tomás woke abruptly, drenched in sweat. His breathing was ragged, gasping, as if he had run for miles. The dawn light began to tint the room with a blue hue. He stared at the ceiling in silence, his chest rising and falling violently.

He passed a trembling hand over his face.

Months had passed without dreaming of that.

But it always came back.

Always.

He sat on the edge of the bed, covering his face with both hands. For a few minutes, he didn't move. As a child, he told himself it was his fault for having gone with her that day. As a teenager, he had silently blamed his father with fury. But now... he no longer knew whom to blame. And what was worse, he no longer knew if forgiveness was possible.

He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He stayed there, looking at himself in the mirror, feeling that the five-year-old boy was still trapped somewhere inside him. In that car, suspended between vertigo and pain, waiting to hear his mother say that everything would be alright. But that moment never came.

Perhaps, he thought, it wasn't about forgetting.

Perhaps it was about learning to keep breathing.

Despite everything.

And as he dried his face with a towel, he thought of the chest under his bed.

Of the photo.

Of the blue bow.

"It won't be long now," he told himself again. But this time, the phrase didn't sound like a promise... but like a farewell.