TODAY I ATE A COMPLETO

Today I ate a completo, but it was no ordinary completo. It had ketchup, mayonnaise, sauerkraut, tomato, salsa americana, and avocado. Beside me, at the counter, a redhead waiting for her order was giving me flirtatious looks. It was served to me by a cheerful young man who was humming Monkey Gone to Heaven by the Pixies without missing a single note. But above all, it was the completo I was devouring while, across the street, One-Eye was being run over.

The car was traveling at high speed; all it took was for the driver to lose control for a single second. When the vehicle struck the utility pole, his spine snapped in two. Like a fortune cookie being cracked open, revealing its hidden prophecy, cerebrospinal fluid was expelled from his spinal cord. The windshield, bathed in blood and seasoned with tiny fragments of bone, shattered into an intricate spiderweb pattern.

His body bounced off the glass and landed facedown on the sidewalk.

What could cruel fate have wanted with this poor devil? Why was Death in such a hurry to move her midnight appointment forward, to brandish her scythe while the black mascara still lay unopened on the dressing table?

A few pieces of tomato fell onto the pavement. I stood there with my mouth open, staring at what had happened, while in my hand the sausage nestled in its bun waited anxiously for the green light. The scene unfolding before me froze in time. Worthy of any Hollywood shot, but seen through the director's camera lens. I couldn't tell whether the smoke was rising from the car's engine or descending from the sky, like a long curtain billowing in the wind. Rendered in graphite, charcoal, and chalk, it revealed the alarming condition of the driver. Behind the steering wheel, his face was buried in the front airbag. From his left ear flowed a little stream of red and purple, the result of the blow to his head when the car abruptly mounted the sidewalk. The drop slowly sliding down the glass pointed toward One-Eye. Blood had already spread beneath his entire body and threatened to consume everything. From the depths of the puddle, his prosthetic eye came floating toward me, stopping just two steps away; it never took its gaze off me. It rocked gently from left to right, like the swing of a pendulum. Not knowing where to look and overwhelmed by the situation, I raised my eyes toward the sky. The top of the utility pole, which had brought the aluminum beast to a halt, had lost its upright position and seemed to be sinking beneath the stars beginning to emerge in the twilight.

I didn't know One-Eye very well. The truth is that, to me, he was nothing more than another one of those homeless drunks who wander the streets at night looking for a bar where they can spend the day's collected change. Perhaps what distinguished him from the others was his friendliness (I don't remember ever seeing him become violent) and his moments of lucidity, which astonished those unprepared for such displays of knowledge from a filthy old man who clearly hadn't taken a shower in decades. He could even speak English, Mandarin Chinese, and a little German. What little you couldn't understand was due to the mucus that accumulated at the corners of his mouth and his worn-down teeth—or what remained of them—the result of poor nutrition and oral hygiene. People said that, back in the day, he had been the director of a renowned national company with offices abroad and that, because of his problems with alcohol, he lost control and ended up on the streets after losing his fortune. His family gathered whatever they could salvage and sought help among the contacts they had accumulated over the years. He never heard from them again.

A lie. He wasn't just another homeless drunk. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been fond of him; we wouldn't have given him a nickname. There were many afternoons when, after a hard day's work at the office, we laughed and drank beer together until we couldn't tell one hand from the other. A happy hour without One-Eye was nothing more than a gathering of failed colleagues around a little round table, whose sole purpose was to complain in unison about the problems that cropped up every day at work. A couple of drinks, then home. The rest of the evening promised nothing more than a mediocre dinner reheated in the microwave and jerking off to the tits of whichever American actress happened to be on television. Depressing. When One-Eye showed up at the bar, the place came alive. The most enthusiastic among us would put up their month's wages and buy several rounds for everyone (surely this was the only reason the owner allowed One-Eye inside to share a table with the other customers). With our arms around each other, we forgot about the grumpy boss; the pretty secretary who winked at us whenever we passed her desk but would never give us so much as a sloppy kiss; the old woman from accounting who was constantly demanding reports even though there was still a week left before the deadline; the $300.000 multifunction printer that worked whenever it felt like it; and the coworker whose sole purpose in life was to undermine you so he could earn a few extra bills.

Reality turned into a dream. A place where borders don't exist and there's no need to cling to anything; all you have to do is let yourself be carried along by the currents of the unconscious and float aimlessly through the void. Words leave the mouth without any need for prior thought; it doesn't matter whether they're hurtful or childish. They travel in every direction, contracting and expanding, until they run aground in some harbor. The response that follows is equally primitive, but honest: a nod of the head, a laugh, or a dry fist straight to the snout. Lying on the grass, you pull up blades of it with your hand and watch the clouds crossing the blue sky. One after another, they leave your field of vision, as though the opening crawl of Star Wars were running in reverse, except the film never stops and no clock exists capable of recording the passage of time. Or rather, the very concept of time loses its meaning because, in the absence of thought, the only machine capable of interpreting it disappears. According to contemporary scientists, neither the present, nor the past, nor the future exists; past, present, and future are all the same thing. Not an arrow pointing to the right, but a record spinning so fast that every track occupies the same place, no matter where you put the needle. But how could we live by abandoning the notions of what seems so logical to our senses? One-Eye can no longer ask himself these questions or suffer the consciousness of existence. Even if he is somewhere else now, that other place follows different rules, and everything I've written here is nothing more than an illegible jumble of scribbles.

I'm in my bed, awake, sweating and overheated. I touch my forehead to check whether I have a fever. I turn on the bedside lamp and sit on the edge of the mattress, my hands resting on my thighs. I think about One-Eye. The same terror that tormented me in my dreams is suffocating me now. They say that every human being, in the deepest recesses of their heart, wishes for the end of the world. I myself have often fantasized about the earth splitting in two and swallowing me until I disappear into absolute darkness. But thinking about One-Eye, about his motionless body on the sidewalk and his glass eye, I break down crying because, in truth, I want to cling to life at any cost. I don't want to miss anything it has to offer me. I want reality to bite me and leave the marks of its fangs on my skin. I want to love and be loved, to feel the morning breeze in my hair, the warmth of the early sun, the adrenaline of doing something wrong, to put my thoughts down on paper, to run through parks, to receive an unexpected kiss...

Today I ate a completo, but it was no ordinary completo. I hadn't had a bite to eat all day, and it looked truly appetizing. But above all, it was the first completo I've eaten since One-Eye was run over.

PD: I was checking my old wattpad short stories and I stumbled uppon this one I wrote around July 2017. I like how it came out, I hope i can regain this kind of prose.