What makes a human being set his eyes on another human being is one of those mysteries that we have been thinking about for thousands of years and that we may never be able to solve.. And maybe it's good that it's like that. A mystery it must be, above all, mysterious, well, if it is resolved, disappear, ceases to be what determines its essence.
They had been working together for more than two years., but only a few months ago had he begun to consider her in that other special way. Or maybe she had been the one who had noticed him in that other way and he, receiving in some way that I had not been aware of, the signs, he had made them his own, incorporating them into their way of projecting themselves towards the world. The fact is that he knew, and she must also know, but no one took the first step, blocked, among other reasons, because of that rule that was said to exist in the company, but no one had ever seen or heard, that prohibited relationships between employees. That morning, however, decided to do it. fuck it!, thought. Decision made, there were two options: or he sent a suggestive message to his cell phone (“I have to talk to you”, or something like that), or approached her directly when the right opportunity arose., that is to say, when there was no one around. And see if the thing was not predestined (another mystery, destiny), that that same morning she was the one who approached him.
They had to talk, told him. Of course, of course, he answered. And so they met at a cafeteria near her home after work.. They talked for like a couple of hours.. How they worked together, They skipped a good part of the logical presentation among absolute strangers, Well, at that point they already knew a lot about each other.. However, there were many gaps, since treating oneself professionally was not the same as doing it outside the rigid context of the office.. They were the same people, the same identity card number, the same faces, but different. As it was the first time they practiced this new facet of their relationship., they started, for opening fire, reviewing the problems they had at work, which served as a cushion for them to gain confidence in each other before truly beginning to open up.. They tried so hard that, when they realized they had to separate, They had barely begun to reveal anything about themselves. It doesn't matter, he said, and she must have thought, logically, the same. To start remedying it, They both agreed to meet again that same weekend as their first date at the cafeteria., maybe for lunch or dinner. but luck (another even more mysterious mystery), came to rule that the government impose the State of Alarm, confining all citizens to their homes.
¡Vaya, for god!, he said. It's also a coincidence. precisely now, when they had decided, the filthy virus was coming to ruin their party. But, in the face of such adversity (another mystery), no one wanted to lose heart. In the first days of confinement, They started sending short text messages. How are you? GOOD, and you? GOOD, also. I'm very happy to hear it. They were testing each other again. Then, much longer messages began to be sent, According to the correlation of questions and answers that were sent, it became more complex. After, to save so much I'm playing On the screen, They started sending voice messages. That seemed to bring them a little closer., because it is not the same to read a cold text, without nuances (no matter how many emojis you add) than being able to perceive the true tone of words and compound phrases. and the laughter. That's when things started to get a little more serious.. It's not that they'd never heard each other's laughter., but this was a different kind of laugh. It is not the same to laugh at work when mediating any work issue. (generally, a little seedy), than doing it motivated by a relaxed commentary on the political and social reality of the moment, a shared meme, some quip about his way of cooking or her way of sleeping (moved so much that, sometimes, He ended up waking up with his feet on the head of the bed, he confessed). No, It wasn't the same. Besides, The good thing about voice messages is that you could play them whenever you wanted. Sometimes, He fell asleep listening to a sequence of messages that had been sent that same afternoon. in your dreams, she fell asleep listening to him.
One day they decided to take the leap and met on Skype.. After a week without seeing each other, the image of the other caught them by surprise. A surprise that they both found pleasant. Motivated by the new State of Alarm, They had sent her home in teleworking mode. He was temporarily dismissed according to an ERTE that affected his entire department.. Why would they want to pay a salesperson if there was nothing to sell?? And here they had to overcome a new obstacle, because sending individual messages was not the same as talking to each other face to face.. Fortunately, The previous baggage made things a little easier for them.. From the first conversation it was obvious that everything was flowing between them.. Perhaps the biggest problem came from technology.. For some reason, Maybe it was the contracted megabytes or the poor quality of the router, the image of her would freeze from time to time. At first, he always tried to warn her, so that, once the image is restored, recover part of the conversation that they may have lost. And so they would continue talking day after day.
Thanks to the moving image offered by their respective webcams, They were able to show their houses: the living room, the kitchen, the bathrooms, your favorite shampoos, the towel with which they dried their hands, the views from their respective balconies. They shared maintenance gym classes and Spotify lists. On one occasion, They came out to applaud together at eight in the afternoon, via internet. They both lived alone, But these video chats introduced them to a new daily life in which it seemed like they were sharing a flat., a flat made of two floors, his and hers, that communicated by fiber cable hundreds of meters away. In all the time that this data traffic lasted, it kept persisting, however, those small absences from the image that he began to let go so as not to insist so much and not to hinder the conversation with her and for her to arrive, maybe, to get upset or tired of so much interruption and ask you to return to the written messages.
During these breaks, He stared at the frozen image of her on his computer monitor.. Sometimes, The pauses were so long that he made up for them by studying every detail of the features of that face.. Sometimes, the expression on his face was very funny. Others, inspired sadness. Others, It was so ridiculous it was almost pathetic.. When everything returned to its normal state, still not knowing what the hell they were talking about, he smiled as if nothing had happened.
He began to worry that night when he stayed up late thinking about one of those frozen faces.. Actually, It wasn't a complete face., because half of her face had been left off the screen. There was a special beauty, different, in that statism, it was said. And it was not so much because of the specific expression or that muscular serenity that he offered at that moment.. It was that that face presented a mystery that he perceived in the depths of her eyes., in a fold behind the right ear, in the fall of a lock of hair, and that it referred him to a she who was not her, so to speak, but another one that he would have liked to meet. It was her, Of course, but in a different variety. Seduced by those frozen faces, he began to collect them, saving them on the computer's hard drive based on screenshots that he then put in a folder reserved for it.. Sometimes, when I had just talked to her, I would open that folder and review for hours all those moments that I had collected. One day it was five in the morning, entertained in such an extravagant task. It's not that I'd lost interest in the original her, on the contrary. Those images offered her the possibility of a self that was now expanding towards infinity.. He felt that his relationship with her was now almost eternal..
Then came the day when the limitations decreed by the State of Alarm began to relax.. Now they could go for a walk one hour a day and one kilometer away from their homes. They calculated the closest place on Google Maps and made an appointment. It was Sunday afternoon. They had both told each other that they didn't need to dress up much., but later they would discover that neither of them had paid attention to this condition. When they reached the agreed point, They discovered that the kilometer from their respective homes left them barely seven meters from each other.. They both stood paralyzed, not daring to move forward.. deep down, it was nonsense. Skipping the restriction for such a small space could not cause them too many problems (who was going to see them?). However, on the other hand, Perhaps it was not convenient for them to be too close to each other because they could be carriers of the virus without knowing it.. But that wasn't what stopped them from getting closer either, and they both knew it.. That's when she asked him to stay still., that it didn't move. He, who knew what was happening, obeyed. So, She took out her mobile phone and took a photo of him.. Then he looked at the picture and smiled.. After, It was her turn.. In the photo of him, she appeared smiling, looking at the sky, arms extended and making a victory sign. Since then, They have agreed to repeat this operation every day. They have already abandoned Skype. GERARDO LEON
