Lunes Sin Fin (Endless Monday)

 

An interminable day begins when you realize that autumn is never what it used to be. When there are no longer dazzling colours of ambers, reds and yellows. When autumn turns badgers and squirrels into lone animals as they scramble during darker evenings. When the season gets colder and darker, when there is frost on the ground and mist in the air. When the colours have turned to a black strip along the long and famous woods that you played hide and seek with mates years ago. A place where you would run in your stockings with those soft hands picking up the orange leaves and twigs to create nests. When tumbling on the ground, being covered by the old stink of the moss under the beautiful leaves and weighing between letting your eyelids drop the immense tears that would form or putting on a poker face, trying as much not to tremble in the territory of dying garbage and be made fun of as others try to make you feel better. That was all that mattered. To be happy, to sleep and dream, to miss school because you had a cold, to pick flowers and get stung by angry bees. 

But now, Monday is no longer the day you loathe because of some unfinished assignment, for some reason, it feels impenetrable, all shrivelled up, like a felt swan navigating on water of origin and ash. It happens that you are tired of sitting and watching a movie, you hesitate, you are stretched out, you shiver with dreams, downwards in the wet tripe of earth, soaking it up and thinking of how much you do not want to be an inheritor of so many misfortunes, to continue as a solitary tunnel, a cellar full of pasts, stiff in cold, shoving you to certain corners, to certain damp houses, to certain cobbler shops smelling of vinegar, to streets horrendous as crevices.

 For this reason, Monday burns like oil, at the sight of you arriving with your jail face, it howls in passing like a wounded wheel, and its footsteps toward nightfall are filled with hot yet cold whispers. Along the streets, birds with the colour of Sulphur hang from the roof of some ugly old crib, with doors that scream poor art because the world has lost its beauty and people's vigour to create has dwindled. Along the road there are broken mirrors, which should have wept in shame because of the horrors they have faced, there are umbrellas all over the place, broken, maybe from heavy rain or a fight that happened when a woman failed to respond to her drunken husband. There is a forgotten set of teeth in a ceramic bowl simply because the owner is long gone or suffering from dementia, probably forgot where they left their piece of completeness.

The day of the luckless, the pale day with a cold heartbreaking smell, with its forces in grey, with no church bells ringing, a dripping dawn everywhere, it is a shipwreck in a void, surrounded by weeping babies and howling of worn-out dogs. The day is long and there is nothing sudden, amid the uncertain, amid the growing savour, with no persistent form. I dream, burdened with my moral remains, creating an existence dressed in chains and carnations, in a cream fabric, with frail linen only good to make a gauze for the sick. Its colour wants to replace, to cover, to engulf, to subdue, to make distances.

The day which is shattered, whose blue stars shiver in the distance, whose wind revolves around, cold and sharp, the sky no longer singing. The same day whitening, stretching and getting longer with an endless sky. A day when men and women do not get home to read bedtime stories for their kids, simply because water or earth devoured them.  In the distance, someone sings farther away but yet near, in the distance my soul longs for the day to end. 

I remember that Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays, and the week with the year, that time however stretched out cannot be cut with my exhausted blade, and all the specks of dust are washed out by the waters of night. That however long the day is, time is lost in its shoes, a day can only last twenty-four hours, and a year can only last several centuries. The day might be taught and dry, silent below the unpleasant weather, but the sun will always sink into the horizon.

 Monday, even though you are not full of flowers, we still voyage through you. We run through you in your shoes, through hills where the mist corrodes the skin, we do not come to you with daggers, but we scoop your misfortunes like the snow on the driveways during long cold winters. When we tremble from our navels, we remember that you are not that fateful morning in Spain, broken Spain, where burning metal flowed instead of flowers, where one morning,  fires erupted from the earth devouring souls. Monday, even though you are timeless, you are not the day Spain was veined in blood and metal. In the depth of our hearts, we hope that someday you will budge, and allow your barren soils to grow the lost flowers of time. But we can only hope that the light of Mondays in July will be distinguishable from the lines of time.