Inside a box
Autor: Raquel | Publicado: 2012-01-29T18:47:00+01:00


“The tickets are bought!” – That was what she told by phone that morning, when I had hardly opened my eyes after going to sleep so late the night before. She called me at 7 o’clock in the morning to tell me the news that would change my destiny. I couldn’t realize. For more than four months my nights had become shorter, I was always going to sleep about 4 o’clock in the morning. The reason’s name was Radek. The foreign that had appeared in my life from I don’t know where, had stayed the same way I don’t know how. Before him, I had never believed in this new kind of relationship, the cyber ones when you meet someone in a chat and some things can happen after it. I thought that this was just a new technology from the end of the 20th century, a kind of joke and illusion that this new individual world had brought to lonely and depressive people. I was not a depressive person. Anyway, I had a cyber relationship. He seemed to be nice, lovely and funny. But I didn’t want to accept that I was in love. How come can someone fall in love with a person she had never seen before? This should be an illusion. “He’s just a friend”, I thought. But Sonia didn’t agree. “You are in love, Rachel. Just face it.”&nbsp;



He was a Czech musician I met in the “music chat” on a Saturday night that I didn’t want to go out with my friends. So, I decided to get in this chat websites, to spend some time before going to sleep. There was nobody online, but him. I was already thinking about finding another chat, when he came with a message “Hi, who are you?” and I decided to go on with this game. He actually had to ask me that because, obviously, I didn’t want to say my real name; I had a nickname, as usually people do. So, that was the beginning. We introduce ourselves and talked all night long, till 6 o’clock in the morning. There was such a connection between us that we decided to chat again the next day. After 3 months, I realized that we had chatted every single day, since the first one. It wasn´t long after he asked me, “Could I call you?”And so we started talking every day by phone. And in one month something has changed. I felt some butterflies in my stomach, I couldn’t stop thinking about him and somehow, even though I tried to pretend not to realize the true.&nbsp;



One day, while having lunch at Sonia’s house, he called me. He said he would soon play somewhere close to London and that he could stay there for some other days. At the end, finally, he invited me to come. I somehow knew that this day would come, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon. Truly, after four months talking, it wasn’t soon at all. I wanted but I was afraid. Going alone to meet someone I had never seen before. I didn’t say no, but I also didn’t say yes. I said I had to think, although I already had the whole travel plans in my head. Just after hanging up, I said: “Sonia, we are going to travel.” I didn’t have problems to talk to her like that. Sonia had been my best friend since university, even though she was 9 years older than me. I already expect her answer: “What? Why “we”? You are going to travel! You have a date, not me!” Thinking quickly and knowing that my friend wouldn’t refuse my request, I said, as if the decision was taken: “We are going to travel because I have a date and you have a job to do: to be my personal photographer!”&nbsp;



One day I found a small box made of wood. I was setting my things in order inside my closet and suddenly something fell. The strange thing about that box was that I had never seen it before. Maybe it was from my mother’s. When I opened it, I found two pictures: In the first one, a couple, in love, kissing each other. The couple in the picture had such a smile, such a different smile that made me realize they hadn’t known each other for so long. A young couple between 20, 22 years old.  However, the faces weren’t familiar. I couldn’t recognize this people. Certainly, it wasn’t my mom. I knew the way she looked like when younger. Surely, it wasn’t my father. He also would never keep such a memory. So I look at the second picture in order to find any track. There were two girls. They were on a train station, with their bags. Travelling somewhere I have no idea. My mother! There she was with another woman I also couldn’t recognize. There was no connection between the pictures. Why were they kept together? Who were these people with my mother? I couldn’t even continue with my setting, I had to solve those questions at that moment. And so I went to my mother’s office.&nbsp;



When I showed her the small box, she hesitated. She put her hands in the box as if it was an untouchable piece of diamond or glass that could break if not well handled. Her eyes were shining like the first sun shine in a beautiful summer’ morning and she stared at me like a kid who opens a Christmas gift. When she opened it at last, she couldn’t resist anymore, she was crying. Somehow, she could still ask me with a very calm voice: “My dearest Mary, where did you find this?” I didn’t know how to answer. It was already clear to me who was who, but it was such an emotional moment that I couldn’t talk about it. I preferred to change the subject “Do you know where my mum is? I’d like to talk to her about it.” She opened a huge smile and said: “Your mum is out. Sonia had to do some shopping for our company, it will take a time. You don’t have to ask her anything about this box, which I also don’t know. We’ve been looking for that for already ten years, without success. Do you want to know what it is?”&nbsp;



&nbsp;I let Rachel speak and, while she was telling me her love story with her husband, I felt inside a movie, full of adventures and happy endings. When my mum came back, some four hours later, we kept on trying to find out how had that box got into my closet. We had a goodtime laughing about details of the trip, about the exact moment when the romantic couple met, about how my mum took the picture. They talked about their marriages, about how things went after that. And more than finding out the true hidden inside that small box, printed in those pictures, I could see that the story wasn’t only my mum’s best friend love story, was a real friendship story. A story of love in all it senses. A story that could have had been forgotten if my mum hadn’t consolidated that moment into a piece of paper. A papyrus that brought us, that day, the moment in which 3 lives crossed one another’s because of love.





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Eu escrevi esse texto em 2008, em Lisboa, foi um artigo para uma das matérias na faculdade. Achei hoje, por acaso, perdido no computador. :) Como faz tempo que não escrevo nada, achei que seria uma boa forma de atualizar o Koiné, e dizer que não o abandonei. Espero voltar em breve.