Make It Right

"It's over, darling... we're completely lost." 

Those were her last words before leaving. As she had achieved throughout all those years, and in the way only she knew how to do it, she gave me a momentarily revealing and wrathful shiver. She closed the door behind her after a sad and disappointed "goodbye" that ripped my heart out to leave it on my feet.

For several minutes I beheld the threshold where Pamela had been standing, watching me with anguished resignation. A black hole was now dancing where my heart used to be, spinning around while absorbing all the light in my surroundings and mocking my overwhelming and confusing feelings. I closed my eyes and opened them again, hoping a whirlwind would turn back time, but the wooden door showed me then the same desolating outlook.

With a lump in the throat, I lunged at everything I found in the parlor. Books, photo frames, and flowerpots flew shattering to every corner, mourning and joining my roaring orchestra with their frightening stumbles. I stopped when I felt the tear waterfalls falling down my face and my neck. They burned my skin and jumped to my chest, which rose and fell violently along with my breathing. An annoying and high-pitched, almost inaudible sound pierced my consciousness and didn’t allow me to think clearly. I fell, defeated, on my knees, and remained that way for a long time, debating whether to call her, follow her, or simply die where my aching body lay.

"What have I done?" I asked myself, "How did I let us come to this?"

The first years, oh, they had been beautiful, spectacular, the love floated exhilarated in the air, and blushed our cheeks with its natural and never-ending serenades. Back then, I was still that typical novel writer with the not so original dream of getting to be a legend of Tolkien’s level. Or at least find my way in my gorgeous and recent discovery: my muse, Pamela, and achieve a work remembered as that of the romantic Nicholas Sparks. But time always comes and corrodes everything in its path. If you're not strong enough, I'm afraid it destroys absolutely everything, without mercy, with its miserable and bloody fangs. Thirty years had elapsed after our marriage, imprisoning us in a terrifying and tasteless routine. And by the grace of time or, why not, the devil, I hadn't realized, but Pamela did. And she brought it up with every chance she had, but I didn't listen. Therefore, the ages when I used to write marvelous and faltering stories got covered in dust, and so did the passion that my beloved used to feel about the art of painting.

Then, in a desperate act to regain the life which I now longed for with tons of unexpected nostalgia, I threw myself up the stairs facing that sad scenario. Recklessly, I got stumbling to the study that had been closed for so long. Determined to seize and requite all those lost years, I opened this now unknown room in which, I assumed, reigned a deathly silence and, mostly, filth. The last thing I would've expected from that chamber was a group of people inside it. 

Astonished, I watched what I had in front of me, unable to believe it: at least ten people stared at me with eyes wide open, their eyebrows raised to their temples, and their split jaws, since they looked as if they had fallen to their stomach. Their expressions rapidly blurred and left place to a burst of laughter, joy yelling, and happy jumping. "¡Master! ¡You're back, master!" stuttered a cute brunette, holding on to my shoulders. All around the place I could hear screams saying "It's amazing!", "The day has finally come!" and "You lost the bet!". Then, thunderstruck, I understood. But, even though I comprehended what I was seeing with my own eyes, I couldn't buy it.

From a corner, an elderly woman was looking at me with unease, holding a burned cigarette: Imelda Barrios. A sheriff on my right was shaking with delight and excitement and I recognized the face of Miguel Santorini, which I had described so many times. A black child of about three years old who was sitting not far from Imelda applauded me, laughing. I recognized in his disparate eyes that he was the orphan grandson of the old woman, Marius. Infinite memories whirled through my mind in a matter of seconds and a strange sensation came over me, which seemed to be the newborn child of terror and happiness. There they were, standing before me, my most beloved characters. They had been waiting for me for all those years, and I had cruelly abandoned them. But see, this bizarre and cheerful euphoria was interrupted by Imelda's accusatory gaze.

—And, if you don't mind explaining, what brings you here after so many years of abandonment to the hopeless fate of our unfinished stories?

Suddenly and unintentionally, I let out a laugh of amusement. Her voice, sonorous and elegant, was exactly as I had imagined it years before! I involuntarily maintained my gestures of pleasure and disbelief, but my creations had ceased their party of gladness and looked at me like puppies wet from the rain, so I was forced to stop. Holding my apprehension between my back and the wall behind me, I stood up and stared only at her for a few moments. The reality of my actions came back like a murder of crows to smudge my sight and crumple my throat. "I lost Pamela," I muttered. To my surprise, they knew perfectly well who my wife was and, judging by their grimaces of horror and their trembling lips, they felt an incomparable love for her. Some of them fell to their knees on the floor in the same way that I had, after destroying the parlor. Even little Marius had begun to cry heartbreakingly.

—You blew it! —shouted the now distressed but enraged Miguel—, she was everything, how did you let it happen? You bloody bastard!

Standing there, bowled over, I felt the black hole laughing out loud at my misery. My work, the clear reflections of my youthful essence, accused me of being a bastard! And it wasn't just Miguel. His yells were followed by a sequence of angry and desperate whining and screaming coming from everyone there, except for me, who barely managed to distinguish one word from the other, nor the truth to my fiction. They were screaming at me and complaining for 5 endless minutes until Imelda pushed her way between them and gently placed her right hand on my face. It looked like she had taken the role of ringleader and was the one who maintained the well-being of the other characters, at least the ones of the main story among all my incomplete stories. I caught a glimpse of some of the main characters from other of my much less important stories, but they observed me much more coldly and were dressed in tattered old clothes. "You never understood, did you?" she warned, scrutinizing me sternly, though making a maternal effort to take my thoughts and organize them on the shelves of my mind in the proper way.

—She was everything, Julio. All those times you boasted of having found your muse, your inspiration, although you were very vain, dear, you were not wrong, or will you tell me you did not notice we came to life not long after you met her? And she loved it. She loved to see you happy and succeeding, so she tried to keep herself that way just for you. But it seems you didn't notice. Julio, if you lose her you lose us, but when you lost yourself and stopped writing about us, you lost her. And I imagine that happened a long time ago already. You have to get her back, dear.

Those last words echoed in my head. The touch of her hand numbed me and suddenly I felt the hole shutting up, but that didn't calm my anxiety. My chest was now completely empty. I closed my eyes, accepting what was in front of me and what they were saying. I had to get her back, I had to make everything go back to how it was before, fight against time... I had to be myself again.

—Julio? What are you doing?

I opened my eyes.

Suddenly, they were all gone. There was neither Imelda, nor Miguel, nor Marius, nor the brunette girl I had never named, nor the decadent characters whom the years had made pitiful. Nor was I where I thought I was before. I no longer pressed my back against the wall next to the door, cornered by a small crowd: I was still inside the office, but sitting in front of a mess of sheets and ink lying on the desk, with my hands painfully clutching the armrest of an old wooden chair. Although it was no longer the hand of my old character, someone was holding my face. Pamela was looking at me frightened when I realized it was her. "You- You came back... Why did you come back?" I mumbled almost incomprehensibly.

—What did you do, Julio? What are you doing? —she impatiently repeated, moving a pair of eyes that were trying to find any evidence of life inside my lost gaze. She couldn't stop shaking.

—I… I think I was trying to get us back, my love—I finally replied, with tears in my eyes.