Bob’s journey

He opened up his eyes and found himself in bed, surrounded by tubes, wires, and a machine that biped. He had no idea who he was or where, but some people dressed in light-colored outfits and wearing face masks kept checking on him as he was some kind of exotic creature. One of them pointed at his eye with a flashlight. He heard words he couldn’t understand and went blank.

The next time he woke, he was feeling terrible. A woman some years younger than him was sitting in a chair in his room, holding two balloons both with a number 8 in them. “Happy birthday, dear Bob”, she said. He experienced something warm inside of him, a nice feeling, as he set his eyes on her, but he didn’t feel strong enough to talk. He fell back asleep before she went away.

As days and months went by, Bob gained his forces. Nurses removed the nasogastric serum and his organism started to produce processed food at first, and later on, solid ones. He could sit on the wheelchair for longer periods, and the woman –was she his niece? He couldn’t tell for sure– would take him out for walks in the hospital garden. At some time, he felt secure enough to stand for himself, and, with the help of a cane, take some walks on his own.

Then one day, the lady, who was not his niece but a social assistant, as she would introduce herself, signed him out of the hospital and took him to an apartment: it was dusty, full of trash, and to make things worse, the woman brought an old cat with her. Bob and the cat remained there. However, because Bob’s mind became clearer, the following days he did some tidying up and took water from the pots of the dead plants on the balcony until they became green and leafy.

By the time he turned 85, he started visiting a certain spot by the county lake. He would experience a certain melancholy there at first, which became a way more violent grief in time, until one day, he started absorbing moisture through his eyes with all his strength, the name Anna came in flashes along with new waves of pain. That kept happening for months, and the emotion was more and more intense each time. Until there was that afternoon in spring, the sun was rising in the west, and flowers were turning inside their blooms, and suddenly, a gust of wind brought a cloud of grey ashes to an urn Bob was holding. He took the urn to a funerary home, and the following day he, along with friends and family, retired the corpse of an old woman. A black car delivered the dead woman to the hospital, where the body was reconnected to a bunch of wires and an iron lung. Doctors put their hands on Bob’s shoulders, and with a quiet sound, Anna breathed for the first time and came to life. Bob stood by her side until she became healthier and together, they moved to the apartment. Now, Bob was wearing on his finger the golden ring he had always had on a chain around his neck. Anna wore a similar ring.

Anna’s presence changed everything: the whole place was full of light, filled with fresh flowers, the curtains always open, and visitors always dropping by to produce some tea and biscuits which she would take off the plates and put in the oven until they cooled so much they became a dough, which she would split into different products: flour, sugar, eggs… she put those in paper bags and took them to the supermarket in exchange for money.

As for the cat, it had become such a tiny kitten, that one day Anna and Bob took him to an animal shelter. Several weeks after, they got a new pet though: another cat they dug out from that very same spot by the lake. Bob could already handle a shovel, and he felt strong enough to go to work every day. There was no need to pay money to the retirement insurance company; instead, he kept paying to his employer now. 

As for Anna, her wrinkles got smaller and faded into smoother skin, as her grey hair got darker and darker. The couple started expressing their love through one another in many different forms by now. For instance, they would wake up, roll into each other’s arms, and burst into what felt like an implosion of intense pleasure, following all sorts of kisses and caresses, until they both put on their clothes and, with a tender kiss, go back to doing whatever they were supposed to be doing.

As Anna and Bob grew younger, Anna gained an increased hearing ability and became fond of playing the piano, something she was great at, and children would come to their apartment to forget their complex songs and go to play simple scales instead. At the same time, after getting up from a fall in the street, Bob experienced a sudden improvement of his left knee, which would never hurt again. Almost immediately, the couple began playing tennis matches at a nearby club: it was so satisfactory, to begin each match with a random result and end up always with an even 0-0!

After returning from a trip to Paris, and receiving an important amount of money at the travel agency on their way back, they celebrated their love surrounded by hundreds of people. Anna wore for that occasion a white dress she had kept in the bottom of the closet ever since she came to the apartment. After the party, the two of them went to City Hall and erased their names from the marriage records. Anna moved in with her parents. Bob went to live with a roommate. That didn’t stop them from going on dates and playing tennis together, until one day, after going together into the coffee shop of the club, when both of them went to play a match with different partners: Bob went with Patricia, Anna went with John, and the two of them never saw each other again.

After Patricia, Bob dated Carol, and then Jackie. By that time, he was enrolled in college, a frustrating stage in his life as he felt like a complete failure. However, after every exam, some of his bad credits were removed, until he was left blank, an enthusiast teenager with his mind full of dreams and expectations. Both of his parents came suddenly into his life when two cars were generated from a big implosion in the middle of the road, two broken corpses crashed into one of them, and became a living man and a woman who would love him tenderly and take care of him, more and more as he became a younger boy.

His childhood was happy and carefree: he enjoyed the summers on the beach the most, destroying sandcastles and taking water from a pit into the ocean, producing delicious ice-creams, and unlearning how to ride the bicycle. But after some years, little Bobby was so young that he could not be left on his own anymore: he started absorbing liquids and solids anywhere so his mum decided it was time to put him on diapers.

He forgot every word he could speak (“mum” was the last one he ever said) and he became a whiny baby. He spent the last months of his life mostly in her mother’s arms, asleep, or producing sweet breast milk her body absorbed. Then one day, his parents took him off the cradle and into the hospital, where the doctors separated him from his mother’s embrace. He could hear for the last time her father’s voice, saying “welcome to the world, my boy!”, as her mother’s body opened up to receive him and one doctor helped him enter his final and definite home.