Sacrifice

History can happen in a single moment, but writing it can last decades. 

Maybe that is why I didn't understand at first the meaning of the revolution. I couldn´t. I was young, and maybe that is not that good of an excuse nowadays, but it sure was then. Nevertheless, I do remember when it happened. I remember the fear, the uncertainty and over all, the fire. Every new beginning must start with the ashes of the old world, but everybody always seems to forget what it takes to build a new one. How destructive fire can be. And how it can warm up the hearts of millions with just a spark of hope from a promise, the promise of new land, a new world. 

I was eleven. Maybe not that young after all. But where I was born, parents will always try to protect their children, even though their knowledge and experience is the cost. So when I saw the first fire, I didn't understand. I took the subway that day. I shouldn't have, but I was late and my bike got stolen and in those days, time mattered. And for an eleven year old, the consequences of being late were unimaginable, worse than any other thing that could have happened to me on that 6 minute ride on the sub. Because I couldn't have known. 

It is weird, you know? First the calm, then the chaos, not the other way around like I was taught. “First, there was chaos. Darkness. Then came the light”. No, not this time. Those six minutes were all the calm I had before the fire came. And ironically, all I can remember from those six minutes are the smell of chicken and sweat, the old man reading the newspaper and the lady with the dark bags under her eyes holding a baby. She was young and pretty, with long soft hair and beautiful brown eyes, but she looked like a veteran coming back home after the war. She looked exhausted. Now that I think about it, pretty much everyone on the subway had that same look, the one from the dead living people my brother used to tell me about. Those are the people who live without living, who feel without actually feeling anything, just empty eyes staring at the nothingness of the tunnel. The only exception was the young student, tired too, but with dreams and ambitions to keep him alive. I remember how he was the only one, on a wagon full with people, brave enough to give up his seat for the young lady. Maybe that isn't such an important detail to the story. Yes, maybe not, but you have to understand that for an eleven year old girl, who had been taught that there was nothing here but selfish people, this was an event from another world. This didn't happen here. It wasn't supposed to be this way, because that is what I had been taught: Selfish people don't do anything nice like giving up your seat at the subway on a thursday afternoon for the young lady with bags under her eyes holding the baby, and in this place, there is nothing more than selfish people, and there is no one to blame for it other then ourselves. So when that boy 一because he was no other thing then a boy一 stood up, I felt all the eyes of the subway turn, and then everything came all at once and until this day, I am not sure how and in what order it happened, but hell it did happen and boy I was young and naive. Maybe if I had known, I would have been prepared for the announce in the speakers that we were arriving  at the next station, and the noise of the subway suddenly being very loud, louder than before as the lights became brighter and the people looked at the young boy with strange looks, just when I remembered that I was supposed to call my aunt because we were meeting the next day to grab lunch together. And of course, the fire. The screams. And the ashes of the subway station covering the windows. 

There was a moment when no one knew what to do. Even the old man with the newspaper, who looked wise and important, had suddenly lost the power he held with his expression, now covered with uncertainty. There were announces through the speakers: there was no way we were getting out here, we would have to wait until the next station, approximately four minutes away, we should stay seated (the boy didn´t, he was standing next to the lady with the now crying baby) and calmed, it would all be over soon. If only they knew that the revolution would last for another eight years, eight years before the calm would finally come after the chaos. I don't remember anything from those four minutes.

We arrived at the station two minutes before hell broke down. I went with the flood of people who were going up the stairs, trying to get a signal to call Evelyn to tell her that I was late. Because if there is something worse than being late, it is being late without giving a heads up that you are late. Having no reasons why you let someone down. 

I first smelt the smoke. Then everything else. There was a wave of people running outside, screaming. I saw the red and blue flashing lights against the broken concrete of the street while I tried to understand why so many people were outside on a Thursday afternoon. Something was very wrong. 

I was small, even for an eleven year old, so I tried to get somewhere high, away from the barricades, away from the chaos. Although I was naive and I didn't know much, I was raised here, so I knew that this was a confrontation, the first signs of the revolution that my parents talked about after my brother and I left the table to go to sleep. 

I turned around a corner and I found myself looking at a group of juveniles searching in the dumpsters for things to burn, something to keep the revolution alive. Looking back, I am pretty sure that they were high, but at the moment, I just thought that they looked like they belonged to an entirely different world, a different reality that went beyond what I could possibly imagine with the mind of an eleven year old. 

So I ran in the other direction, as I was told by my parents to do in front of this kind of scenario. And I ran and ran and ran until I remembered that I hadn't called my aunt, or Evelyn, and I was late and I forgot my backpack on the subway, next to the tired lady and her baby and the old man reading the newspaper and the boy, whose hopes and futures would be destroyed with this revolution, a sacrifice for the hopes and dreams of the generation to come. My generation.