Distant friend

I can't think of myself without thinking of everyone's tragedy.

But I'm going to make a parenthesis.

During the pandemic I made a friend, at an age where you don't make friends like that anymore.

We knew each other from before.

Starting in March 2020, when the confinement was decreed in my country, we began to send each other WhatsApp audios with recipes, data on places to buy knives, fish, and wine.

Little by little, the life that matters began to creep in: the anguish, the jobs.

They were longer and longer audios, a diary of laughter and bewilderment.

A view of his world, different from mine, and mine, different from his.

The frigidity of technology was, for us, a nest.

Now, that friend is far from Buenos Aires, traveling through a Central American country.

But, like when we're both in the same city, or in cities that aren't ours—Venice, London,

Cartagena—, we send audios to each other every day: I woke up at dawn, ate a delicious pizza, how is writing going?

I am surly, and he makes me less surly.

I am silent and he sometimes makes me speak.

My father kept a photo of his best friend.

They had lived high adventures.

That friend traveled to the Bahamas and, from there, sent him a

in which the two are seen standing, shoulder to shoulder, in a wasteland.

It had been taken in Brazil.

She had this inscription: "Only the friend is missing so that everything is the same."

I stole it and carried it with me throughout primary school.

When I got bored, or felt sad, I looked at her.

I wanted to have, sometime, a friend like that, who loved me so much that he felt that without me, he was not the same.

Now, my friend is far away, between beaches and volcanoes, and I am in the pampas, surrounded by wheat, the pure light, the water.

We are all far from everyone, cruelty is what reigns.

We always do wrong.

But my friend speaks to me from afar, he tells me that he eats arepas, that he drinks coconut water, and says, without saying it: "I think of you, you are with me."

That's enough.

Happy New Year.

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