What I See and Feel
I see the old part of a city as if coated in black moss, the aftermath of some pandemic.
Everything lies still.
It fills me with a mix of sorrow, rage, and nostalgia.
The Story
We Are Legend
I no longer even wonder about the origin of the Tyranno pandemic.
Sometimes, in the mornings, I wander through Havana’s streets and admire the buildings once erected by the great Spanish and North American families. I gaze nostalgically at cars frozen mid-street, all cracked, rusted, and crumbling—eaten away by the same bacteria that killed us all, sparing neither stone nor metal.
But I don’t ask about its origins anymore. What’s the point in knowing the source of a lethal affliction when your future has been stolen?
I don’t even ask how I’ve survived. Sometimes I touch my shoulders and head and think I’m a ghost. Or that I’m trapped inside a decades-long nightmare.
I walk the sidewalks where I’ve placed mannequins, their faces painted with smiles and expressions of awe, of joy for life. Sometimes I ask them about their parents’ health or their children’s games. Other times, I’ve courted a girl among them. But only the migratory birds that occasionally streak across the city’s sky offer any reply.
I can’t leave this island—nothing works, not the boats nor the planes. But sometimes I also believe the world has abandoned us, as if we’ve become a museum—like Auschwitz—a reminder (for Humanity’s future) of what went horribly wrong, what was too terrible to ever repeat.
I hope to wake up someday. I suppose, as the poet Paul Éluard once sang, “Everything exists in my mind.”
