The day had begun with relentless rain—more like a downpour. That night, a fierce storm had battered the city, filling the air with a tension that didn't seem ready to dissipate. Martín was trapped in his indecision, staring out the window, his heart pounding. He had to take the car and drive 100 kilometers to a city where a job interview awaited him, his last chance. The bank had been clear: if he didn't pay in two months, he'd lose the house.
"Damn Covid," he muttered under his breath, a venom rooted deep in his soul. Everything had happened in the blink of an eye. Two years ago, he caught the virus, and since then, his life had slowly crumbled. The suffocating cough, memory problems, the inability to concentrate—they were all to blame for his dismissal. That day, he almost lost everything and nearly punched his boss when he handed him the termination letter, but fear paralyzed him. He accepted the letter, the ridiculous severance, and returned to the tiny apartment he could barely afford.
The days passed, the same, tasteless. His friends tried to cheer him up, but their words were ghosts vanishing into the air. "The storm will pass," they said. But at that very moment, a thunderclap echoed in the distance, deep, unsettling. Martín laughed, a bitter, almost deranged laugh. "The storm is only just beginning," he thought.
After a breakfast he couldn't taste, he got into the car. He started the engine with a sigh and set the GPS. Outside, the rain kept falling, as if the sky itself wanted to crush him under its weight. The horizon, shrouded in leaden clouds, seemed like a threat in itself. There was no light, no hope, just the road leading him to his uncertain destination. He knew the journey was only a formality. There was no way out.
The highway was a trap of water and shadows, and as he drove, the bad weather seemed to close in around him like a dark claw. Distant thunder heralded chaos, but one particularly brutal bolt struck so close that its flash blinded him. For a few seconds, Martín saw nothing, only a white void that chilled his blood. In his mind, an ancient fear shook him: "I'm going to die here, in this storm." Trembling, he decided to stop at the next service station. He needed another coffee, any excuse to get out of that rolling coffin.
When he spotted a service station, he almost sighed with relief. He parked quickly and dashed inside, though the rain soaked him in the short run. As he stepped into the place, a chill ran down his spine. Something was wrong.
The place was a relic of another time, with decor seemingly stuck in the 80s. Faded posters of old movies hung on the walls, and the dusty shelves were filled with cassette tapes—something he hadn't seen in ages. But it wasn't just the aesthetics; it was the atmosphere. The place was empty. There was no sign of other travelers, no cars. Only silence, broken by the hum of fluorescent lights.
He walked to the counter, looking for warmth, maybe a coffee—something to ground him in reality. "A coffee and a toast, please," he said in a dry voice, but the bartender stared at him before responding.
"Right away, Martín," the man said. His voice was low, almost a whisper. Martín felt a shiver run down his spine. How did he know his name?
When he returned to the main room, something had changed. The lights were dimmer, almost gloomy, and the place was wrapped in a sort of ghostly twilight. Martín felt the air grow thick, oppressive. He walked over to one of the shelves, and then he saw it: they weren't just cassette tapes. They were his tapes. The albums he'd collected in his youth. He crouched to inspect them more closely, and his heart skipped a beat when he also found some of his old video games, the ones he'd played for endless summer afternoons on his old Commodore.
At first, a warm nostalgia enveloped him. The idea of staying in this haven, surrounded by the happiest memories of his life, seemed comforting—a cozy refuge in the midst of the darkness. There was his old bicycle, a symbol of endless afternoons of freedom, his favorite video games that had stolen countless hours from him, and photos of his friends, from those days when everything seemed fine. For a brief moment, he felt something akin to peace. Here, at least, the bitterness of the present couldn't reach him.
But the illusion didn't take long to crumble. Soon, a more bitter feeling settled in his chest. What was the point of all this? Yes, there was his bike, but there was no road to ride it on. The video games, which had once been his escape, now felt useless; he knew them by heart, and the ending was always the same. The photos, those frozen fragments in time, only reminded him of what he'd lost. What good was a picture of his friends if he could no longer laugh, talk, or share new moments with them? Everything around him was a shadow of what once was, empty and devoid of the spark of life that had given it meaning.
The rarefied air of the place began to suffocate him. What had initially been a refuge soon revealed itself as an emotional prison. What tore him apart most wasn't the absence of those objects, but the realization that memories, no matter how perfect, could never replace life itself. What he longed for was no longer within reach. He was trapped in a museum of his own memory, surrounded by dead relics, inanimate, incapable of giving him what he truly needed: the present.
Bitterness consumed him completely. Life, with all its imperfections and miseries, had been stolen from him, and the only thing left was this empty corner, where time didn't move and memories, instead of comforting him, gnawed at him from the inside.