All lives begin before birth: there’s a mother rereading a list of names before bedtime, indecisive, or a father imagining the face of a baby who doesn’t yet exist. There are years of desire, wilting in silence, or the frenzied rhythm of regret. There’s peace—paid for dearly—after a long pause, or a dark room demanding to be occupied. There’s the wait that will put an end to unbearable solitude, or perhaps the fear of a new presence arriving to disrupt everything. No matter what, all lives begin before birth.
I would’ve liked to have thought the same of my own life, but I’m convinced that my tiny body, curled up in a dark corner of my mother’s womb, was incapable of arousing any feeling in anyone. It took me an entire life, twenty-four short years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet, to be able to say this without pain. I wonder about the period when I was sick without knowing it, about how life sails along peacefully when you ignore sadness. My story is also about that: about time. About time you can’t get back, because you can’t ever get back time. And about fear, too, because one day you’re afraid of one thing and the next day you’re afraid of everything. And surely this story of mine shows that when someone comes up to you and tells you, don’t grow up too quickly, brio and beauty fade so fast, you must know they speak the truth.
It is nighttime. The people I loved are sleeping. But perhaps not Rita and, resting on the windowsill of the apartment in the city, she tries to convince herself that nothing can shatter her world’s equilibrium. From the window she sees people she doesn’t know. Someone returning home after a long day looks up at the sky before opening their door, as if making a wish. They find the blackness vaguely overwhelming. Or someone sees the light on in Rita’s room and their eyes meet for a second, from a distance, observing one another with astonishment. All this is to say that we exist because others remember us: perhaps, probably, Rita is thinking of me, of the things we did, as she looks out the window into the pitch-black night.
Líton was my name. Twenty-four years old was my age. Unvarnished compressed pine was my coffin. Hellish heat was the weather. Scorched, the landscape. The rest is very long, because stories are always long, even when a life hasn’t failed or triumphed, like mine, even when a life is nothing more than a bit of space and many hours together. Now I try to separate myself from time. I’m explaining the pillars that sustain this story as if I wasn’t the one who built them. No other kingdom will come, none that aren’t already on this earth at least. Oblivion is a part of the body you haven’t used yet. That must be why I think it’s too soon to talk about the people I’ve loved as memories. Despite this, I can’t stop imagining what the living will say about me: the people who loved me, the people who didn’t even know who I was, who knew nothing about me, who merely sensed a shadow that came and went in the town, a shadow of a boy who had only just become a man, coupled with a landscape like the echo of a voice lost in the vastness of the valley, a town everyone just called the town: it’s easy to forget a place with no name.
I wasn’t from the town. I was from the city. A city three valleys away. I came to the town because my parents bought a house there. That’s what city people with the money for a house did—they said the town, the town!, like someone saying wake me up from the nightmare of oblivion! But it had been many years since the last rain, and the cracked earth was thirstier than a hundred dogs barking throughout the night. Where there is no water, there is nothing. I would go to the town on weekends. This was after the Service and before the fires. The train would leave me at the station, I would wander uphill until the first roofs and the gray mountain crowning them appeared on the horizon. The hot air whistled through the streets. The sun pointed at me. Fire comes where there’s no water, but everyone forgets that. I would’ve liked to think that the town wasn’t crowded into some corner, abandoned by time; I’m trying to imagine a piece of moon in the sky just to believe there’s still a bit of light stretched out over the place.
Rita lived in the Colony. The Colony was a fistful of houses on the mountain peak, white houses the mine had turned gray, clinging to the earth as if they were bedrock, scaling the sheer summit and defying the landscape. The miners lived there with their families. Old people lived there, tired people. Old women lived there, lined up in front of the doors seeking shade, gathered at the laundry pool chatting for hours, discussing the Colony and the young folk and how life often goes on too long. From there, the town gleamed in the valley like a mirage. With distance and time, things can seem pretty, but they aren’t, and the people of the Colony would say the town, the town!, like someone saying give me back my piece of history!
I met Rita when her story was already braided into that cursed stretch of land and would be forever. The pain of loneliness is a very particular pain; I knew that when I met her and I knew it, above all, because when I saw her I discovered that her primal pain was also my own. We became friends. That meant that for a while we tried to camouflage our sadness with euphoria, and we succeeded. When you’re sad and you want to disappear, it isn’t you who wants to die, it’s the you you were before. And suddenly, by each other’s side, we wanted to disappear a little less: we convinced each other that this was the promise of friendship.
Upon waking, you don’t really remember anything from your best dreams and worst nightmares, only the memory of your body twisting and turning in certain ways throughout the night. That was how I was with Rita, when Rita was with me, like I was in the worst nightmare or the best of dreams. It’s true that she carried her stories with her and I, mine. We convinced each other we could pretend they weren’t there and I’m not sure we succeeded. But we tried. And sometimes trying is almost like succeeding. Believe me. We didn’t speak the word Colony just as we didn’t speak the word father, the word childhood, the word future. Those were words we’d agreed not to say to each other. And so we didn’t say them.
The Service came first. Before the town and before meeting Rita and, obviously, before the fires. I can say it now: it came before everything, because love draws a line at the beginning and at the end of things that aren’t important, which is pretty much everything. Then one day love shows up and all you can say is: before everything, before all this. Or after, after all this. And “all this” is love. I also tell myself that it’s crazy to talk about the Service and about love as a single thing, but all stories have a hidden side and the unexpected always lies in wait, ferocious, behind a corner. There isn’t much you can say about love when you’re in it, because everything gets fogged over with excitement, and there isn’t much you can say about it when it’s done, because everything gets fogged over with sadness. And in the end you don’t actually say anything. And maybe that’s for the best. It’s almost definitely for the best. Still, I hold onto his name: René.
It’s not easy to talk about the fires either. Let your senses wander as much as your thoughts do: your eyes will see it without looking. Fire. You aren’t searching for it, but it finds you still. The memory of the fires is older than our memory, and it’s always hard to accept that there are things that began before us and will continue on after us. The fires don’t hurt because they destroy everything; they hurt because they never destroy enough. When fire comes you wish for it to obliterate all the pain, all the memories, your whole childhood; you wish all of it would go up in flames, but the truth is it never does.
Nobody wants to be the one who doesn’t make it. My desire to do things began when I found out I wouldn’t have the time. That’s how we all are. It’s easier to fight an enemy when it has a name, but I had to invite the enemy in despite being unable to greet him. I would’ve liked to break the silence and to never be buried, for my body to be evidence of the ravages of time and what others tried to hide about me, shown in an open coffin and, written on my forehead: I died of silence, the diagnosis was silence, the cause of death was silence, what was waiting for me on the other side was silence. Or for someone to stand up during the funeral and ask what I’d died of, who I’d gone to bed with, where I’d wandered in the city on nights when I didn’t know what to do, searching desperately for a bit of love, like the trembling lights of streetlamps when darkness falls. For now I stay here, waiting to hear my name, waiting for someone, at some point, to say out loud that this spectacle was real, that this was my way of leaving.
When you are sick, all you can do is wonder what the point of your illness is. I mean if it showed up to make you better, if it was about changing you to be like the others, if you now have to learn how to absorb the stillness surrounding you or whether you’ll ever be able to swallow the small growth in your throat that formed when you learned there was no cure. But I only had the words they’d been repeating about what was sliding around inside me, as if it were only words sliding around inside me. As if my illness were other people’s words. Their stories.
I’d grown up with the stories others had told me as if they were mine, but they weren’t, and when you hear the same stories that many times you think you lived through them yourself, and it takes you a whole life, twenty-four years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet, to discover what is true and what isn’t. My parents, who spoke about their youth with nostalgia. The guys in the Service, who longed for the world beyond, as if they’d ever experienced it. The old women in the Colony, who described a landscape that didn’t exist, animals that were no longer there. The guys in the hospice, who regretted the things they’d hadn’t done, because we always regret the things we haven’t done more than the things we have. And my illness, which was a fistful of words that was destroying me from within.
Now I wish for the orderliness that distance brings. To be up high and look down, or to be down below and watch how the sky moves in circles, how the clouds form and disperse in a practiced choreography, how the few remaining pigeons return each dusk to the same nest, and how, tomorrow morning, the east will be the east again. Or to be up high and see that, down below, a town is just a grid spread out on a map and nothing more, a grid that flickers with lights that spark on as the darkness commences. The gleam that lights up the windows when the day has yet to be born, and the black silhouettes that move along the panes, making coffee, dressing, living. The paths drawn into the mountain and the people who travel along them. The earth that doesn’t change color because there is only one color. The fences that separate the dry fields and the doors that allow you through them. The reflection the clouds imprint on the earth. And how the tree trunks themselves, the houses themselves, the people themselves cast a different shadow depending on the sun’s angle. Things remain in place yet shadows are always different.
When you tell a story, people want it to have an order. People don’t know that stories, if you give them order, aren’t stories but lies. It makes me think that what people really want to hear are lies. It’s sad to reach the end of this story, I want to keep going, keep telling and telling and telling stories. I want to stop mistrusting the parts I don’t remember about my life. I want to stop imagining what would’ve happened if it had all gone differently. I want to believe that I can still say all the things I didn’t say when I should have.
Mom, don’t walk down the street with arrogance. Time is running out.
René, let me forget how the sun shone on your skin. Let me forget you.
Rita, my friend, you have bees in your stomach; one day, they’ll turn into dragons who will eat you from within. Feed them.
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From Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch. Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2026. Copyright © 2026 by Pol Guasch. All rights reserved.