Leire

Leire drives through the roads of Germany with her left side window wide open. The warm air coming off the heating escapes through it as fast as the tears pour down her cheeks. It’s minus two degrees outside but Siberian weather inside her guts. She rolls herself a cigarette while holding the wheel with her wrists, hoping for another car to show up at any point so she wouldn’t be the smallest thing in the immense scenery that is the Northern Limestone Alps.

She speeds up her blue ford ranger as if it was the legs she was using to run away from a murder she had committed in self defence. She reaches for the red lighter on the copilot seat, and closes the window to light her cigarette. Her left leg is covered in snow and her lips are dry. She places her hand in the heating valve in between puffs, cries and shreds. Watzmann mountain is staring at her while she stares at the radio, unsure of what will happen if she turns it on.

Her short black hair is covered by a blue hat made of wool that she got in the second hand shop downstairs her house. Her eyebrows, thin but messy, give way to a sad pair of eyes that see nothing in front of her but the years that precede her. The complexity of her pale skin makes the freckles on her nose shine even on the cloudiest of days. The tears that race each other to the unknown, fall off her face as if they were jumping off a cliff hoping the crash to be on water, not rocks.

She throws the cigarette off the window and grabs the steering wheel with both her bony hands as she screams off the top of her lungs. Her right foot pushes the accelerator while she closes her eyes and day dreams about driving to the moon, as if on a magic highway that you take to escape the world and never come back.

Her magic highway had walked out on her a few months earlier after she had an affair with the neighbor. It wasn’t the French guy from next door that she was thrilled about, but rather the way he looked at her and grabbed her thighs. The freshness of having someone look at you as they think you to be, not as you are.

Leire reaches for the radio and turns on a random station. Ludovicos Einaudi’s Experience comes on and as the cue she was waiting for, she goes for the clutch and the brake and stops the world from spinning.

Around her there are bare trees covered in snow, a sunset that is falling on her like a secret never told, and the unworldly sound of the thought that keeps on coming back to her like an itch.

She rests her hands on her knees and leans back as if enchanted by the grandiosity of the music coming through the speakers.

The mysticity of the mountain upon her soothes the breaks of her heart, and the tears on the edge of her eyes don’t burn as they did then. Wondering how she could ever look at life the same way, she begs the universe for forgiveness if she is not strong enough to appreciate beauty anymore.

With a sense of relief that she wasn’t expecting, she opens her eyes to a butterfly sitting on her arm, engorged by the strength of the piano breathing through all the particles in the air. She moves her left hand and with her index finger, she draws a line from her knee to her thigh while dreaming of the magic highway she once had, she once was, and she now needs.

The song comes to an end and so do her tears. Leire looks through the window for what is the longest two seconds of her life, where the sun completely disappears behind this goddess of a mountain that has watched her cry and heard her scream.

Her phone rings vibrating on her back pocket. As if in a slow motion scene from a sci fi film, she pushes her body forward and reaches for it.

-Yeah? She says as she answers.

There’s a long pause.

-That’s it Leire. Mum is gone. Come grab her hand one last time before they take her away.