Christmas Spirit
fiction
Based on the “Merry Christmas” prompt, and taking up his challenge to write a story in 5 minutes, I wrote the text I'm sharing with you now.
I shook his hand. I felt his cold, wrinkled hand, with the touch and taste of loneliness, a cold, dry, rough hand. Despite the harsh touch, I felt involved when that hand slowly pulled mine away and Paul's two arms wrapped around my body in a warm, affectionate embrace, a protective, enveloping hug that tasted like affection.
Paul was an aged man, but smiling nonetheless. He must have been no more than 40 years old, but he looked like he had already passed 70 years. The wrinkles that crease the skin of his face are like rivers that have dried up, they are the mark of something that once lived, and now serves as an archive of memories through which tears flow on days of despair. When I met Paul, on a cold winter's day, one of those days when the morning fog seems eternal, it occurred to me to think that the dried-up rivers that crease the skin of his face are rivers of memory. Paul doesn't agree, he says that they are rivers of experience, which carry learning from a time that has passed into the present. Paul speaks like a philosopher, and I really enjoy hearing him talk about time, memory and the life he once had, which is now just a memory.
- memory doesn't belong to the past, on the contrary, it lives in the present, as if it had the ability to travel through time,
Ever since I met him, Paul has never spoken to me about his family. For some reason I've never had the courage to ask him either. The only thing I know about his past is his dry, cold, rough hands, which taste of loneliness and emptiness.
Paul doesn't look happy or sad. He seems lost in his thoughts, like someone who's looking to find an escape from the pain that beats in his heart. However, I feel that Paul is a good man, and that's all I sensed when he suddenly took my hand and his two arms embraced me, in a warm and affectionate hug that contrasted with the amorphous and absorbed bustle of the city.
It feels good to receive a hug when all the city has to offer is strangers, people who walk around like ghosts and make a point of looking busy, as if they're afraid of being seen from the inside.
Throughout these 20 years of friendship, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't remember Paul, a homeless man with a wrinkled face who hugged me, with no expectation of receiving food or shelter, and held out his hand to me in a gesture of friendship, saying “Merry Christmas”.
Paul doesn't know it, but my lonely heart, which knows abandonment, loneliness and helplessness, remembers that cold winter's day when a homeless man wandering around the city saved my life when my family left on Christmas Day.
Rolando Andrade, 2024
What a gorgeous piece of writing! I have no words. Melancholy and real it feels like you've just shared something very personal. There's one thing I don't like though.... the AI image, I would have liked a real picture. But it's Christmas so I shouldn't be critical. I love your story and that's what counts. Thank you and Merry Christmas.
It's quite amazing that you wrote this fine, coherent story in only five minutes! That line in the second paragraph really tells a tale about Paul: "He must have been no more than 40 years, but he looked as if he had already passed 70 years." Paul's premature aging seems to be attributed to "rivers of experience", and the writer also hints that he is separated from his family and quite lonely because of this. This is a very focused and compassionate story.