– ‘Please, come with me. I need out of here. I can’t stand it any more’
It was a Winter day, in the middle of a class. The creative entrepreneur and his friend, Mark, were eighteen and studied together their first year in college.
– ‘Yeah, let’s get out. Where do you want to go?’, he replied in a whisper.
– ‘I don’t care. Come on, please. I need air’.
They went out of the classroom and onto the corridor, then into the gents’. It was a wide room, with a big window, on a third floor.
Mark was collapsing by the second. He could barely breath. He cried and shivered as he walked up and down the space as a caged beast. He had never seen him that way.
Suddenly, he set his eyes on the window. –‘I will end all this for good’. And run towards it.
– ‘Wait! Talk to me! Tell me what’s happening!’.
Mark stopped. He swallowed and, in his tears, spoke.
– ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. I didn’t choose this. This is not my life. I can’t find myself. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where to go to find me’.
They looked at each other. The hopelessness in his friend’s eyes got stuck in his heart as a knife. His own eyes replied in tenderness, understanding and curiosity.
– ‘Where do you want to go? You don’t need to go anywhere to find you. You are you already. You are already here’.
Mark stood still. His throat got up, then down, in a sigh. His tears ceased. He looked at his friend, then lowered his eyes. He sat on the window sill and stayed there, in silence, for an eternity. Then brought his eyes back up.
His face had changed. There was no hopelessness any more. Only serenity.
– ‘It’s true. I am me. And I know what I want to do’.
He walked to his friend and hugged him.
– ‘Thank you’.
Several weeks passed. Mark dropped out of college. The following year, he changed his studies and his life.
One day, many years on, they met again on a street in Malaga. And it was just as if they had met the day before.
– ‘How are you, Mark?’
– ‘Happy’.
