THE NEIGHBOUR

I was planning to write about something else today, but then we got this phone call…

You know in big cities people can come across each other day after day without knowing our names, just saying “Hi” and smiling. This was my case with him.

He was living with his family in the building next to our, we even shared the same parking spot, one car close to the other.

His presence became familiar to me, six years ago, when I saw him with his crutches trying to walk along the square where we both lived.

He was tall, handsome and stout, on his early fifties and far from being the talkative kind as he always avoided saying “Hello” if he could, but I knew from the very beginning that is burden was a heavy load.

He became “the neighbour” to us, that was his nick each time we talked about him.

He used to spend the whole morning walking up and down the street, resting from time to time on a bench under a tree, leaning on his crutches now and then, crestfallen, without looking at people, keeping his eyes on his long legs.

You will have noticed, as I did, that sometimes he was feeling ashamed for being as tall as one could hardly ignore tall people, but he just kept walking and walking and walking, up and down, up and down, leaving behind him a delicate men’s fragrance.

His face was expressionless, hardly a smile on his lips, always walking lonesome without the support of a friend, his wife or his kids. This is just an observation not a statement, as he surely was too proud to show weakness.

And as years went by he had become an usual presence, so usual that I didn’t even notice the fact that he was not walking anymore.

We know those things happen in big cities, in a neighbourhood of twenty families, those things, how sad to say that, are pretty normal nowadays.

A ringtone on my husband’s cell phone this morning – he is the president of our residents’ association – informed us that he had just passed away, silently with his exquisite discretion.

I’m feeling sick till then and I have to bow as he played all his cards, he fiercely fought for six years to defeat that bloody shit called bone cancer… he lost.

I’m just feeling terribly sick. I might as well have shared a little more than just a short “Hi” and a smile, I might as well have said: “Hello… what a beautiful day. How are you doing today?”