Our children's war was wanting to be older; young, scratch a few hours, come home later. Later, the war was to earn our bread, to steal a kiss, to be independent, to peek at life even if it broke our faces. Later, I reached the end of my sin, the rope around my neck, to survive as a freelancer in a country that is devouring us. Our wars were the small towns, that schools and clinics do not close, that there be pediatricians for the few children, that the elderly do not die of loneliness and that the young do not go to take root anywhere.
Our war was the departure of mus, take the car or stay home for the weekend; the Madrid or the
Barça, seagulls or roses, Bach or hard rock; the unfair distribution of opportunities, this inequality between East and West and also on this border bordering the Duero, so silenced.
Our war was to go out at night without fear, to fight for the future of a dying land, to try to change destiny at the polls, which insist on never changing it. They talked about us at nationals like our wars are important even if they don't put us on the map. Our war was to sneak out in confinement; to survive fear and illness thinking that we would come out betters, stronger; recover the old normality, which sounds as far away as the Old Testament.
And the war came, this war that one declares and in which we all die; a threat to who we are knocking on our door. Your war without reason or heart, that breaks freedom at its core, that strangles the cry of those who only want peace and bread. Your war, which tramples on the most basic right of human beings, life, with a criminal like Putin threatening the world, juggling with his finger on a button while brainy theoreticians debate whether he is a communist or a capitalist. What difference does it make, if his war kills thousands of innocents, if so much death doesn't need color or surnames. The same shit, this madness that nobody stops.
Battles on the edge of nowhere. One button and it won't even matter if Mañueco dances in Vox's arms after his pyrrhic victory. Our wars today will be borage water.
