A fresh start · fiction
Starting over from zero in another place
A 2041 story about a Colombian family that loses its village to a flood and climbs the mountain carrying what fits in a backpack and what fits in nothing.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
In the year 2041, the river decided to go back to where it had been before people.
It rained forty days in a region of Colombia where it used to rain ten. The village sat on the river's bend, as villages always do, because it's on the bend that the water leaves the land richest. On the night the water rose, it didn't ask permission. It came in through the doors, took the chickens, took the school, took the cemetery with the dead inside, as if it wanted to take memory too.
The man woke with water at his ankles. He picked up his six-year-old daughter, his wife grabbed the backpack that had been ready for weeks, ever since the radio began to warn, and the three of them climbed the mountain in the dark, guided by the sound of others also climbing.
Up there, in the morning, he looked down.
There was no village anymore. There was a brown lake, with the church roof showing in the middle, and a bicycle caught in a tree branch, turning its wheel slowly, as if still pedaling somewhere.
He was thirty-eight and had nothing. The backpack held three changes of clothes, documents in a plastic bag, a flashlight, a packet of arepas and a little music box his daughter wouldn't leave behind. That was all.
The girl opened the music box. It played an old waltz, metallic, which her great-grandmother had received on her wedding day, long before anyone on that mountain had been born.
The music opened a door backward.
The man saw his grandmother, as a girl, listening to that music when it was still new, in a village that wasn't that one, because his grandmother had also come from somewhere else. She was fleeing a war, around the fifties of the last century, and had arrived at the river's bend with a music box and nothing more. He saw his great-grandfather, further back, leaving yet another place, for another reason. He saw a line of people from his family, crossing centuries, all carrying little, all arriving somewhere they knew no one, all starting from zero.
He understood that his family had never belonged to a place. It had belonged to a movement.
Zero, which that morning had seemed like the end, now seemed the most common starting point in human history. No one is born in a place that has existed forever. Every place was, one day, the mountain someone climbed with a backpack.
On the slope, other families were waking up. Someone lit a fire. An old woman began cutting her arepas into smaller pieces to give to more people. A young man he didn't know appeared with a tarp and asked if anyone knew how to tie it.
The man did. He had tied fishing nets his whole life.
He got up, took one end of the tarp and began. He didn't think about the future, which was too big. He thought about the knot, which was the size of his hands. One knot, and then another.
When the tarp was standing, his daughter went under it with the music box and said that was the new house.
No one corrected her.
Bairo says he started over from zero more than once, in a country that wasn't yet his, and that the fresh start had a neighborhood address. Read: The sun is for everyone.
The way forward
Starting from zero is humanity's oldest starting point, not your private shame. When the future is too big, think about the next knot: the task the size of your hands. Look for those climbing the same mountain; a fresh start made together weighs less.