On Sunday I arrived in Barcelona. Again travelling. Again myself always with me. I decided to stop writing while I was in town because I don't want this journal to be riddled with anxiety and dark thoughts. On Sunday, when I said goodbye to my parents at the baggage reclaim of the train station, I felt trapped in a story doomed to repeat itself: I call it the cancellation of time. It starts this way: Father Mother and I car full speed, fear of missing the train, and all, I repeat all, trying to pretend that nothing happens. All, I repeat all looking for conversations that fill the space that is opening between us, mother pretending that everything is fine while I move away once more, once again, once more distracted by my mobile phone, opening Instagram to try to block Mind that it is no longer present, Mind is now somewhere inside Body inside taking refuge from the wind, that with speed savagely lashes at the window and drags up the mountains and...what do I know?, maybe the faster we travel the further we go and the more sheltered this Mind and I are sheltered somewhere in that car on that seat moving on this earth in the middle of this universe and I am just a body filling the space that exists between us (Mother, Father, Me) until we reach the baggage control and Body embraces Mother who in Ear whispers I love you very much. and because it is in Ear whispered, it reaches Mind that hides refuged and stores the hug the whisper stores the Teary Eyes with the skin around them holding them a little more wrinkled more tired a little of getting up every morning day without rest and a little sadder just like this. Mind, I repeat Mind stores the hug in the same drawer in which all these hugs in front of the baggage control are stored and when Mind opens the drawer and looks at the files, time melts and we no longer know where they are. Mind lost Body embraces Father, but as Father doesn’t whisper, Father cold, holds Body close enough but far enough awkwardly stating that it doesn't know how to act — and because Mind doesn't listen Body feels absolutely nothing. And so, with Mind sheltered somewhere within Body, building walls to protect itself from the wind, we move, thinking about fucking time, about the cancellation of time. Thinking about the impossibility of escaping, now, from a relationship that ended more than nine years ago, with Body and Mind different from Body and Mind now (and I do not speak of Body and Mind as two entities with independent existence or independent form, Body is Mind, consciousness expands and mixes with my muscles and my intestines and it is impossible to separate them. i.e. when Stomach hurts I cannot think outside Body, Body and Mind are the same and sometimes they are different and sometimes they forget about each other, although this is too complicated and I'm already lost). I guess it’s just that time erases and relationships reify and I guess it is difficult to learn how to care about this all, or so I guess I think.

On the train to Barcelona I read an essay by Mark Fisher where he talks about the slow cancellation of time, about lost futures and this is exactly what obsesses me now - to be lost, fuck. Body and Mind change but they move among the rubble of tired Eyes that don’t see.  and each time they become heavier, labyrinths of crumbling walls and before this was a house or a place to hide or take refuge and now dust, now walls, after walls, after walls now they barely hold their weight and between door frames I crawl between empty rooms and we can no longer go out or go in between. A door another door another door rubble rubble rubble (I try, I swear). Because it’s the end of a decade CRISIS, absolute dissolution of the future, weighed down by the weight of tired Eyes watching. Eliminate time as a reference, past, promises of futures riddled with abundance, --Father: study to be something to find work because here we cannot keep you. Abundance and so on. And that was so until the moment just before we began to studied, because then you could be successful (someone could be. they say), at least superficially successful some (we already knew the promise was empty). and before the Tired Eyes of those who always look at the same horizon (read here, the same ones as always the same one horizone though),  tell us to move forward and grow and improve and fulfill YOURTHEIR dreams (but only the dreams of some, of a few, some who wanted to dream within the narrow limits provided by the narrow and suffocating REALITY, obviously). That promised future was just one and so on and so forth, it was always the same and such, completely detached from cultural (?) time (Nazi documentaries on television one after another one after another as if nothing else had happened and in what fucking year do we live? - Father: Do you know about this battle in 1944 ? -- Me: believe me I know about battles).  anchored forever to one present time, developing technology, and now we are more connected than ever, it is great, right? This development was towards a single horizon and that was that or that is so. although this time there was just one future and no time (and only for a few, because for others, I must say, history has never ended), just one time existed (-Father: in my times this didn’t happen, - Me: I believe you, believe me). Now time is different, we can no longer even believe in what, progress was the word? See I can’t even remember (even if it is to reject it, even if it is to criticize and deplore it). Ten years CRISIS CRISIS and a new one CRISIS CRISIS threatening to blur to destroy what we have built, the future we fought for. Caught in the eyes of Tired Eyes to live in a non-existent time (--Mother: when are you going to focus? Stable work? Life plan? You know, family, partner and such, being an adult A FUCKING ADULT.- Me: I am a FUCKING ADULT don’t you see DON’T YOU FUCKING SEE ME?). These Tired Eyes looking at us erect us running among the ruins cuz CRISIS CRISIS of demolished buildings and us alien to the Big World (--ME: But it is here where I find peace, don't you see ?- Father: There is only trash here, I don't know how you can live in these conditions, really. Besides, I don’t REALLY understand you). I don't know, maybe that's why, now more than ever, we have thought of the future as something indeterminate and constantly at stake in the present. I don’t know. I don’t RELLY undersatnd me.

Body and mind come to Barcelona backpack on shoulders we arrive at Pedro's house. (What comes now is boring, I warn you) Soraya comes at about 11:30 p.m. At 21:00 she tells me that we could meet, that she is having a few beers with her colleagues at the bar, that she would soon return to the neighbourhood, etc. But no surprise, at 22.00 she tells me that she arrives in 15 minutes and disappears half an hour until she calls me to tell me that she cannot find number 46. Something had broken in her mind is that logical space that is deteriorating? she doesn’t understand what happens and then oh, then laughter over the phone -Me: perhaps there are more houses on one side of the street than on the other, maybe you have to walk a little more because 46 EXISTS. And well, she comes, much later than we agreed, but I expected it. It is typical of these “artistic” “eccentric” personalities that I surround myself with, fuck, a Capricorn obsessed with efficiency and productivity trying to get the most out of every second and always condemned to waste a few minutes of life awaiting in each hole or absence or delay or expectation of these scattered minds and bodies. Alex also wants to meet, but it would have to be later he calls me and I tell him I don’t want to keep an eye on the mobile phone determining what I would do based on an imprecise and probably prolonged moment in which he decides to write back to me, deciding to come or not. He says well we leave it open, alright. I smoke a joint and I start reading, whatever.  Soraya comes and soon Alex comes Soraya stays we talk she leaves and since Mind is sheltered I am far away and there is this distance, he feels like seeing a stranger from whom you want to protect yourself a stranger you don’t know if they can harm you, but slowly we are breaking this distance, talking and talking and words entering through Ears and rumbling on the walls and the vibrations making them crumble little by little. or lying on the sofa, with his head resting on my chest, or finally in bed, with our bare legs tangled but only sometimes, sometimes only because there is this distance only between us (especially after having spoken after deciding especially to be just friends this especially after, which for me doesn't mean anything because of course, like water I flow now but sometimes, I find rock, and although now Alex is a very soft and a very soft rock Alex, although he is almost mud on the verge of dissolving in the torrent and flow flow flow, he still needs contact to abandon his form, to expand a little, and this distance between us prevents us from flowing flowing flowing). But I break the distance, a little, because Mind is still separated from Body and it only moves a little, distrustful, to see Alex to remember him and later I let this distance enter within Body and with this distance still within Body I caress his ass with my fingers and our legs are tied more tied and more and so on, feeling his hairs brush against the soles of my feet feeling good and calm and feeling so, like stepping on a stable surface and finally lips, and after, kiss skin that is scattered throughout the body, warm and soft like mud in summer or like a drained riverbank? I find lips and we wear away the soft stone just a bit (distance, resistance, rejection? Who knows...), but simultaneously this distance goes deeper into Body (my Body), deeper closer to Mind that increasingly holds more precariously the walls that now this distance is trying to pierce reduce to rubble. Body caresses Alex’s erect penis with hands, Body grabs his penis between fingers and feels how penis tries to grow more (his), rise more, and Body wants to feel his insides feel his soft intestines around my penis but oh it hurts too much it hurts... - Me: I want to fuck you but I can't because it hurts too much now, and we kiss a little more. Alex doesn’t want to fuck me either and I know this or better I feel this because he doesn’t even touch me and I don’t know if he doesn’t like me or if he is this passive because believe me, I do not know how to read this I don’t want to read this I guess, but I know I don’t want to fuck with a body that ignores me a body that doesn’t holds desire  towards me desieres me, so we hug we kiss we follow our lips with our fingertips we grab our hands and this distance, this distance only sometimes disappears and in these moments Mind peeks out behind the walls (feeling rejected is screwed, it is a scar on the body that takes time to erase, but this is a cliché and I'm just a mediocre writer anyways). 

The rest of the day is less relevant I am sorry this wasn’t the hot gay story you expected (me neither, belive me). He tries to talk about our relationship again but he decides to let it be - Me: nothing has changed on my side, we are friends I think it's stupid to repress something that we feel like doing just because it doesn't fit in any preconceived notions of relationships etc etc (i save you the bored). I don't know, maybe this distance is still inside and sometimes it looks through Eyes, because something has changed in him, he is different, looks different, looks far, but he says everything is alright everything is the same…OK. We eat breakfast in a square we are absent from the world, kids sell hashish and marijuana behind us screaming, screaming, running who knows, surviving Raba which is already a lot, feeling the distance grow between me and the world. Back at Pedro's house, sitting on the sofa, we talk about being lost, about the weight of the determination of Tired Eyes trying to encode ourselves and about how to avoid it, about running through the rubble ruined, we talked about being alone while hugging each other while I told him that I believed, I believed that I would always be alone and that, well,  this makes me feel good but it also scares me then we kiss lips touch lips and at the end he leaves. He says do you want to meet later today? He says but I still don’t know what I want. Rejection opens scars and I now have an entire map of ruined buildings. it doesn’t know how to show me the way out of this fucked up world. Fuck. Maybe I will see him later anyway.

Felix del Campo is a writer living in Barcelona and currently completing a PhD at Queen Mary University in London. He says, ‘I wrote this piece as an experiment in translation. I copied and edited a Spanish text, then translated it to English with google translate and then edited it again. I was worried I would not be able to carry the cultural connotations of the original text to English and I decided that I would not do a proper translation to "proper English" because that would also erase the fact that I am not an English native speaker. I am happy with the result and I liked the experiment, I will probably use it more. I think that part of the experience of reading it is a frustration to try to grasp what I am really trying to say, which in a way carries with it a big part of my experiences as living in a English speaking country where I am constantly (still) negotiating how to understand what is going on and sometimes a bit confused as well.’

Nina Hoy is an illustrator and you can see more of her work here.