People live here

The cloudy weather we have been experiencing in Barcelona over these last days, combined with some post-holiday, new year's melancholy had sent me in a really grey place by yesterday morning. I woke up sleepy and tired, got dressed while swearing in all languages I can pronounce, mumbled "good morning " to my flatmates and went out the door, hating my job, the moist sticking on the tiles of Plaza de la Merce, this humid winter and the complete universe. As I rushed down Carrer de la Merce, hoping to make it on time for the seminar I passed by this place, a small strip of the street sheltered beneath an arch, where usually I see a couple of homeless people sleeping.

Yesterday they weren't there. But there remained signs of their existence in the form of a smoked wall. Signs that someone had built a fire to get through a chilly night. I thought that in my native Greek tongue, the fireplace is actually used to mean "home" and then I thought that the place I was looking at, the remains of a fireplace I was taking a photo of, IS the actual home of some people. I remembered the sign I had once seen in the nice, nearby neighborhood of el Born, "Aqui viu gent", meaning "People live here" and imagined it pasted over this smoked wall.

And then I gave myself a moment to think about this unknown neighbours of mine, who spent each night a few meters away from my front door, covered up in anoraks, blankets and sleeping-bags, trying to keep warm by building fires in the middle of the street. I thought about them, being rudely awaken by the cops much earlier than when I lazily decide to get out of bed. I imagined them telling stories to each other to forget their agony in the face of one more rainy night, or even worse, having told all the stories so many times and having got so drunk that there are no more stories to tell.

I thought about all these things going on right next to my doorstep and decided that it probably was the wrong day for me to bitch about the weather, or the seminar or everything. Or perhaps it was a perfect day to bitch about all that but I was the wrong guy to do it.