time

Time is relative. This we all know.

What we sometimes do not realize are the conditions that impose this relativity in our daily lives. Time is after and above all, OUR time, and while we are supposed to make of it what best suits us we are also responsible for defining it on the basis of our limited perception of duration within the confines of eternity. The fact that I had to wake up at 6.30 a.m. last Saturday to welcome my friend Kostas had nothing relative about it. It was the simple consequence of Vueling having setting up a flight schedule that is meant to torture its Greek customers.

The relativity of the whole thing makes its sudden appearance only under comparison. And such a comparison was painfully made this morning, just two days after Kostas' arrival. According to the earth's axial tilt and the geographical longitude of Barcelona, the difference in sunrise between two days is marginally less than 2 minutes. I can assure you though that the temporal distance between some days, which calendar-wise seem only slightly distant, can be huge. Especially if we are dealing with the distance between Saturday and Monday.

This was my case, last weekend. Kostas woke me up at 6.50 a.m. on Saturday, but it was a smooth waking up, simply knowing that I would go back to bed. There followed a nice nap, interrupted every now and then by the joyful sounds of a beautiful weekend morning, the smell of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen and the promise of the newspaper lying on the couch. Then all these promises were fulfilled and the day started, carried on and ended in the midst of the Fiesta Mayor of the city of Barcelona, in the company of a rather reassuring sun.

This morning, though, less than 48 hours later, when the alarm went of at 6.30 a.m. so that Kostas would catch his flight back to Boston, it seemed more like life on a different planet. A planet, where every day is Monday morning, grey and dull, with the threat of too many boring stuff piling up on your desk, where the coffee tastes like boiled leather and where there are no more fireworks or disguised people dancing in the streets. Most important of all, you cannot go back to bed. I know because I tried. But it just felt so that the atmosphere on Monday planet is too dense and too humid for me to fall asleep.

At 6.50, as the street lights started to go off, I was already waiting for the bus. It looked like it was about to rain. Through my headphones Radiohead sang "I might be wrong".