"To you, my dear Xàbia" by Juan Legaz Palomares

I am grumpy, sore, desperate and indignant with the prohibition to see you and visit you that this invisible, traitor and cursed coronavirus has subjected me to. There is no punishment that is pleasant, we all rebel against any condemnation or reprimand, but I assure you, my dear Xàbia, that this coronavirus veto that prohibits me from looking at you, without you being guilty, mortifies me and afflicts my heart because I miss you
beach ... and you.

I miss the Bay and its sleeping boats, the lights that watch over them when the sun went down, yes, you too. It is that I long for the person who was by the sea, a free man made flesh, pleasure, life. I long to have been next to the things I loved destroying the distance in my hands. Your beach was part of me too ... in it you will see me as an ungrateful love, I know, sitting in the same place where I felt revive. You will deny me and miss me as I miss you, I know.

How happy I am there, alone and free, immersed in the present, shaking off nostalgia and remorse, so close to God and my life, so alive and so close to glory, without fear, naked now. I loved myself more than not you, the seductive person who was next to you, the merciless and sweet lover at the same time. Excuse me, but when I looked at you I looked at myself and gloated in my reflection, forgive me, I'm not used to seeing myself like this.

I wanted to hold hands when we parted and feel like this in my world of obligations and routines, but I didn't know. I was shipwrecked thinking that I needed you when I really loved that part of me that I left behind. I long for your beach and return to it when I hear those litanies from a land that was not even mine. I would like to feel as light as that rabid noon of sun in which I met you to light me with a look and a single kiss. I miss who I was in your arms ... I miss you.

Every year I want more and more to see you again. Will this malicious virus allow me to contemplate you, embrace you and breathe the purity of your infinite wonders? I always love to say to friends: "In Xàbia all the malltías are cured". They laugh, and every year when we see each other again they sarcastically repeat the phrase to me, and that I, I remind you during the course of the comforting bath in the crystalline, peaceful and precious Grava beach.

In this year, in this uncertain summer of 2020, if I can see you again, I will lock you in my heart until death.

Juan Legaz Palomares.