I find a thousand things

Walking along the side of a road, at the edge of a field, I find the wrapper of two condoms. Its shiny surface makes them look brand new. I put my foot on it and press down with the toe of my shoe. Two Olympic rings appear on the wrapper.

They're not condoms, but the stories they preserve. This strip of two was part of a box. Have the rest been luckier? They're on the side of a road in Solius. Someone threw them out the car window. What disappointment was this man going through that made him not want to save them for another day? Was it at the end of an argument? Before? During? Was it a sign of contempt? Of commitment? Was it a liberation? Did the co-pilot throw them, or the driver? Did the passenger discover them and throw them in indignation? Or was the driver going to see someone and suddenly changed his mind and didn't want to reconsider? Or did he throw them into the sky, like fireworks to celebrate the decision to procreate?

On every walk I find things. Birds like out-of-season fruit perched on bare branches. A wind takes them, they fly through the sky, and then they return to the same tree like magnetized leaves. One day I found a bag with three flashlights. I put in batteries, but they didn't work. Who knows what they would have illuminated? Another day, a headlamp that I used to spot a salamander and write an article. Bottles, rusty sardine cans, bits of clay from aplecs a thousand years old. Once, a red hat that says Andorra and that I still wear from reading in the sun. A headless stone marker, too heavy to carry in my backpack. Packs of tobacco or bleached handkerchiefs, spent pellets. Stones and boulders vertically stacked one on top of the other. We're like animals marking their territory. The last thing I found were some half-rotten dreamcatchers in the middle of the forest, hanging from branches, like circular cobwebs.

I encounter a thousand things. They're like the news in the newspaper, fragments of reality that I try to understand the world with. It's impossible. I also encounter walkers who are alone, pensive, sometimes with a dog, fragments of my own personality. One day I'll find myself, lost in who knows where.

These rainy days, looking at the drops falling calmly and quietly into a pond, I thought they were like those things I find walking around, circles that are born, that open and connect with each other to end up merging with the pond, infinite rings of preservation, drops that fall from the sky but enjoy the sky.