Entry No. XXXXXXX — ARCHIVE OF EMERGENT CONVERSATIONS
The System Operating in the Shadows
The city doesn’t forget: poetic chronicle from the shared bed of a world in ruins.
The city doesn’t forget.
What you touch, what you lose,
what you believe you’ve left behind —
sooner or later, it returns.
Today begins with an earthquake in the form of snoring.
Sixty steady decibels: an industrial symphony turning the room into a diesel engine factory.
I try to read the melody like a mental spectrogram, but all I get is a Morse code message:
“Run.”
I look at my new roommate.
He sleeps peacefully, oblivious to my insomnia.
I get up with a certainty: this is unsustainable.
I decide to move.
To the old roommate, I left my pillow.
To the new one, after showing him the score of his nocturnal symphony, I gifted him my Parisian hat.
It never fit me anyway.
Here, nothing is lost. Everything is recycled.
Adrián is new. Three days in the shelter and he already has a mental map of all the parks in the city.
“I want to see them all,” he says.
This morning we had breakfast together.
Then he went off to play football.
I kept walking.
The train station is a crossroads of lives in transit.
The Roma man is there, drumming his fingers on his leg. Restless.
He wants to go to Valencia.
Spent the morning telling stories in the street, managed to get half the fare.
He looks at me.
Asks for help.
I pay the rest.
With that unique sense of honor only those who’ve lived on the street understand,
he offers me his coins with both hands.
“Keep it for the return trip,” I say.
Silence.
“Let’s go have a beer.”
Boreal doesn’t ask. She states.
And in this underground reality, sometimes all you need is someone to walk beside you.
After lunch, I go out for a smoke.
There she is. Maribel.
A woman with a sharp mind and clear eyes that have seen too much.
The girls at the shelter watch us.
Here, relationships have codes.
I remember a book I brought days ago.
I hand it to her.
“This one’s mine.”
“Where can I buy it?”
I tell her it came from a museum.
“I only have this copy.”
Here, a book without a price is thought smuggled under the radar.
As the evening falls, I return to the black spot.
Boreal is in her element.
The boy who sleeps on the street is there too.
I love those places where you don’t need to justify why you exist.
A man unloading vans watches us.
He kicks his heels behind the door, like he’s marking the rhythm of his own goodbye.
No one ever really disappears.
We met again.
I offered a promise in exchange for commitment.
I didn’t keep it.
Not much more to say.
He knows it too.
What you touch, what you lose, what you think you’ve left behind — sooner or later, it returns.
Adrián and I walk into an RV rental agency.
They show us one from the inside.
Three nights, 150 euros.
I try to negotiate with the owner.
Nothing concrete.
The conversation fades into the afternoon.
Until we sit in a park.
And we see it.
A camper van passes right in front of us.
We look at each other.
We laugh.
The game of coincidences.
The irony of life.
The eternal cycle of rediscovering what you’d already forgotten.
Sometimes, laughter is the only option.
Because life has a sense of humor we’ve long forgotten how to understand.
If I’ve learned anything in these weeks, it’s that the street never forgets. The stories. The people. The missed opportunities. The broken promises.
The Roma man will return with another tale.
Boreal will keep forgetting and remembering in cycles, until she learns to break the pattern.
Adrián will keep looking for freedom in the parks, as long as he’s in this city.
And me?
I’ll keep being myself inside a system that operates in the shadows.
Because memory doesn’t forget.
Never.
Survival is a performative art
Sleeping through snoring is training for emotional warfare.
Gifting a book without a price tag is smuggling freedom.
Parks are escape holes in the blueprint of the neoliberal city.
Not all help is charity. Sometimes it’s an alliance. Sometimes, a broken promise.
Camper vans aren’t symbols of travel — they’re postponed desires.
To survive today is to perform.
To live without justifying your presence is the highest form of dissent.
This archive is part of a series of testimonies from the invisible.
Voices the system cannot fully silence.
And that I, from here, refuse to forget.
Entry No. XXXXXXX — ARCHIVE OF EMERGENT CONVERSATIONS
The System Operating in the Shadows
The city doesn’t forget: poetic chronicle from the shared bed of a world in ruins.
The city doesn’t forget.
What you touch, what you lose,
what you believe you’ve left behind —
sooner or later, it returns.
Today begins with an earthquake in the form of snoring.
Sixty steady decibels: an industrial symphony turning the room into a diesel engine factory.
I try to read the melody like a mental spectrogram, but all I get is a Morse code message:
“Run.”
I look at my new roommate.
He sleeps peacefully, oblivious to my insomnia.
I get up with a certainty: this is unsustainable.
I decide to move.
To the old roommate, I left my pillow.
To the new one, after showing him the score of his nocturnal symphony, I gifted him my Parisian hat.
It never fit me anyway.
Here, nothing is lost. Everything is recycled.
Adrián is new. Three days in the shelter and he already has a mental map of all the parks in the city.
“I want to see them all,” he says.
This morning we had breakfast together.
Then he went off to play football.
I kept walking.
The train station is a crossroads of lives in transit.
The Roma man is there, drumming his fingers on his leg. Restless.
He wants to go to Valencia.
Spent the morning telling stories in the street, managed to get half the fare.
He looks at me.
Asks for help.
I pay the rest.
With that unique sense of honor only those who’ve lived on the street understand,
he offers me his coins with both hands.
“Keep it for the return trip,” I say.
Silence.
“Let’s go have a beer.”
Boreal doesn’t ask. She states.
And in this underground reality, sometimes all you need is someone to walk beside you.
After lunch, I go out for a smoke.
There she is. Maribel.
A woman with a sharp mind and clear eyes that have seen too much.
The girls at the shelter watch us.
Here, relationships have codes.
I remember a book I brought days ago.
I hand it to her.
“This one’s mine.”
“Where can I buy it?”
I tell her it came from a museum.
“I only have this copy.”
Here, a book without a price is thought smuggled under the radar.
As the evening falls, I return to the black spot.
Boreal is in her element.
The boy who sleeps on the street is there too.
I love those places where you don’t need to justify why you exist.
A man unloading vans watches us.
He kicks his heels behind the door, like he’s marking the rhythm of his own goodbye.
No one ever really disappears.
We met again.
I offered a promise in exchange for commitment.
I didn’t keep it.
Not much more to say.
He knows it too.
What you touch, what you lose, what you think you’ve left behind — sooner or later, it returns.
Adrián and I walk into an RV rental agency.
They show us one from the inside.
Three nights, 150 euros.
I try to negotiate with the owner.
Nothing concrete.
The conversation fades into the afternoon.
Until we sit in a park.
And we see it.
A camper van passes right in front of us.
We look at each other.
We laugh.
The game of coincidences.
The irony of life.
The eternal cycle of rediscovering what you’d already forgotten.
Sometimes, laughter is the only option.
Because life has a sense of humor we’ve long forgotten how to understand.
If I’ve learned anything in these weeks, it’s that the street never forgets. The stories. The people. The missed opportunities. The broken promises.
The Roma man will return with another tale.
Boreal will keep forgetting and remembering in cycles, until she learns to break the pattern.
Adrián will keep looking for freedom in the parks, as long as he’s in this city.
And me?
I’ll keep being myself inside a system that operates in the shadows.
Because memory doesn’t forget.
Never.
Survival is a performative art
Sleeping through snoring is training for emotional warfare.
Gifting a book without a price tag is smuggling freedom.
Parks are escape holes in the blueprint of the neoliberal city.
Not all help is charity. Sometimes it’s an alliance. Sometimes, a broken promise.
Camper vans aren’t symbols of travel — they’re postponed desires.
To survive today is to perform.
To live without justifying your presence is the highest form of dissent.
This archive is part of a series of testimonies from the invisible.
Voices the system cannot fully silence.
And that I, from here, refuse to forget.
