And here I am again in Spain for a short holiday, away from my feline tribe (actually it felt weird for the first few days to wake up and find that my bed wasn’t hijacked by at least one cat while I was sleeping).
I met my old friend Josep, the Hungarian who lives half of the year here and the other half in Germany. Over bitter coffee, Josep told me in his unique speech that he mixes Spanish, Italian, German and sometimes French – never in English and thankfully excluding Croatian, his mother tongue – about how bad last year was for him.
On Easter time, while walking on the beach in Malaga (something he rarely did) he decided to take a short break to catch his breath. As he sat on the sand for a few minutes, he felt a tiny insect landing on his cheek. The insect bit him fast before he could slap it. When he looked at his hand, it was a tiny red spider.
Josep got up and went back to his hotel. As he entered, the receptionist was aghast by how swollen the side of his face was. He insisted on taking old Josep to the emergency as it looked serious. In the Emergency room, Josep had to go through a minor surgery to remove the poison from his cheek and was put on a heavy antibiotics course for a month.
The medication made Josep feel sick and sleepy the whole time. Nevertheless, he was glad that the hotel employees were taking care of him until his antibiotics course was over. His feeling of illness continued after that and he decided to go back to Germany to see his GP about it.
As he entered his building, he was welcomed by Edna his good Samaritan neighbour who was the only connection between the lonely residents living there. Edna told him that their 40 years old neighbour- who stayed above Josep and suffered from chronic depression- had ended up hanging himself one night (Josep’s comment to me was: “Mama mia!
Imagine me sleeping peacefully below while he hung dead a floor above! That would’ve been awful!”). When Edna noticed his absence, she knocked on his door and later called the police when there was no answer. They both fell silent for a minute. Josep knew about Edna’s failed effort to befriend this neighbour in particular, he was simply immuned to her charms.
As for their other neighbor - a young woman who lived across from Josep’s - she’s being incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. She was a drug user who’d stabbed her partner under drug influence. He died instantly and she got a reduced sentence due to her mental instability. Edna wrote to the authorities asking them to visit her young neighbour.
It took the authorities a while to respond back and grant Edna a visiting permission. However, Edna was rather shocked when she found out that her visit was being monitored by police personnel and a psychiatrist - as she sat across from her neighbour trying to have a normal conversation. While Josep continued his tale, I kept thinking about how lonely our world is becoming. In the past, Eastern societies took pride of having stronger family and social bonds that kept loneliness away. But not anymore.
Nowadays, people on social media complain about how they miss “The good old days when things were simpler and staying in touch was real, not virtual”. Sadly, this nostalgia is never turned into action. I guess our world is in dire need of more selfless Ednas to make it a better place.
Rasha al Raisi is a certified skills trainer and the author of: The World According to Bahja. rashabooks@yahoo.com
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