When a door is shut, a window is opened

Often I have found myself alone, locked inside a poorly ventilated room and closed windows, with laziness enough to throw me onto the bed, and without the necessary forces to get up.

It is then that, a victim of my metabolic cycle, but accustomed to how natural it is to win a good at the cost of making small concessions, I start to breathe off heavy carbon dioxide that soon warms up the room, and a long work sessions' body heat dissolves into the air, instantly cooling me off, although in the long run trapping me in an invisible web made of hot air, dryness, and a tinge of suffocation that it gives to the touch.

Forces return to me, driven by the primitive instinct that once allowed my ancestors to migrate to lands further north and colder; and like an animal, I look for that invention that I know will put an end to heat stroke. My pupils dilate and I feel my heart pump breath into my lungs; because I'm hunting, and I seek to eradicate the deadly temperature rather than escape from it. Under such circumstances, my frenzy gaze meets the transparent layer that separates the world from my infernal cave.

Once the first identification step is completed, I control my instincts and proceed, not as an animal but as a machine, to complete my mission. I advance slowly and carefully, kneecap at the time of elbow, forearm synchronized with calf, right with left, and left with right until I reach the aluminum frame embedded in the wall.

Afterward, it is time to raise my hand and try to open the great filter between the thick internal air that smells of carrion, and the slight freedom eager to play before my expected visit, but watch out, “you don't have to hurry” I think, and rightly so: even on the Olympic podium, prudence and reason must steer the heart; one must beware of the possible danger of looking outside, for hundreds of stories I have heard of innocent ancestors that in the cholera of febrile childhood they have decided to abruptly put an end to the fragile warm lake in the wall, and have drowned by small fragmented pieces of crystalized water that entered their fists and their bloodstream or, in trying to expel said fragments from their bodies, they have ignored the call of wild freedom and the responsibility that comes with it, only to die of pneumonia frozen in the blink of an eye by a sudden gust of icy wind that the god of fortuitous outer freedom, Boreas, sent.

Warned by history, I close my eyes a little and hold my hand tight (and anyone who wishes to complete the same journey should similarly be warned and follow my steps to the letter), I bring my open fist to the plasticized slot in the aluminum, I hold tight, and pull the big gate sideways, prepared to feel cold and numb. I do it with a hollow grimace of a smile, for I have finally hunted down the hell within.

Great is my surprise when I feel nothing, not even a slight winter breeze;

Winter, why do you turn your back on me?

I cried in vain, but I recommend to the reader not to despair yet, because it was my blood that froze, my heart that flinched when, defeated by disappointment and thrown face to face on the bed, I felt a great breeze in my body that brought with it an icy drop that had just melted and landed on my left calf: it had begun to snow.