The story
Some absences don't announce themselves with goodbyes, but with an abrupt silence that defies reason. Samuel learned to fear that void long before settling in the coffee region, during a pitch-black, stormy night that he could never quite shake.
It happened during a trip in his youth, crossing the páramo, a high-altitude Andean moorland, on the way to Venezuelan territory. The rain fell with implacable fury, lashing the car's windshield with icy gusts. The mist devoured the road, and the high beams barely traced a few meters of asphalt before vanishing into the abyss. In the middle of that nothingness, where one wouldn't expect to find a hut or a soul for miles around, the headlights illuminated a hunched figure by the shoulder of the road: an elderly man, bundled in a heavy wool coat and a dark hat from which threads of water dripped, leaning on a gnarled cane.
The driver braked cautiously on the muddy shoulder, looking to ask for directions in that moorland labyrinth. Samuel rolled down the window; a gust of biting air and the smell of soaked moss invaded the car. He was about to offer a greeting, but he looked away for a fraction of a second to adjust the door lock. When he turned his eyes back to the road, the shoulder was deserted. There was no sound of hurried footsteps or branches snapping among the frailejones, the fuzzy-leaved plants native to the highlands. The old man had evaporated as if he were made of the very mist that surrounded them. The travelers continued on without a word, their hair standing on end and their throats tight with a frozen knot.
As time passed, Samuel tried to convince himself that exhaustion and the drizzle had played a trick on him. He rebuilt his life in Armenia, far from those freezing valleys, in a warm apartment where the usual city noises were supposed to be a guarantee of sanity. However, the uncanny seemed to have kept its trail.
It was a sweltering early morning. Samuel got up barefoot to the kitchen, looking for a glass of water. The living room lay in a peaceful gloom, tinted only by the yellowish glow of the streetlights filtering through the blinds. Just before turning on the light, something blocked his path. It wasn't a gust of wind or a trick of the light: a dense, pitch-black silhouette, with the unmistakable height and bearing of a man, floated across from the living room toward the patio de ropas, the laundry area.
The air in the hallway turned freezing in an instant, with that same mineral cold of the páramo that Samuel thought had been buried in the past. Trembling, he reached out and flipped the switch. The fluorescent light flooded the laundry area. There was nothing there but the damp tiles, the silent washing machine, and a row of hanging clothes that didn't even sway. In the adjacent rooms, his family slept in unshakeable calm. There were no open windows or possible hiding places.
Samuel stood there, the glass trembling between his fingers. He knew then that not all night travelers are looking for a destination; some simply cross our lives like cracks of shadow, reminding us that the visible world is merely a thin and fragile curtain.
