Many times we are aware of what is happening around us but, to the extent of the unknown, things that do not happen to us but we could always be part of them. These days I feel like something similar is happening to me.
I'm back in Madrid, after a month of pre-summer at home, you know all this that is called University and those things of recovering subjects. Well, now back I have decided to stay with a friend in an apartment, evading the high prices that make you pay in the dormitories if you have to stay longer than expected (apart from how expensive they usually are). Considering that we are at the end of June, the heat in Madrid is becoming horrible, and the only way out I have to cool off, in this province without sea or air to breathe, is to go to the pool of my dormitory, to continue taking advantage of the facilities that I have paid for a year. The journey I have to follow is to walk approximately 15 minutes and take a bus that in another 5 leaves me at the dormitory. Well, this short journey during these three days has surprised me more than ever.
Here I wanted to get to explain myself. Many times I enter social networks and see women complaining about unpleasant gestures from men towards them, and you think, what need do they have or what will go through the heads of those men. Well, I have come to the conclusion after these three days that there is no explanation to this PRIMITIVE phenomenon (I think it is a word that is quite close to those gestures and sounds without any sense).
During my short journey, the first day I heard a man of a certain age and experience, let's say in an elderly age, say while looking at me: "how beautiful you are". My head froze, I looked back and even doubted if that was directed at me, I think, well I'm going to pass, as they always say, "there are people for everything". I continue my way with my head held high, wearing a summer outfit worthy of a Dior fashion show. I continue my way to wait for the bus, and I see how two cars decrease their speed to honk and look at me, or shout a couple of things. To all this, at no time did I respond to anyone, smile or show any sign of gratitude, and then what is the intention?, in what way do they think that will influence me?
Later, when I had already left my mental uncertainty and was about to return to the apartment, two teenagers shout at me and say: "how hot you are". There I stopped, turned around and thought "heat of course I have with 30º in the shade, but I do not think that those primitive beings can make this interpretation so complex to which I have arrived" and I passed again. I was tired I wanted to arrive already and forget about that that I treated like nonsense.
The next day, I decide to go with a couple of friends to Fuencarral, of this that even if you do not carry money on you prefer to grieve watching the shop windows. When we were already approaching the subway entrance, a man turns around (I put him in his early forties) and says: "beautiful!". I look at my friends, we all laugh, but not because it was funny, but it seemed so unreal that we did not know how to act.
So I go another day to school for the post-study bath and I run into a guy at the door, maybe around 25 or 27 years old, who says to me with a certain cockiness: "how beautiful you are". That's where I got, I turn around I approach him and I ask him to repeat it to me. Then he lowers his rude and cocky tone and repeats in a much lower voice: "it was just that I thought you were beautiful". It only occurred to me to answer the first thing that came to my head and I said "I do not care about your opinion, keep it to yourself".
Here I reiterate my previous idea, that of when you hear a girl telling a story with which you could identify but you think that it does not really concern you. How confused we all are, this happens to me, it happens to my university colleague, to the girl who attends me in the supermarket, to the business women that I see running through Gran Vía, to the woman who always receives me with a smile when I buy in the kiosk my Jot Down of the month? IT HAPPENS TO ALL OF US. So, how can we think that that does not go with us?
If you think that you should stop and think about the reason for these rude acts, I will tell you something, they have no explanation. I look around me and there are days that I think how lucky I am. Other days I look around me and I think, well there are things that I could change but it is not bad. And finally there are days like these that before going to bed I think, why me?
None of those rude and unpleasant men have ever cared about what I think. Well then do not talk to me, do not shout at me or honk at me in the street.
In all those moments I never thought about why they did it (it would be a waste of time), but in how bad they made me feel, in the insecurity that I felt back home, in how those girls who are raped every day all over the world will spend it. I could only think about how unprotected I felt in a street full of people. But, if it is not my fault and I should not feel that, why do I have to be the one who suffers your stupidity?
If you really believe you are a man, woman, or simply a human being RESPECT other human beings. Nobody deserves to feel like this ever, and you are nobody to make a woman, a boy or girl, a man, an animal feel like this?
"Every living being deserves our respect, whether humble or haughty, ugly or beautiful" (Lloyd Alexander).
Teresa Fajardo Negrín https://teresasabeescribir.wordpress.com/2018/06/24/carpe-diem/
