About a Friend
e wasn�t a guy of big words you have to know, and he seemed to live
entirely in his own world. I remember that none of us exactly knew who
he was, where he came from or what he was looking for. During the days
he worked with us and afterwards he disappeared. Nobody knew where he
was going, what he was doing or if he had friends or a family to stay
with. I guess, we didn�t even know his name - and in case we did, I
forgot it.
These days were more than hard for all of us. There seemed to be no escape from the tough taste of our everyday life and the only colour that surrounded us was grey. It was the grey of the huge concrete blocks we lived in, the grey of the factory dust, even the grey colour of our clothes, that once might have been white. It must have been a bright and shining white... and I can�t exactly recall how much time I spent trying to imagine the kind of white it might have been. Anyway, it was too much time - considering the fact that in the end of the day it didn�t take me anywhere better.
Since white was the colour of the kind of paradise I so much longed to live in someday, grey left behind nothing more than a bitter taste of emptiness and depression. I can remember how I noticed once, that any other colour must be a symbol for something, a feeling or whatever. Only grey seemed to stand for absolutely nothing. This was the world I lived in, and so did he.
Having our job in the factory was still luxury though, considering the fact that most of us had families to feed. And not long after he started to work there, I would always find him working at the machine next to mine. We�d work for hours next to each other, staying quiet, with our thoughts drifting away to a different place but still aware of our hands doing the same movements over and over again. We were doing that until the bell would ring to end the work for the day.
I used to work in a mechanical way, following the same rhythm over and over again, and so did he. But every time I was about to give up (I used to feel that I wasn�t going anywhere anymore), he would lift his head and give me a little smile, as if he could guess my thoughts.
I think it was actually his eyes that impressed me most. They were so dark and straight, and above all they were never hiding. Still I couldn�t get rid of the impression that he was hiding something else instead.
Now, after all these years, I can�t help but thinking that I didn�t try hard enough. If I had known by then what I know now, I certainly had done.
Since I saw him first, he had always been around, and every time he gave me one of those smiles, he would spread a bit of warmth into my heart, a bit of friendliness. I guess, at the end of the day it must have been him who gave me the strength to go on somehow, just by being there. Just by being my friend.
Well, to make a long story short, he died only a year after he started working with us. It was a car accident and he didn�t have to suffer very long.
I must have been his only friend in town, at least that was what I thought when I went to his funeral.
The only person I met there was an old lady, maybe his mother. She told me that he had lost his family just the year before and since then he didn�t speak any more. He hadn�t said a single word.
First I didn�t believe her. I just used to think that he was a fairly quiet person; besides there was nothing much to say anyway. But suddenly I recognised that I couldn�t recall ever having heard his voice at all.
I guess I can�t describe how I felt when I learned that he had lost his speech and I hadn�t found out before.
He gave me so much and I knew so little about him. He had been my friend and now I lost him without having had the chance to give anything back. He had been so strong and after all still able to give.
I felt weak in those days. And guilty. But since then I started to care for the people around me.
Since then, I think I started to live.
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