And I still remember him. I cannot forget about him. Not that I have tried, on the contrary, I think it’s one of my most precious memories. I was looking at him, I was seeing him, trying to understand, looking at his face, looking at the marbles.
I couldn’t understand what was he doing, and at the same time, I knew it. There were a few people near him, but definitely not with him. As I remember, it was me, my brother and my cousin. I think my cousin knew him, but I couldn’t be sure of that. We were waiting for our parents to pick us up after school. We were already outside, it was sunny. I think there were no more people around, but I’m not sure. This boy (older than me by two years more or less) was sitting on the pavement, on the sideway. He had his bag of marbles with him, those so precious marbles that you used to treasure so much during the recess, after school and all day long. That was our treasure at the time, we all had one, one bag as a treasure, it was ours, not our parents, not our teachers, not our classmates treasure, but all ours. That bag that everyday you tried to enlarge by winning the other’s precious treasure. There he was, sitting on the sidewalk, with his bag of marbles, open eyes but not looking. He was just staring at the pavement infront of him, and throwing his marbles to the void and the uncertainty, throwing them with his two fingers as you do it when you play the game during the recess, but he was not playing, he was letting them go, one by one, the big ones, the small ones, the more precious ones and the unwanted ones; the pawns, the queens and the towers, all going to the void indistinctly.
We all were wondering what had happen to him, we asked our cousin but he just made this gesture of ‘I don’t know’. None of us knew why he was doing that, and none of us asked him, we (or at least I) just stood there, close but with a distance, watching him letting them go… one by one.