Miro and the Three Days

Miro was a theater director, twenty-seven years old — and the number itself sounded like a warning, as if some prophecy lived within it. He grew up without a father, but he was not entirely alone: there was his mother, an aunt, and that strange, slightly fractured household that people called family. She loved him, cared for him, but something always seemed cracked — like porcelain with an invisible line, ready to break.

His closest companion was a black poodle named Bertolucci. The dog’s long gaze carried no judgment, no questions — only acceptance.

An ordinary day for Miro was an endless loop. He did not wake to an alarm, but to the ringing in his ears, as if thousands of thin wires were strung inside his head. The kitchen — a cup of coffee that always went cold half-full. The desk — scattered script pages, where he would rewrite the same word twenty times until it lost meaning. He could pace the room for hours, touching the same objects, repeating lines of dialogue to himself. Sometimes he stopped at the window and looked down at children playing in the street, but he never opened the glass — too many sounds, too much of the world.

Anxiety lived in every detail. He could not wear a jacket if the buttons were closed in the wrong order. Looking people in the eye was unbearable. Even a trip to the store was an ordeal, so he ordered everything home instead. Yet all of this dissolved in his work: theater and scriptwriting were his refuge, the only place where he ruled the rules.

One evening, at the end of such a day, he stepped outside — not for errands, but as if something inside had pushed him. The streets were empty, washed by rain. Stone walls held the echo of his footsteps, and each turn felt like the repetition of a dream.

He saw her from afar: a girl walking slowly, holding a bouquet of violet flowers. In her walk there was something fragile and defiant at once. Then the flowers slipped from her hands. She bent to pick them up and looked straight at him.

— Do you like my flowers? she asked, as if it were a password.

In that instant something shifted inside him. The ringing — that eternal, torturous ringing — suddenly ceased, leaving him alone with silence. In her voice he heard the music he had been searching for all his life.

They had three days. Only three. They wandered the streets, shared bread, drank cheap wine on the riverside. In the evenings he read her his notes, and she laughed, saying it all sounded like a dream that deserved to be staged. He never learned her name. To him she was only fire, the spark that reignited him.

Those three days gave Miro everything that years of solitude and empty theaters had denied him. For the first time, he felt himself alive — without fear, without pills, without the cage of anxiety.

To feel everything in every way, to live everything from all sides, to be the same thing in all ways possible at the same time.

— Fernando Pessoa