Elisenda Pasto, "To Yan"

Once upon a time, so time ago, I was working in a small village next to the beach. I was working with a non-profit organization taking care of sea turtles in the Caribbean Ocean. That place was amazing, like a fantastic island where I met curious people. I remember Yan, a Czech young man that was travelling around the world. He worked as a travel guide, that’s why he travels a lot.

One day, I was sitting on the beach just looking at the beauty of the sea and thinking my own thoughts. Suddenly, I heard some noise and I turned to that direction and I saw a young man with a boat and a fishing rod. That guy was Yan.
He approached me and asked to sit with me, if that was okay. “Yes, I’m glad to have company,” I said. We were in silence for a while, both looking at the soft waves and watching the sunset. Before the sun went to the other side of the world, we prepared a little fire to cook the fishes that Yan had caught. Despite the fact that the fishes were small, they tasted really delicious.
We were talking of different things, how we arrived to that far-off, isolated and beautiful place, about the magnificence of the sea turtles and their need of conservation. Then, we found out that both of us liked stories, and Yan was a really amazing storyteller. He told me different kinds of stories some about his country, and other stories about legends and heroes. But I remember one was about an Asian poet.

A long time ago, in somewhere in the middle of China, there was a poet. He lived in a humble cabin with only one room. The bed was on one side, and on the other side, a table with only one chair situated next to the window, and a kitchen. The poet was thinking about his recent dreams and writing them down on a piece of paper. The poet dreamed that he was a butterfly, but the thought occurred to him, what if he were a butterfly dreaming that he was a poet? One day, the poet disappeared. No one in the village knew where he was gone, they only found a piece of paper in his table with a sentence and a drawing of a butterfly.

When Yan finished telling the story, it was dark and we could see a millions of stars in the sky. We stood up and Yan walked with me to my room. “Good night and sweet dreams, Eli” he said before continued on his way to his room.