A story about memory, sickness, and survival.
Written and illustrated by Roberto Sánchez
Follow me on X: @punisherpapi · IG: @punisherpapi
📓 August 11, 2025 — 2:52 p.m., Monday
The MacBook Pro beside me still looks brand new.
I remember when I only dreamed of owning one.
I take care of things — at least I try.
Right now, I’m parked at the edge of a gas station lot, next to BMO Stadium in the legendary Exposition Park.
That’s the same park I ran through when I was seven.
My uncle Pedro said, “You will run, and it will help get rid of your asthma.”
So I ran — inhaler in my jacket pocket, beanie on,
the only thought in my head was that I believed him.
Today is a distant moment from that beat of when I was a child.
The heat is heavy, and I didn’t sleep well last night.
What else is new — the Spaceman orbiting into infinity when I needed to land on Earth early enough to sleep.
Now here I am, parked in this lot after vanilla ice cream and a 10-piece McNugget without barbecue sauce…
the McDonald’s girl forgot.
Eyes closed.
Shade falling over my white van.
Somewhere down the street, a car turns over — that low, sudden growl breaking the stillness.
The wind moves around me, brushing against the quiet.
For a moment, there’s nothing to do but breathe and listen.
6:10 p.m.
I am sitting in my chair now in my small studio, listening to Coldplay’s Yellow.
As I listen, I remember a thought that was inspired today in my mind by a simple stroke of a key on a piano.
As I drove through Koreatown, that piano key rang more and more.
Out sprang a thought:
A room is dim, lit by slats of neon bleeding through half-closed blinds.
The golden light falls on a man sitting at a piano, fingers drifting over the keys without a score, without a plan — just feeling his way forward.
Each note hangs in the air like a memory he can almost touch.
Beside him, she sits.
The one who knows what she is.
She carries the truth of her creation in her eyes — the truth he hasn’t yet faced.
She doesn’t tell him.
She just listens.
The piano is life itself.
Every key is a feeling — joy, grief, hunger, love — pressed in no fixed order, each vibration echoing through the body.
He plays without knowing the composer, unaware that the hands on the keys are his, but the music comes from somewhere deeper.
We are all the man at the piano — consciousness, playing through the song of life, sensing there’s more but not fully seeing it.
The subconscious sits beside us like the woman — holding the knowledge, connected to the source, remembering the truth we’ve forgotten:
that behind our eyes, God is looking back at Himself.
And the music — those strokes of life — is how He feels what it’s like to be us.
All I hear is, Let it breathe… let it breathe.
My voice has been in development since I was that asthmatic kid,
and that kid is now a 43-year-old man who sometimes wonders why it took so long to understand my own mind.
Shots and explosions all around me — all self-created.
I self-detonated because I allowed my mind to say,
You are not. You will not. And you will accept. That is final, boy.
But deep down, something always said,
No… you should try.
I remember being a boy in the 80’s —
the colors, the horrible mullet I had.
My parents bundling me in a thick jacket, beanie, scarf, and then finally wrapping me in a multitude of blankets because I was going to be dropped off at my aunt Rosa’s apartment.
For a while, she took care of me while my parents worked.
She was a stay-at-home mom.
✈️ Read more reflections like this at robsanchezs.com
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