The old man was sitting in front of the fire, staring at the cuckoo clock on the wall. It was a gaze empty of all impatience. He was watching the time, but he didn’t mind the advance of the clock. A wait that maybe could take forever and not for this would be longer.

When at last the clock struck twelve, nothing happened. It was so still it looked like a painting located in the darkest room of an old museum. After five minutes, he sighed wryly and got up to smoke his pipe. When he returned to his seat and struck a match, all the fires of the house went out. Te room, avoided total darkness, only because the halo of the moon light frittering through the large window. Thus the old man’s face was split between the shadows and the total darkness…

-You are late – He said with a tired voice
-You are the unique mortal without suffering in agony, complaining for five minutes more of live
-I want last request before crossing
-Is not in my hand to decide where you go
-It doesn’t matter
-What do you want then?
-Three days and three nights to read the seventh shelf in my library. There are the memories that I have written in my lifetime
-You understand the consequences of this request ¿Right? If you find unfinished issues, however small, you can’t cross to the other side
-I need to remember how I got here, where I was, how many times I fell and what I couldn’t achieve
-Then, so be it.

For three days and three nights he read and reread his life.
He can only remember a little about his childhood, but he thinks that it was happy.
“Today is my birthday. I turned six years old, and mum and dad have given me this diary” Those first words, written with a crooked and winding calligraphy, were the beginning of the story about his life.

It wasn’t an easy read. He enjoyed the ups but suffered the multiple downs. He had been a great writer, so just read, he was reliving his story. Fell in love with his first love and he saw her again in the rearview mirror while he traveled on the road bound for his new home.

He struggled to make his friends and split the time between them. He saw again people moving in and out of his life, some important and other tan apparently meant nothing to him, but throughout the time it would become important.

He rediscovered aspects about his personality that he believed dead by changing the world. But most of all, to stopped believing in “better half”, fulfilled dreams, saw how the fear showed him sometimes, regret, pride, fell in love, had children, educated them, cared for them, lost their loved ones, had grandchildren, loaded with faults, defects.

At the end of the third day, when midnight approached that he had played his cards as best he could, that he would make the same mistakes and have the same successes. He was honest with who deserved it and who did not do right.

But above all, understood that each of the failures and successes he had committed, he had taken a path that placed him where he was now. It would be questionable to talk of good or bad luck, justice o injustice, fate or destiny…now these mattered little change would infinite future events different and he was happy with what I had.
Finally all the puzzle pieces brought together.

With a blinding flash, the moon down the curtain after the twelfth stroke…