Once upon a time, there was a man, and that man was me, who lived in the placid monotony of any small town. The days passed slowly, marked by the ticking of a clock too dull to be noticed. My name is Hannibal, and right there! As a young man, I fervently cultivated a deep aversion to everything considered beautiful, romantic, and poetic.
Sunsets, for example, I found ridiculous. Those orange and red hues that everyone gazed at with dreamy eyes seemed to me just an atmospheric phenomenon without any meaning. Candlelit dinners? A useless waste of energy and wax. And let's not talk about flowers! Useless plant organisms destined to die within a few days.
Poetry was for the weak-minded, love songs a melody for those who had nothing better to do. And besides, I knew that the universe was bound to end and that nothing lasted forever, so why bother?
Then came that fateful day. A day like any other, or so I thought. I was in the library, reading an essay on chaos theory (ironically enough), I looked up, and I saw a stunner—yes, let's be clear and use a synecdoche (a rhetorical figure that uses a significant part for the whole)—it would be a shame not to use this word, I really saw (absint iniuria verbis), an astonishing piece of womanhood, and everything suddenly made sense, everything was filled with obvious meanings that needed no proof. There was absolutely nothing left to explain. Everything was clearly worth living and experiencing. And all of this confirmed the untranslatable Spanish proverb: "Tira más un pelo de cica que un carro de cien toros" ("A single hair from a woman’s body can pull more than a cart of a hundred bulls").
She was there, among the rows of dusty shelves, a girl with brown hair and a smile that defied the laws of physics. She wore a light dress that swayed gently with each step, like a flower cradled by the breeze. And at that precise moment, something inside me broke.
I approached her with the same confidence as a panda entering a marathon. My heart beat faster than it ever had while reading any treatise on formal logic.
"Hi," I said, trying to mask the tremor in my voice, "I'm reading about chaos theory, but I think I just discovered a new level of disorder in my brain looking at you."
She laughed, and that sound was the most sublime melody I had ever heard. She told me her name, and with that name in my head, the world began to transform. The beautiful things I had despised until then began to take shape and color.
Sunsets became celestial wonders, each shade a secret to uncover. Candlelit dinners were no longer a mere waste of resources, but moments of intimacy where words turned into sweet melodies. Flowers, once insignificant plant organisms, were now nature's masterpieces, fragile and precious.
We walked together along the seashore, and every wave crashing on the sand told a story of eternal love. The stars in the night sky were no longer just gas and dust, but bright eyes watching over us.
Logic and rationality melted away like snow in the sun, giving way to a new world made of emotions and feelings. Every day was a discovery, every moment a work of art. She taught me that beauty doesn't need an explanation, that love doesn't follow the laws of physics, and that sometimes, the most beautiful things in life are those we can't fully understand.
And so, from that encounter in the library, my life changed. I had gone from being a rational cynic to an incurable romantic. And all thanks to pure instinct, which with a simple smile had rewritten the laws of my universe.