He welcomed everything that made up my life.
With this sentence I can sum up who Marcos was for me. It moved me deeply.
One day I set out my longing and my pain in what for me was School of Community, in an email addressed to all of us who were then at university, and Marcos replied; he suggested we meet, he said that everything I was saying there mattered to him and that he wanted to live it with me. After the meeting he said to me: «there are friends who are simply placed in front of you and others whom you choose; I want to be your friend».
He has never left me since.
My friendship with him began with a love for the ultimate needs of my heart.
Marcos loved my destiny almost more than I did, and my present life too; he even wanted to know the people who were part of it, he loved them, he looked at them with a tenderness from another world.
Marcos and I did not write to each other every day, but every message had great content, from a «how are you?» — one of the real ones — to some passage from a psalm, a letter or the Gospel that had moved him, awakened him, and in which his passion and love for Christ as the destiny of his life were reaffirmed.
Marcos wanted my destiny; his messages and our meetings were a reflection of that. Marcos exalted my heart and my need for Christ, and through him I have discovered more of the nature of Christ’s love for my person and my life. It was Christ saying to me: «Hey! I am here, don’t forget it».
With this awareness I have been braver in making decisions in my life, not letting myself be overcome by vertigo or by the fear of loneliness, but betting on my happiness because Christ exists.
For me, the awareness that Marcos is still alive coincides with those moments when I recognise the Lord in my life again, when I come across someone who looks at me the way Marcos looked at me, loved me. Then I rediscover how His exceptionality is still present in this world; I realise that the person of Marcos was an instrument of Another to reach me in particular.
Sometimes I cry or feel a kind of vertigo at the thought that Marcos is not here. That I will never have his great hugs again, that I will never see him here again; I get trapped in an image of the past, in looking at what happened as a loss because Marcos’s body no longer walks the streets of Barcelona.
I ask the Lord, and I also ask Marcos: Where are you?
By grace, being faithful to my experience, to my history, I come to the truth that I do not really miss Marcos, or rather that the happiness of my life does not depend on whether I meet him again here in flesh and blood; the one I miss is Christ, the one whose love I beg for is His.
I would like to end with this message that Marcos wrote to me, which accompanies me day by day:
«Even if your mother forgets you, I will not forget you, says the psalm. Even if you lose me, Inés, you have the Love of your soul, who is Christ».
Inés Agustí
Machine translation. If you spot a mistake, do write to us.