The sand flowed between my fingers when Fran called me:

  "Alma! Where are you?"

  "Here!" I replied, watching the last grain of sand in my hands gently fall to the ground.

  Since I was little, I liked going to the beach, picking up sand from the ground and watch it how it felt, slowly, returning to the place from where it came, like a cycle - an infinite loop. However, I hadn't done it for two years. After the death of my first child, a beautiful dark-haired boy whose destiny turned bitter at the young age of three years old, I hadn't returned to the coast, or even seen the sea again. You might think that having the concept of the life cycle so naturally present would have helped me to overcome a moment like that, but that wasn't the case, as it made everything even more difficult. Now, after a couple of years since the decease, I felt ready, and asked my husband Francisco to come back here on our next vacation.

  "What were you doing?" he asked.

  "Letting the sand fall. Like before, when the nature colors were a little more vivid and bright."

  I picked up a handful of sand again. Fran hugged me, words weren't always necessary between us, and his calming arms invaded my chest, starting from my heart to my head, arms, and legs. When the pile of sand from my hand dissapeared, Fran asked me:

  "Do you want to take a walk or would you rather stay here a little longer?"

  "Let's go, it will be good for me to move."

  Together, hand in hand, we walked along the beach until we reached one of the exits where there was a stone slope leading to the beach bars and shops and, a little further on, the small family hotel where we were staying. We had been going there for years and it was our comfort place, the place we went to when we wanted to disconnect from work and the daily hustle and bustle.

  When we arrived at the hotel and entered the reception, we found a couple of adults and two children, about eight and three years old, waiting at the front desk for the employee to give them the access card to their room. While waiting, the mother was struggling with her children who kept asking her to go outside to play in the front garden. Smiling, we went to the cafeteria, ordered a drink and sat at some tables with armchairs by the window, overlooking the garden. A while later we watched the children we had seen earlier going out to play, while inside their parents approached to the bar to one of the tables next to ours, from which she could watch her children.

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  The afternoon passed and it began to get dark. Fran and I got up to change clothes before going down to dinner when the other guests' children entered the cafeteria door. While the older one went straight to his parents, the younger one approached me shouting:

  "Mom!"

  "Mom is over there, honey," I replied, crouching down to his height, pointing towards his mother.

  "No, Mom, you." He looked at me fixedly. "Diego says he's okay."

  I don't know what I felt at that moment, maybe because I felt so many things or maybe because I felt nothing, I just remember the boy's eyes looking at me proudly of having carried out what seemed like an errand, and the inability I felt to move any of my muscles. Next to me, Fran also stood still. That state lasted only a few seconds, as the boy's mother, whom I later found out was called Maira, appeared apologizing:

  "Marcos, honey, come on, leave these people alone."

  "It's okay," Fran and I replied at the same time. And I couldn't say more because my eyes were filled with tears and a lump rose in my throat.

  "Are you okay?" Maira asked.

  "Yes, it's just... I'm going to our room."

  I walked away from there like someone was dragging me, as I don't remember having been the source of my movements. From a distance, I continued to hear the conversation I had just escaped from:

  "Our son passed away two years ago."

  "I'm so sorry."

  "I don't think we'll ever get over it completely, but her son must have a little friend with the same name and Alma is still very affected."

  I got to the room and lay down on the bed. My head was spinning. Fran was right, it had been a coincidence, Diego would be a friend of the little Marcos, he would have mistaken the person, he would have reminded him of someone; but inside I wanted -needed- to cling to the tiny possibility that, somehow, that child could have spoken to Diego, My Diego, and that, wherever he was, he was okay.

  By the time Fran arrived, I had calmed down. I felt good, calmed like never before. There was now a glimmer of hope and I felt ready to do what I had been delaying for days. I kissed Fran, asked him to wait five minutes, grabbed my bag and went into the bathroom. I took out the box I had bought before starting the vacation and opened it. I urinated and picked up my cell phone to set a two-minute timer. When it beeped, I went to observe what I was so afraid of, the two lines that informed me that another life was taking shape in my womb.

  I left the bathroom and showed the pregnancy test to Fran, who didn't know how to react at first. We cried, embraced, but this time there weren't tears of sadness or frustration, but joy, because I felt, finaly, that I was ready to face this experience again.

  During dinner we barely spoke, but neither of us could stop smiling. Perhaps a melancholic smile, at times, but always sincere. Afterwards, we headed to the beach for the last walk of the day. The night was starry and we could appreciate it thanks to the absence of light pollution. I knelt down, and this time Fran knelt down with me. Together we took a handful of sand and watched it fall between our intertwined fingers.

  We contemplated that process, the process of life, for a while; how even if it changes, moves, falls and rises or moves away, it always returns to its place, finding its way, its way of being and existing; how everything that happens comes and goes, never remains, but is in constant movement. And how the bad, or not so good, things in life are not forgotten, but they mark a path for you to be happy again.