Hello everyone 

! I’m Mel.
Today, I’d like to tell you something very special that is happening where I live.

I live in El Marco, a hamlet whose streets belong to two different villages : La Codosera
and Arroches. We are half-Spanish and half-Portuguese. That’s why we speak
« Portuñol ».

My grandad is very happy because there is no other hamlet like ours in the world.
My name is also half-Spanish and half-Portuguese and it means : « as sweet as honey ».

I have honey-coloured eyes.

On the Spanish side, where I live, there are no shops. But that’s not a problem because on
the Portuguese side, there are two, and one belongs to my grandad Toribio.

I love the honey sweets my grandad gives me when I go to the shop every day.
I love them so much because my grandad says I have honey-coloured eyes.

However, on the 14th of March, Coronavirus struck and all of us who lived on the Spanish
side had to isolate in our homes.
I didn’t understand anything but in my heart I felt a big hole full of darkness.
From my bedroom window, I could see my grandad’s little shop.
I missed my grandad so much, the grey colour of his eyes and his sweets.

On the 15th of March, my grandad decided to step on the smallest International bridge in
the world which by three metres separated my house from his shop on the Portuguese
side.

He walked up to the step where there was a Spanish flag and he threw me his fishing line.
I caught it and I don’t know why I tied it to my window.

Seconds later, before I finished tying the last knot, a yellow paper plane slid across the
invisible line and landed in my hands. It was yellow, yellow as the Sun, yellow as the
summer, yellow as my friend Enma’s curly hair.

Upon opening the paper plane, a small honey-flavoured sweet fell out with a written
message :
« I love you, Mel. Soon, we will hug each other »

And every day for 97 days I was sent planes with honey-flavoured sweets inside.
And the dark hole in my heart was being filled up with iloveyous and colours.
The day I could cross the three metres that separated me from my grandad and I could
reach the stone with the Portuguese flag on it, I realised that his hugs had been with me
during those 97 days and they will always be a part of me.
THE END