Month: December 2004

My grandparents’ absence from Bogota has changed more aspects of my life than I ever thought. Not only have I become familiar with La Dorada and family gatherings have become more meaningful, but the meaning of Christmas has changed completely. Without my grandparents, novenas are accessory, meaningless, an excuse to gather your neighbors and/or drink. Christmas music is driving me crazy, the same three songs over and over and over, everywhere.

I’m quite sure I’m not getting presents aside from my parents’ and Minori’s. It doesn’t matter, though; sometimes I wish Christmas didn’t involve presents, just gatherings and food. Maybe Christmas is just an excuse… an excuse to get people together. However, La Dorada has been our excuse to visit my grandparents more often. Maybe that’s way Christmas doesn’t seem too important to me this year.

She had never seen him.

She had never had the opportunity to feel the soft fibers of his hair, the possible roughness of his unshaved cheeks, the mild humidity of his warm breath. She couldn’t tell the story of his scars, for he had none in her mind, where he resided—

That is, whenever he wasn’t busy being himself in real life.

She wasn’t always like this.

Reality was her god, as she thought life was written in a book to which she’d always have access. After all, nothing extraordinary had ever happened to her, locked up in her little town in the Midwest. ‘Locked up’ might just be a silly saying, keeping in mind how free one can be when running up and down the pastures in broad Illinois. But sometimes freedom, or the wide view of it, seems much worse a prison than the actual set of barred walls. The emptiness surrounding seems like solidified void, and the infinite horizon gives crippled wings to those who dare to look beyond the two or three chapped trees behind an old couple’s powder blue house.

Deirdre Gallagher hated her life. She began to hate it as soon as she realized her feet would never stand upon anything different than the sad road which pointed to wavy infinity, or the silly glass museum which intended to deck the whole, creepily green, minuscule town. Every morning she’d gaze through the window at the cars passing by, following them until they became dots and vanished at some turn. Sometimes she pictured herself inside those cars, and after years of daily observation she had learned to recognize the faces within the colored metal carcasses flying by the forgotten village of Woodbine.

Sometimes I’m seen as a widow whose husband never died.

To them, happy memories are shadows, forecasting a meagre, neverending absence. They delve into my eyes, looking for that stubborn tear which refused to see the sun, and the rainbow in my clothes fades into black when I pass by.

Don’t they know I have never intended to weave a shroud?

However, sometimes, the dirt in my hands is visible—

But that’s only me, burying myself in my lonely silence.