An Aged Album

I remember the morning of that day when confusion sowed a seed. It sprouted into restlessness, which kept growing in the form of doubt. And from it, hope blossomed.

Under the clandestine gaze that watches, through proprioceptive sensation, every millimeter of exhalation my disconsolate diaphragm sighs out, I open that dusty album of memories.

The recapitulation takes me back to the times when innocence was sacred. A smile marked by a sunken tooth and a few deep scars, extreme, yet at that moment raw reflections of feeling the world's disdain for the sacred treasure of my pure heart.

"Mom," I call. I search at eye level and see several skirts around me. I pick the one that looks familiar, but when I look up it isn't my mom but a cruel lady who, with her cronies, chants a taunt dedicated to my until-now sacred clumsiness.

The yellow hammock, with its cheaply woven red pines, smells of sour nostalgia as I rest my elbows on it, still on my feet. "Mom, I want boobie," I say. Her "no" is so absolute that, inside my yellow refuge that smells so piercingly of sour nostalgia, today I begin to sigh.

This same sigh takes me to the time I survive chickenpox and see my childhood sweetheart again. "I don't like her anymore," I admit, puzzled. The tender intensity with which she hugs me for the last time drowns in pain the budding Don Juan who was going to be the cow that jumps over the moon.

Now the world tastes of metallic choking. Sitting at my innocent desk one day during this first school experience. A school opened to shelter the profane afflicted of that river flood I chose not to understand, since all it took from me was one flip-flop. At this desk scratched with vulgarities I hide while I am cruelly harassed by the gang of mean girls led by the most lascivious succubus ever inflicted upon the sacred Earth.

And with nowhere left to flee, tonight I look at the badly drawn rabbit stamped on the full moon rising millimeter by millimeter over the mountain that hides the horizon. The good girls in the distance look at me full of incomprehension. Only the moon understands me. Only in this particular qualia does my innocence remain untouched by anyone.

So many footprints drawn upon the sea. So much pain that shaped the impulse of my song. So much ignorance that I interpreted with ignorance, and for which I closed my heart.

The sigh that opened the album descends to the point where I usually lose sight of it. The expansive line that separates the way out from the way in becomes perceptible, ending all accumulated uncertainty.

I remember this moment in which I hold my heart in my hands. I immediately return it to my chest, to the center of my being. I leap from my chair, ecstatic at the innocence of this moment. Now that my heart is inside me, it opens by itself.

I watch clandestinely as, diffusely, my diaphragm begins to inhale. Every millimeter of air swells my being with tempered enthusiasm, with that joy that celebrates equally both the sour little snapshots in an aged album and the eternal sacredness of this single instant.