October 21st of 2020. It’s 2am in the morning, sounds of emptiness travel through the house. A gut feeling tells me “wake up, sleep no more”. My mirror had turned grey. My plants where no longer. My eyes opened at 2:05AM to wildfire flames dancing at rhythms resembling a cello in a Mozart’s symphony. Something changes inside of you by the idea of being burned alive. I am grateful to these fires that where kind enough to not touch my skin. However, they did enter my mind. I now close my eyes and only see a yellowish red. Some images never leave you. This is one of them. You can truly stop breathing at any given moment. Eyes should be wide open while they can still see. Your body it’s not like a lizard’s tail that reproduces itself if it breaks. Your body will stop being. It will stop. Everything will eventually stop, if not by fires, by age, sickness or misfortunes… Tragedies always have a chance of occurring. To wait for tragedy to strike in order to get a sense of what’s really important in life it’s like throwing yourself into the deep blue sea and wait for a shark to eat you. Yet we still do it. We act like we need «to fall in order to be awakened”. Our selfishness gets in the way of our sensibility as living creatures who can only survive on food and water. We are vulnerable and fragile. We are not superb. We are no heroes. We are humans who suffer but are still lucky to be alive until we’re not. Why worry about how to live instead of living? It’s almost like -deep inside- we desire for death to come before its time. A time that’s unknown to us all. A time all we know about is it will happen. Let’s not let confusion get in our way. Let’s not be ungrateful to our existence in this life. Let’s appreciate every step we take, every food we taste, every drink we swallow, every kiss, every hug, every tear, every laugh, every dream. Lets’ not let the fires of our soul burn our insights before recognizing the true light that lies among the universe. Let’s be stars until we are not. Let’s be. Attentive. Appreciative. Alive. Until not.
-This was written the day I learned my mom almost die because of a fire in her building in Puerto Rico.
October 21st 2020, New York, NY.