AWAKENING

MOODS

How fast Sebastian runs! Without hesitating a single moment, hardly stopping anywhere, he crosses the avenue, goes across the square, his legs are in a rush and his breath never fades: a brief traffic light will give him new strength. He runs alone as he knows every street and in his marathon there is nothing that can stop him. He moves forward swiftly between the tumult of cars, avoiding one person, another person, a litter bin. His feet cannot be still, they love speed and movement; if they have to sleep, he has to be barefoot; if they have to stop, let it be at the edge of a zebra crossing.

And how does he smile while running! Some people gaze at him curiously when he passes by like a bat out of hell, but it is not his frenzy which attracts their attention, but the captivating spectacle of that radiant smile that guides his race diligently and will never make him fail. Sebastian runs the city and smiles at it, measuring in his giddy march the size of his own resistance, sharing his joy with everybody.

How lovely Sebastian is, still so small but so smart already! I see you going straight past and I wonder where you must be heading for in such a hurry, now that you are about to turn around that corner therefore leaving me behind forever. But, suddenly, my doubt is postponed: you did stop! There, under that tree, you stand motionless, although your muscles crackle restlessly. Maybe some ignorant insect has bitten you, because you are inserting your hand inside your pants and you seem to be scratching your ass. Your hand doesn’t reappear yet, and your shining smile has vanished into an expression of disorientation.

—Sebastian, don’t look like that, please. Don’t worry, everything is fine. It’s only your body. Flesh and bones.

And then you disintegrate at a stroke in my memory, and I rdalne, painfully, that kids don’t grow up; one day they simply die and transform into adults. The hardest thing, however, is that nobody attends the funeral; not even the corpse.

MOVIES

Nobody knows, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2004.

A Lie! Childhood was a lie!

They say that childhood is the seed of man, which lets him germinate and become a distorted adult, and also that it is impossible to realise the exact moment in which that change is finally completed; the blossoming is so subtle and discreet that the eye in our memory is unable to catch that transit. And I do answer: a lie!

A punishing hand humiliated violently my head against the ground and forcing me to breathe the grains of sand, my eyes dived inside the humus, struggling between surviving the suffocation or looking for an exit through the stones, the roots, the darkness.

Like an oracle, the seed was in front of me, shining with a rare intensity in that underworld full of insects. And so it happened, in the least expected moment, just a few centimetres from me, that the seed broke with a subterranean roar, the shell cracked in thousands of invisible fragments, and the beginning of that life started to beat hastily. Both, it and me, sharing the same desperation to escape from that cell and breathe.

But now that I know what lies beyond that wall, the door has no meaning anymore.

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2 Children, by Desártico.