Mother.

Mother, I was thinking you this afternoon driving my motorbike. Sometimes, when one is son that goes growing, one develops certain cycle in the mind, in which one remembers exact memories on time and evaluate and understand them with a curious strength of present. How wonderful, the mind. Then sometimes I remember, I remember you, and I ask myself with brush strokes of surprise, Who were you? while I was distracted on the television when you were cleaning the outside of the house. Who were you? while I was distracted playing videogames on the computer and your hands were creating art in the kitchen. Sometimes, full of curiosity I used to come by your side when you were cooking. There wasn’t question you didn’t answer. It didn't matter your concentration on flavours, there was always a word to me. There was always your planning, telling me what you did, what you were doing, and what will you eventually do. I remember you, I remember your vocalisation towards the end of your session to call us all to eat. Your tones, very clear on my mind are. “Franklyn come to eat!” does not sound as “David come to eat, it’s yummy”, and that doesn’t remotely sounds close to “Jesus David come to eat, I won’t repeat it”. I think of you mother, I think of you in distance, not only physical, but spiritual, the one that allow me to think of you from another galaxy. And I see you, among stardust, by seconds, between memories I have of you. A total warrior; every frame per second I see someone that compromised itself with life as I never saw compromise in anyone. Curious, when kid, I used to ask myself when I used to see you reading those extensive documents with words like “epistemology”, How can she read so much?!.

Reading wasn’t a fictitious or impalpable tool, reading gave you, mother, an absolute power of the word. To talk about soul or about academy, your word could supply any empty space on the intellect. Who’s capable of stepping in such terrain, can, and even must, educate others. And that’s why, you created such an stable academic world. A world that eventually dressed my imagination. Your academic world gave me loneliness, it gave me entire afternoons for myself. Entire afternoons to imagine you hosting a class few meters from me. I never told you, but the fact that you used to take me from time to time to your work, used to give me total tranquility. Among your responsibilities you used to give me time to live, to live differently as I would at home or school, you were giving me an space in which I was appreciating your confidence on me. And certainly that place, the called “House of twelve windows”, had printed on its walls that independent scent, whit its particular renaissance floor, and old and heavy wood everywhere.

On your compromise for cleaning you only needed me if anything was heavier than 10 Kilos and you needed to move it. I remember, already shameless, that you used to show your annoyance on my lack of collaboration. But you can’t denied, I did never left your side. And I didn’t used to stay because I was ashamed, I used to stay next to you because there were someone I was admiring grandly. You didn't need anyone. You didn’t need much. Two plastic bags covering your arms were enough to compile all the trash from the floor with your own hands, even picking the stranded submarines from the intestines of the pet. Then there I used to help, opening the bag in which you were pouring all the trash. I had to go out to the world to realise, you are a real labourer. An academic labourer. A mechanic erudite. Mathematical. Logistic.

Certainly you didn’t force me to anything. As my father, everything you guys were was placed in front of me without censorship. We, the children, should sit back just to look at parents, to see on them talent, compromise, and in that way, not to shape ourselves on that, but to feel inspired and hopeful about the world, about sapience, about the collective advance by the hand of infinite ideas. I admired from you, as from my father, what you guys were outside parenting… it didn’t matter how small I was then, you guys were thousand meters tall, and you used to raise me above the clouds to look wider.

Mother today I remember you, I remember you and I write to you because I believe you deserve from me one million words. Today I can’t give you a million, the brain works on a more humanly way, but I wanna wish you today the best on this new stage that comes to your life. Look at life, how curious, on this level it gives you another hope, another trampoline. Life is inviting you, now, to come in and have a red wine. Our country died mother, and we saw it dying together. A country that ceased looking at those who used to maintain it. A country that ceased being worthy to those who provided dignity to it. But we are already here, and another page opens. Let the Bolivar get as devaluated as it wants, anyways every day you’re more reinvigorated. So much reinvigorated that today you receive a call from Inca lands.

I love you with all my heart.

Your son David. Your son that today feels being more your son than ever.

Bolivar*; Venezuelan currency.

Inca lands*; The Inca empire was the biggest pre-Columbian empire of America. Ruled the east of the continent from Colombia to Chile.