One time I asked my mom about my childhood, about my past. Her answer was: “you were a happy girl”. Those words come and go to me like the ocean waves.
Water, the prelude of my birth and the border limit of this corner to which I always come back. Memory and nostalgia, my own ways of condemn myself always.

Of those first years of my life, my memory falls and fails trying to remember who is that girl. I don’t know where or when that part of my history disappeared. Sometimes I feel it doesn’t belong to me and it makes me sad. The few memories I remember from that time are lose and mixed photographs inside of a blue box. Contained moments in pieces of old paper of 4x6 inches.

I’m in the same house I’ve always lived, but like the house I’m also changing and getting old, like everything else also changes. I remember the house of the photographs and some objects from the background, but I don’t remember myself in most of those pictures. I see a smiling and playful girl, happy to be home or happy to be next to the trees. I remember a canvas on the wall and a couch, the dining room, the walls, my grandmother’s garden and my dog.

I also remember my elementary school, the uniform I wore, the birthday parties that I cried and going away with my family crossing the border to the US. Happy days and sad days, faces of people that I don’t know where they are now, names and last names that have also been erased from my memory.

The things I remember, I remember them in pause or just like a glimpse, like opening and closing my eyes very quickly. Blurry view, colors fading. I see my eyes in the photographs, I see my smile, my skin, the objects and people all around me, the colors, the lights and shadows. I try my best to reconstruct that fragment of time that I have in my hands as I hold the pictures, but I’m almost never able to.

There’s so much that happens and then it goes away. The days go by, the emotions of yesterday are also different. The scent of the things fades and the textures to the touch are forgotten. And all we have left is this moment, that is also inevitably going away. It is going, it is going away, it has gone.

A blank page and a sigh.

The childhood, my childhood has gone away, this house is different. My skin, my eyes and my smile are not the same anymore. Neither my memories from before, nor the memories from today that will I have after.

We are not but ghosts of clouded memories, almost completely forgotten, dancing in the air and in the time. We are oblivion clinging to the memory of the present time. We are sand that sticks to the skin and then it is drank by the sea or blown away by the wind.