Along The Yellow Road

I like to play a game that involves traveling through time, paying no attention to the chronological line, as if it didn't matter whether something happened yesterday or 20 years ago, jumping from one place to another with my eyes open, looking inward. Now, here in a small town where it's cold and the fire in the stove tints everything orange, I think about how I'm wandering through a garden in Adelaide, watering seedlings that in a few months will be flowers that bring joy to people I don't know if I'll ever see again. I'm also on a balcony in Barceloneta, listening to two Catalans argue while we drink mate barefoot, with guitars and singing. I feel like I'm walking down the nearly abandoned road that leads to the Cerri pier, the town where I was born, watching how the salt flats manage to cover everything in white. I ring the doorbell at all my friends' houses, and at some I clap instead because the doorbell doesn't work, sometimes they toss me the keys from the balcony wrapped in socks. I'm walking on the beach, the neighborhood's familiar dogs go by, Lala running with a rock in her mouth, and a little while later Chaty and Misil, trampling people's beach mats, and when I look to the sides, there are my friends from the sea, racing to catch the best wave. On the striped beach chairs, my mom and my siblings bought little cones of dulce de leche, and we drink mate with sand in it. With my dad we go to the country house and look at the motorhome belonging to another trucker they call "el Corcho," a 1114 that I dream of owning someday, painted sky blue and white, with daisy curtains. Then I find Georgia's red pickup truck, parked on some random street in Henley, and inside, Emanuel laughing as he pokes his head out between little clotheslines hung with underwear and clothes. The bats that tug at my hair and make chirping sounds as if they were laughing, I see the sun in Haarlem setting between its storybook streets, and the Müller organ that Herman Melville mentions in Moby Dick, which sounds somewhat mournful yet majestic. I see myself lost on a nameless road, sitting on my sky-blue suitcase, trusting that someone will come pick me up. Suddenly I appear in the south, and there are the monsters of Lácar that fed my stories, and the little goblins that used to tap-dance on my roof on freezing winter nights. I see mornings of freshly made fried cakes and folk music, people getting up from the table to dance, waving napkins as if they were handkerchiefs, I hear a song on the train that tastes of Buenos Aires and melancholy, and I walk through Joaquín's planted fields, we take photos, gather bright red tomatoes and play at doing philosophy. In Italy I learn to speak with my hands and to eat with all my senses, I pray in my own way, I love my present, and I sit inside Elizabeth Gilbert's book. Time travels are vast and infinite; sometimes details get added to them that make me doubt whether they really happened, other times I forget certain voices and that saddens me, and I open doors and boxes to find them again and make them sound within me.

It's no news that time passes and doesn't come back, but what is possible is to travel through it along a yellow road that could be called memory, recreating who we were in order to be who we are, feeling that everything is still clinging to us with claws and teeth. And without a doubt, what we do with that defines us.

Paradoxically, these time travels help me stay very present in today, trying not to miss a single detail of these landscapes I'll someday wish to return to. New days, which after being lived will inevitably become intangible memories, but so real for having existed that they will have transformed us.