Your first name, last name and a date.

I will continue to write to you every May 11th until one day, in eternity, we will meet, you, a young man of 26 years old, and I, an old woman of septuagenarian or octogenarian age, as God will decide.

THERE IS A SMELL OF damp earth here and fresh grass ready to break its confinement and grow in search of the sun. Everything is covered by silence. It seems as if only the leaves of the trees have conversation here, swaying in a gentle breeze.

I keep so many things for you, year after year I have kept them from time to tell you and give them only to you: projects, illusions, disappointments, dry leaves, photos of all this time… It will be like telling you everything at once to erase the time of separation.

But…, I’m afraid. I don’t know how I’m going to find you…, if you’ll recognize me. I know you won’t understand, I wouldn’t have understood either…, so many years without coming to see you!

I have not forgotten, I have not been able to do it. From the first sentences we said to each other, to the last ones, I could repeat them all if someone asked me to. You remained static in my memories with those 24 years and the two holluelos marked on my cheeks.

That’s why I walk slowly, despite the years since I last saw you. And with this slow walking I just try to know how I can surprise you. I know that with surprise I have a trump card. To be true I have to say that it was you who surprised me. From the first instant, from the first time…

-Can you see well from a distance with those glasses?

-Yes.

-And up close?

-Also.

-Let’s see, lend them to me… From far away I can see you very well, from close up….

And then came the kiss, that unexpected kiss that united us for almost the whole race. And so were each of our things, so was the world we made for ourselves, the years of life we gave each other. When you weren’t there, I would hide little pieces of paper around the house that I would write to you in class, at night, when I was studying or just wherever I could find your image. And there were so many of them!

That’s why now I’m trying to think what I’ll say to you, how I’ll introduce myself to you, what words will fill the gaps of these years. But I’m not going to talk to you about that. Nor am I worried about whether I will impress you again as before, or whether, on the contrary, I am only the image of someone much loved in another era.

I know that there is no explanation for my behavior, when so many years have passed. That everyone has come here, the most friends, family, acquaintances and even -I know it well- the least friends…, who have sat here for a while and have felt sad not to be able to stay.

I’m wearing pants and my hair is short, but you won’t notice that. Only my eyes, no longer as luminous as they used to be, will fill the depths and reach your reasons…, I want to see if this way I can find out what you were looking for. My hands are full of photos, of papers to read, of loneliness, of projects waiting for you…

I’m not going to ask you questions. I feel you won’t interrogate either. I have brought you some picualas and wonders that escape from my hands so full of things for you. I don’t imagine you at 32, I still see you at 26. When I close my eyes, I see you at 22, laughing, it’s raining hard and you and I are running down the stairs. I always remember that.

I’ll get there and stand still, waiting for you. You always saved the situations. I’ll wait for your first word, for your hands outstretched to me, for your smile that opens hollows on your cheeks….

But…, I cannot get there and simply find your name and your surname and underneath a date: May 1978, and nothing else. To shout your name to the point of no end and that you do not answer, do not speak, do not laugh, do not shout, do not cry, do not reproach, do not move…, do not be there!

I prefer to keep on talking to everyone about you, making you immortal for me, longing for you to the point of suffering, bringing you to the present as if the sea were not in the way. And so, sending you messages and messages of love with doves that know about you, with singing crickets that know where to find you, falling in love with the flight of some autumn breeze that reaches you, that’s how I prefer to have you.

Do you understand me, do you understand me? It is better this way. I do not subject you to the futility of not speaking to me, of feeling me and not being able to embrace me, of letting me escape again….

As for me, I will continue to wander near the place where you are without daring to arrive. I finally came to know the meaning of that sentence you wrote me in your last letter: «You are for me the infinite and eternal love, and impossible to reach». Because that, exactly, is what we will be for each other. And it will be, it is, beautiful.

After all, we had that, we gave each other the best of our lives and that is a shocking truth. There are those who never get to know that «ray» of the Italians. I will continue to write to you every May 11th until one day, in eternity, we will meet, you, a young man of 26, and I, a septuagenarian or octogenarian, as God will decide.

I am ready, like that morning in a university classroom, to accept a book from your hands, to read it together.

May 11th, 1982

Written by Maritza Tejera.