My life has been worth every minute

Each year near my birthday I sit down and meditate about the curious and profound matter of time. It`s interesting, by the way, that my birthday actually happens to be near the alcoholically important Palmares Festival; near the economically awful month of January; and like this year`s case, near some embarrassing election campaign.

Pff! Bummer! Yeah, I admit it. I am not exactly a fan of my birthday. First of all, I just don’t know how to react when I am in the spotlight for 24 hours. It seems to me it`s too much importance and that everything would be easier if I had a twin brother who to equally share half of this attention with. Secondly: I never know what face to make when people sing happy birthday to me. Should I stare at the cake? Or should I stare at everyone who is standing around me? Should I smile? Should I pretend I`m trying to focus on the wish that will magically pop up to reality as soon as I blow out the candles? At the end, I am so nervous I never wish anything, which makes me think I have wasted 32 very valuable opportunities to make my cosmic dreams come true. After that, I am attacked by some kind of self-awareness and low self-esteem effect and I think no one is going to remember my birthday. Instead, I feel everybody will totally ignore it because, even though there are many Facebook birthday calendar apps, people nowadays don´t really invest their time in recalling dates. On the other hand, I strangely and uselessly tend to waste energy and keep my mind busy constantly recalling everyone else´s birthdays- by everyone I mean famous people, first grade friends and even people I don’t like. To make things worse, I get inevitably attacked by a horrible Peter Pan syndrome: my outfits are more childish than ever and I feel like going around antique stores wishing that out of the blue a genie will come out of an old lamp, a vase or an 80`s computer just to grant me eternal youth. I get very anxious about the unavoidable passing of time, and I go through and existential crisis thinking that since January 16^th 1981 I started to die. Anyway, I am not good company between January 8^th and January 15^th. Consider yourselves warned.

As part of my Peter Pan syndrome, I tend to swing and wear colorful socks…

In addition to my neurosis (so short but dramatically described in the previous paragraph), I consider that the fact my birthday is in January- I`m a Capricorn- basically pushes me, almost by default, to the lovely entertaining hobby of philosophizing about the passing of time. All of us, who follow the Gregorian logic that counts the times the Earth goes around the Sun, tend to devote ourselves to deep end of the year thoughts for about 5 days near December 31^st. However, on January 3^rd at the latest, everybody has concluded their own inner analysis and has moved on. They will meditate again on what important stage of their lives they are going through only when their birthdays start getting closer and closer. For now, May and August still seem to be very far away. Now, since I was born in January, I continue pondering over the end of the year conclusions. Therefore, when January 16^th finally comes I am completely absorbed in a fucking mental disorder.

The thing is that the passing of time is one of the most mysterious phenomenon of the universe. Neither physics nor philosophers or shamans have been able to find out how it happens or even how to control it. Not even the devil is willing to ignore it. Very well did Mephistopheles denying it to Faust, even after Faust had sold his soul to him: he would grant Faust anything he wanted, but the possibility to say “time, stop!” The passing of time is such a mysterious matter that, as in Thomas Mann´s The Magic Mountain (the only book I read last year, and well, I haven´t finished it. I know, a very embarrassing reading balance in 2013), we don’t even know how to perceive it because we can´t smell it. We can´t taste it. We can´t see it. We can´t hear it, and clearly, we can´t touch it. So, if we can´t perceive it with any of the senses that help us discover what´s around us, how do we feel the passing of time to the point in which some people can assure half an hour has passed and be right without even checking a watch?

As we can see, I get a hell of a mess in my head. However, this year, my regular thoughts about the passing of time have been softened by a definition I consider brilliant about this matter. At the end of December, while going over my facebook year, among pictures, phrases, videos and some of the rides of this rocking horse, I ran into an article about a dictionary whose definitions have been written by children. The book is titled House of the Stars: The Universe Told by Children, and it was written by Javier Naranjo, a teacher who put together 500 definitions of over 133 words. Such definitions were given by children from rural schools in the East of Antioquía Department, in Colombia. I love to read the definitions given by the children about profound concepts because they definitely see the world differently, through the angles of some windows adults don´t usually see through any more: the simplest angles.

Thousands of men and women have tried to define the matter of time (I dare you, dear readers, to define it for me. I can bet you will think about it for a good while), but none of them has ever seemed as true as 8 year old Jorge Armando´s definition: Time, something that happens so you remember.

While I write these lines, I am exactly four times as old as him but I couldn’t have come up with such a wisely simple definition. I mean, if time is something that happens so we can remember, I welcome the passing of time. For me there isn’t anything more valuable than memories.

Dali´s Persistence of Memory. Time and memories in one portrait.

Memories are the essence of life. I am sorry to attack the naive vision that considers that the only thing that counts is the present and that the past is fucking gone. Here, ladies and gentlemen, everybody lives out of memories.

You know, the present is so short that it practically doesn’t exist…So short that at the moment you, dear readers, have reached this point of the sentence the first words already belong to the past. The present, although short, is beautiful, but useless. The shooting star is so beautiful, but its light is not enough to guide us through the sky of a dark night.

Life, as we know it, is practically made up of memories and depends on them entirely. We depend on memories to find the words that we`ve used to describe what we`ve lived since we were little children. We depend on memories to recognize those who are around us and to know what role they play in our lives. We depend on memories to move around the streets of the city to go back home. We depend on memories to remember how to turn on the computer and get to work. The only thing that does not depend on memories is what works automatically, such as breathing, going to the bathroom, and the beating of your heart. Our memory is what saves us from just being mere living creatures, so we are human. This is why, to me, Alzheimer and amnesia are the worst illnesses of all. They take away from you the ability to gather those memories that make you human and define who you really are.

Dude, if time is something that happens to remember, then what a success! Really, I think it is great that it goes by! If the price we have to pay to have memories is the passing of time, I am glad I am one year older, even though sometimes I feel like moving to Neverland so I don’t grow any older.

So, dear 32^nd year, thank you for having gone by. Even though you leave me with a body that does not lose weight so easily, that has been warned about quitting smoking, that has some gray hair I sometimes pull out fiercely in front of the mirror as soon as I see it, you also leave me life pages full of memories, pages that were boringly blank before.

My mom and I in a coffee shop in Amsterdan. The best moment in my 32nd year.

Pages that tell the story of how I worked up to 17 hours non-stop taking care of German dogs, making beds in a hostel, and translating a shitty book for peanuts. Those pages have taught me that if I really want to become a writer, I need to believe it first and work more seriously on it.

Pages that tell how I lost my fear of riding motorcycles and my fear of having feelings for someone again in the moment I hugged a guy who knew how to ride all over the streets and through my scars.

Pages that tell how, during a week full of tears in Berlin, I realized there are stories that are not as good to be written or to stop me from writing new stories.

Pages that tell how, under a surreal landscape in Nepal, one day I opened my e-mail and the cover of my first book stopped being a dream to become a bunch of pixels.

Pages that tell how I realized I was not dead inside; that I was still able to feel and weep over the paper when I had to say good-bye to the hero of a story.

Pages that tell how in a snowy crystal attic you can find the essence of good literature and the lips you had been wanting for 15 years.

Pages that tell how a coffee shop in Amsterdam can work as a time machine to take you back in time to those days that are gone to never come back. I was able to sit with my mother, but she was my age, it was the 70`s and behind the pot smoke, for a while, those days seemed to be back.

So if time had to go by to make me grow older but also to leave me all those memories, then, time, please keep going by. At 33, ladies and gentlemen, I can say that my life has been worth every minute!

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