Saturday, September 26, 2015

Broken by History


She crossed the border illegally and went from princess to worker in a few days. She saw her house burn and her dolls turn into ashes. She lost a father because of jealousy, and went to another place to run away from two powerful uncles.

He lost his family in a shipwreck, and sailed through the seven seas from India to Canada. Before that, however, the Indian economy wasn’t doing well, and obliged them to sell their zoo.

She left a beloved home, a beloved country, a beloved past memory to run from the Nazis, because in their mentality, the way she prayed wasn’t the right one. So she had to move to LA as fast as she could, even though it meant to leave her ill father and a dazzling Gustave Klimt’s portrait in Vienna.

He saw in buzzling New York a new life he would never know in a small village in cold Russia. And the children of his cousins saw, in a balloon, a possibility to flee from Eastern Germany.

She spent months in the middle of nowhere, trying to get anywhere, because China didn’t really seem like a brilliant future for a grandmother, a mother and two little girls.

He never made it to Europe, but his body did, floating in the Mediterranean. He broke millions of people’s hearts. The Earth cried blood and salty tears, as it never cried before, for the boy who lived a little, and moved lots of cold individual souls.

Pieces of History’s infinite puzzle. Missing pieces, molded in a way they would never fit in their original place ever again. The edges would never fit, and all of them would be forever outsiders, lost between Mexico and the US, New Delhi and Montreal, Austria and California, Minsk and the big apple, Hong Kong and Sidney, Syria and the EU. Lost all over the world.

Children's fates, brutally taken away.

The forces of destiny have never been so cruel.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Teenage whims


"All young people would have their little whims"

- Mrs. Weston, “Emma”, Jane Austen, 1815.


To get a whole pizza to celebrate, and Nutella in times of sorrow;
Never wait for the cookies to be ready, eat the fresh dough;
Be as impatient as a child; ambitious as an adult.
Selfish and unselfish

To break things and legs
Live in drama and comedy
Tears and laughter

Skip gym to watch Netflix,
Skip classes to fall in love or study before tests.
Immersed in boredom, but always busy to stop for a while.
To look forward to a party, and spend it in a corner, with a phone in hand;
Criticize society and do nothing to change it;
To see everything in black and white and ignore what’s gray.

Match summer with ice cream;
Winter with Starbucks;
And forget about salad.

To be blind and have eyes opened;
To shock and be shocked,
Laugh continually.

To complain about everything and generalize;
Find excuses all the time;
Love more than it is possible, and hate intensely.
Have hope when nobody has faith.
See magic in little acts.
To exaggerate and daydream.
To see what’s good in people and quickly believe them;
Be naïve and spontaneous.

To let things go and hold on to them
To be and not to be

To shout at the sea, and cry when no one’s looking,
To judge and be judged,
And face men, women and children as equals.

To understand diversity and embrace it.


To be, at the same time, lost and found in reality.