| |
- Happy birthday mom!
My daughter jumped out of bed, ran barefoot over the wooden floors and hung over my neck waiting for me to pick her up in my arms.
- You’re so heavy! – She was eight years old and she was the girl of my eyes. My greatest treasure and all my fears together.
- You’re just getting older mom – she said while hugging me tightly.
Older, old... no – I thought – mature, interesting, wiser. I was not afraid of the passing years, at least not mine. I suffered more on my daughter’s birthdays than my own. Thinking about the fact that she was growing, that soon she would enter adolescence and I would become her number one enemy. That she would be heartbroken, that she would taste alcohol, sex, maybe even drugs, that she would leave home, - hopefully not very far – and build her life without me. I wanted my little girl for myself, like that, just the way she was, barefoot, with her Bambi t-shirt, those yellow pants and her scrambled curls. If only time wouldn’t pass her, that she should stay forever by my side, spinning around me.
- Call grandma tell her to pick you up from school and to come meet me at my office at one o’clock to eat just the three of us – my mother and my daughter loved each other, they were like twin sisters separated at birth by the distance of sixty years. They had the same gestures, the same look, the same innocent heart. – And hurry up, it’s almost seven thirty.
I was turning forty years old and I could proudly say that I had lived them intensely. Nobody could accuse of the contrary. I had studied, worked, traveled, loved, cried, and everything ending in “ed” I had done it. Even a daughter! She wasn’t in my early plans and she was actually my best decision. To her I was just her mother, but to many others I was many Elenas. The protagonist of the many lives I lived, because in my forty years of age, I have had time to give the best of me, in the many versions, costumes and masks. Life has given me so much and I gave myself to it without a parachute. <<She died for having lived>> that’s what they’d say of me when my story was the memory of the people that were part of it one day.
- To life – I said to myself, toasting to nothing with my fruit shake.
At my forty years of age, I was the Elena I wanted to be, and a little bit of the Elenas I was.
Like every morning, I accompanied my daughter to school before going to work. If I had earned something in my twenty years of professional life, it was the management of my time, and since I started sharing my home with an eight-year-old, my clocks turned towards her. I had learned also, to economize the minutes and the distance, so my house, the school and the office formed a triangle that I could easily walk around in less than fifteen minutes. To live without the stress of cars, the subway or the bus was a reward I had earned during my forty years.
- Remember that your grandma will be coming to pick you up at one and then we will eat together – I said to her while I placed the little backpack on her back – don’t get held back playing with your friends.
- Yes, mother... - she answered with a sigh that alerted me of how hard her adolescence was going to be. She still hadn’t finished her first decade and already she had more personality than most of the people I knew. I loved her for that, but I feared her even more. – Congratulations mommy! – She screamed from afar waving her hand and without turning her head to look at me. The backpack was heavier than her, it was almost as tall as her, but she didn’t care, she was at school and she was happy. Actually, my daughter was always happy and that made me, an incredibly lucky woman.
- Thank you honey – I answered back.
She didn’t hear me. She was running through the aisle to meet her dearest friends. She reminded me of when I was little. I loved school. Mostly recess hours, the game, the snacks, end of course fieldtrips, music class, dance class... I had been born to be a tv star. Until I turned thirteen and started hating to be the center of attention. All the grace of my tender childhood was frustrated by the reddish color of my cheeks every time more than five people stared at me. I didn’t just blush, I mutated! And of course, the rest of my classmates, so generous, they made sure that the incident was not left at that only, and while I was suffering trying to control my nerves and sweat, they would raise their red pens. As if I didn’t know that my cheeks were about to explode and that we, yes, them too, all were in grave danger of combusting.
My mother, at the time, thought that drama classes might help me in my battle against embarrassment so I attended a dramatic class school every Saturday morning. I lasted three weeks. The day the professor invited me to go in the stage and act as if I were a fish in a fish bowl, I quit and convinced myself that shame would be a sickness that would heal with older age. I think I was right. Until that happened, I decided to take refuge in reading, studying and traveling. I was a mixture between the solitary young girl and the weird girl, although my mom would rather tell my grandparents that I was simply “special”.
Special, a word only comparable to the other one she used, “funny”.
- Mom, do you like this hairdo? – I would ask in front of the mirror, with more hairpins on my head than hair.
- Yes, you are funny darling – she would answer with particular sincerity.
- But is funny a good or a bad thing?
- Funny is funny – she would say – not good, not bad, funny. –and then she escaped from the bathroom with the excuse of some “urgent” task.
I wanted to be beautiful, not funny, but I preferred to be special than weird, of that I was certain.
The morning of my fortieth birthday, after dropping off my daughter at school, I decided to remove the sound from my phone and enjoy the silence. It was eight thirty in the morning, I had twenty minutes at a slow pace, from the door of my daughter’s school to the door of my office. I expected a day full of work and more social life than desired. To the calls I received daily for professional reasons and the few (the necessary ones and some more) of my private life, would be added the amount of messages, emails and calls in the form of congratulations that would accumulate in the memory of one of those smart phones my boss forced me to have. I swear, I had nothing against turning forty, I thought it was a wonderful age, but the years, apart from wrinkles and wisdom, also gave me the right to renounce commitments that I did not want and among them were the “happy birthday” calls.
For some people, the affection of others is measured by the amount of congratulations one receives on their birthday. I, on the other hand, could renounce them and feel equally loved. Even more.
I was walking down Verdi Street, in the Gracia neighborhood, at the height of the cinemas by the same name, after walking past certain house, number 39, which I always dreamt of owning and never did – I still have time – I thought. I was walking entertained in my thoughts, imagining how my dream home was on the inside (I only knew its front), of how I would decorate it, if it had an elevator, if there would be windows on every room... I imagined it would be filled with natural light, with high ceilings and marble floors.
It was one of those spring mornings in which the sun heats the walks, the jackets make a nuisance and we start to feel that breeze of a summer that has not yet arrived, but it is desired. Winter, always long, weighs upon the paleness of the skin and the fifteen degrees Celsius of the first hours, are the speaker of an ending that is only starting to begin. During spring, Barcelona changes its skin, it takes out the colors. The people who shared ways and routines with me, smiled more and better that morning, unaware of my birthday, surprised by the sun. I liked to have birthdays. I always liked it.
I have never understood, or rather, I have never shared the opinion of people who look to the past as if it were a better place. I love my past, let it not be misunderstood, but I like it from a distance, from the unreliable and generally sweetened memory of a time I left behind. I don’t look at it from longing or melancholy but as the school that it once was. I have closed a lot of doors throughout my forty years, some I closed determined, others with doubt and some few ones, I was forced to close since it wasn’t entirely up to me to keep them opened.
A closed door protects the world behind it, it keeps it secrets, keeps smells intact. The door, its memory, evokes the person we were, the moments, the companies but above all it reminds us of the decisions we made and it explains the why of who we are now. The door is just the frame of our photos, the proof of the way traveled.
While walking towards the office, with the house of my dreams already behind my back, I reflected on the Elena I was. Over the years, I’ve been getting rid of the masks that at some point, society or myself, put me. I’ve been letting go of the burden of obligations that nobody told me I had to fulfill, but that many expected me to do. I have learned to love me for who I am, to cherish my flaws as well as my virtues, to let go without feeling guilty... no, definitely I would not go back. My present was, with all security, a better place to live in. I didn’t have to look back, only forward. Of course, on that Tuesday morning, I couldn’t imagine that what was just a reflection, would become a strange prelude, a very particular birthday gift. And the fact is that I was the sum of all the Elenas that I once was, but also the Elena of Quim, Edward, Gibel and Manel. Four people, four stories, four moments of my life.
That morning I would meet again with feelings I thought were forgotten, distant loves, people that in one way or another, had changed my life.
The four corners of my past, they came to greet me for my fortieth birthday.