"Ma & Pa”
*Endearing Spanish ways to say “Madre & Padre” (“Mother & Father”)
"Ma” ("Mother”) Earthenware and metal Electric firing, 25 in tall 2021
"Pa” ("Father”) Stoneware Smoke firing, 25 in tall 2021
“Ma”
“Mother”
SUNDAY
“Life consists of perpetual changes,” my mother tells with serenity, “incessant transactions. You exchange one pain for another, one worry for the next, one joy and then another. And so you go until you reach fifty, like me, and fall asleep reading because your head is too exhausted.”
I have stopped drying the dishes, and now I observe attentively her young wrinkles. Her face doesn't really look like it carries the fifty years she has discounted.
I must have been stunned by such a sudden and introspective confession because my mother turned her eyes towards mine, and held her stare softly for maybe a second or two. Just enough to calm my worry before she said with a delicate smile, “What's the matter? You've stopped drying the dishes. Look, the rag is wringing out on the tile. There are already three drops on the floor.”
*Excerpt from my writings. From a collection of texts entitled “Confidencies”.
"Sleep sometimes becomes the only way to have peace and it is no longer the obligation imposed by parents when you want to stay awake as a child.”
“Pa”
“Father”
MY FIRST FAREWELL
I remember realizing that time "was" and that it passed like clouds and the toilet flush. I remember a goldfish but not his name, and I remember the farewell my father and I gave him when his time as a fish became the time of something else.
In my childhood memories, the story is worthy of drama and novel, there was a paper coffin and nostalgic discourse. My father guided me through the construction of a suitable artifact to bury the immobile, scaly, and golden body, while my four years shed tears as sticky goodbyes. Together we traced a red cross in the white lid of our homemade paper box; a cross drawn with a permanent marker as if we were trying to evade the change that comes to everything.
My father is a surgeon and he showed me how to draw the red cross when I was four. I like to think we did it then in honor of a wounded warrior who was no longer able to swim.
After drawing, we proceeded to bury the fishy soldier, whose name I no longer remember, centered on the floor of the paper coffin.
I remember him thirty centimeters under the ground, covered with a paper blanket and my child's prayers. I remember me and my father digging the garden. I remember solemnity and a cold breeze under my feet.
*Excerpt from my writings.
From a collection of texts entitled “Confidencies”.
