I knock and my friend opens the door. From behind him his little daughter jumps in, faces me from her 50 cmts and three years with a broad smile and tells: “inti, look, here is this hat that my father gave me and it has a very nice band”. I can’t say anything meaningful, but smile and emphatetically move my head up and down in agreement. No words come to help. Last time I saw her she could pronounce a couple of words, certainly understandable by her parents. What a fuck is going on?
I am chatting with a girlfriend. A dedicated professor, she has also served in several leadership positions at her university. Right now she is considering to move on, perhaps even to Europe. Plans are still too vague, and COVID and the future are all open and to be decided. But who knows? We play with the idea of meeting in Madrid, or perhaps in Istanbul, why not? After all, we say, we haven’t seen each other in... I count... twelve years? TWELVE years?
According to myself, I am a Venezuelan who found love in The Netherlands, so that I happen to live here, in Utrecht. But actually, I arrived to Venezuela when i was 8, and left when I was 27. I have lived in The Netherlands more years that I have lived anywhere else. Yet the last twenty have gone in a whistle. I don’t feel more dutch than years back, nor more settled, nor older.
Yet the years flow by. In a while I’ll be nothing, again. It doesn’t really matter where my carcass will land, does it? In the meantime I’ll keep improving the trajectory of my katana and my peace underwater. Perhaps one of my books finds a publisher, perhaps my piolets will bite ice again. I know I will keep trying, but I also know that time is short. This is no time to stop. The old barbarian is at the gate, indeed. It is open, but I will not yield. He will have to chase me when I run, and when I climb and when I dive.
I will not stop.