It is not a church and yet you feel the same solemnity.
It is not a mausoleum, but you can breathe that overwhelming and respectful silence.
It is not a museum, but you can see the reason that makes people interesting, intense, talented, unforgettable.
It is a place, not too big, that shelters tenderness, strengths, beginnings, endings, reflections of authentic beauty, of life.
It lives in a dusty, but endearingly intimate corner of my home. That which, as the Persian poet Gibran says, is “your big body.”
I’m not going to continue with this kind of riddle, so not to bore you.
It’s my trunk of memories.
I visited it recently looking for something, I don’t even remember, and as if it were a magician’s hat, rabbits in the shape of remembrances jumped out.
A well of, not very organized, cards, letters, old photographs, each one an immortal moment.
I stayed for a long time immersed in that ocean of the past, which felt very present. It was like reliving those “here and now”, after galactic light years.
I felt it like an eternal moment, an encounter with a certain divinity.
I closed the trunk and stayed for a long time listening to the echo of my own life.
Murmurs of time…
Leonor Henríquez (Caracas, Venezuela) Civil Engineer by training (UCAB 1985), writer and apprentice poet by vocation. From her time in engineering emerged her Office Stories (1997), another way of seeing the corporate world. Her latest publications include reflections on grief, Hopecrumbs (2020) (www.hopecrumbs.com) and “The Adventures of Chispita” (2021) (www.chispita.ca) an allegory of life inside Mom’s belly.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com