_Where is my grandmother? -they would answer:

_She's gone. She doesn't come anymore. She was taken away by a dog in the trunk - and I would start crying, until my grandmother came out of her hiding place and wiped my tears with her white lavender-scented handkerchief:

_Dumb girl, I didn't go anywhere. I'm still here.

This anecdote, beyond highlighting the unintelligent (and even cruel) way some parents had of raising their children, speaks of the feeling of sadness that my grandmother's absence could cause me. And when my grandmother died, just as when the wolf finally, after a thousand threats, comes and eats the sheep, so came the abandonment and the real sadness for the departure of my grandmother. I felt, at the age of 15, the sharp fangs of sadness, the one that bites you and does not let go until it makes you cry inconsolably.

_{Either learn to accept the thorn or don't accept roses, says Arjona}

After that initiatory experience I learned to be aware of the size of my sadness and which experiences may or may not make me sad. Although I have learned over time that sadness, as well as other feelings, can have a reason to appear, and other times it arrives, like that object that we did not know we had, but without looking for it, it appears. Thus, I get sad before a sad story, I am moved to the last layer of my skin before a melancholic song, I cry before a painful movie, but also before a sunset in front of the sea.

_{They say that salt cures the soul: sweat, tears and the sea.}

Before I go on, lest you think I am a walking gray cloud, I must confess that I am a very cheerful, optimistic, extroverted person, one of those that when she arrives at a meeting, people say: “The one who is going to start the party is here!

_The one who is going to start the party is here!

This attitude towards life can have its flats, because others do not expect you to be discouraged, apathetic, they expect you to always smile, to tell jokes, to wave the flag of hope wherever you go, but I am human and I have my obscurities.

_{I, in tears, after I fell and broke my leg, was in tears.}

For example, sometimes the world makes me very sad, especially when I see all that we, as men, do: wars, human rights violations, discrimination, lack of empathy, lack of tolerance. To live in this world, so full of contradictions and inequalities, is to be lighting the candle of hope all the time and not let the cold air of sadness extinguish it.

I have lost count of the number of times that after an election in Venezuela, after a march, after a protest, I fell asleep crying with sadness, with the kind of guayabo you get when you know that no matter how well you do things, things are still bad and maybe they could get worse. This sadness for my country has deep roots, it is a tree of 25 years that I hope to be able to uproot someday.

_{Me, after a protest for Venezuela}

The illness of my family also causes me a lot of pain: my family is my Achilles heel. My father's and my nephew's illnesses turned me into a different person: sadness is a transforming feeling, say those who have lived long enough. Their illness put me against the ropes of the ring and I endured each blow, with fortitude, because inside me there was the possibility of beating death. I remember the time when the oncologist told me “sincerely” about my nephew's cancer and I felt that something inside me was breaking and as I was afraid that my nephew would see me crying, I left and began to wander the streets, crying, sad, disconsolate and begging God: mercy, Lord, mercy. But no. Death has already beaten me three times.

_{Me, in the pandemic, in front of my father's grave.}

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro has a poem entitled “The sad man”, and in one of the lines of the poem he says: “beware of badly closed doors”. I have several unhealed wounds that hurt from time to time. Several open doors through which sadness enters and sits, lodges and shows me its sharp fangs, and makes me cry and there are no white lavender-scented handkerchiefs to dry my tears, nor anyone to say:

_Dumb girl. I didn't go anywhere. I'm still here!

The images are from my personal gallery and the text was translated with Deepl

This is my participation this week for our great friend @ericvancewalton's initiative: Memoir monday. If you want to participate, here's the link to the invitation post

Likewise, this is my entry for the amazing Silver Bloggers Writing Contest - in collab with @ericvancewalton: Memoir Monday. If you want to participate, you're on time and here's the link to the contest

Thank you for reading and commenting. Until a future reading, friends