On The Ice Inside Us, or Life Is Dancing
It turns out that we, who live with any type of chronic pain, eventually it’ll feel like we’re dulling it up, and we’ll begin to believe that it is normal to live with something that bothers us so much. We’ll thus miss the warning mechanism that pain can mean. We are deceived thinking that we are living in calmer times when, in reality, we only silenced the voices that warned us of the dangers that we are still going to face. It’s like when we’re asleep and the neighborhood cats start to make all that scandal of crying and screaming that we never know if they’re having their guts pulled out of their bodies while they’re alive, or are simply loving each other. It’s also like these predictions that economists and political scientists make about the social situation of countries, believing that the world’s populations have reached a level of maturity in which they won’t allow (we won’t allow) the atrocities of old times to happen again, and yet the mythic monster is just sleeping in what we consider to be the ideal pacifism for our survival and coexistence. We live anesthetized and we don’t even realize it.
Within me, a heavenly smile opens up when I meet people who inspire me to continue believing that we can still one day, if we can’t solve it once and for all, at least contribute heavily to the eradication of the various evils that plague our modern society. Spring comes during my conversations with these people, but lasts a few weeks only. My reality mingles with the harshness of other cruel realities, and I begin to lose focus again. It seems to me, in this way, that the spring smile had nothing to do with heaven, and that, most likely, the revolutionary ideals that reach my ears are really mere jokes told by fallen angels. But a fallen angel doesn’t cease to be an angel, right? Even with tepid spirits, the sweetness of love for our society is unmistakable in the discourse of those who fought battles of other times, other ages, and other lives. They plucked up their own hearts and lifted them proudly over their heads, blood streaming down their arms, screaming at the world and for the world. Today they are teachers, friends, sages and bitter — fallen people who, nevertheless, insists on raising us. Their pains are frozen lemon juice, soured their willpower, but prevented them from giving up completely, because the ice numbs them. My fallen heroes keep fighting, so why shouldn’t I do the same?
When we enter this process of numbness, at first it seems that everything is empty inside us. Then fear comes from the unknown, even though we have nothing to fear, we fear nothing in any way. And then come the mistakes, the mistakes that guide us and keep us going and eventually we’ll realize that they were not real mistakes, it was only life opening up to us in the way we allow it to do it: we didn’t let life come in naturally, we didn’t invite it to have some coffee — instead we simply turn our interiors into ice-skating rinks, and my God, what a marvelous figure skater life is! We had no other choice but only to accept that it would win every grand pix of our hearts. Okay, maybe it hasn’t won it all, and there have been horrible crashes (even with an open fracture), but life is always the promising winner for every championship. Didn’t win this time? It will win in the next, for sure. Life is a dancer who doesn’t grow old. Only death decrees the end of its competitions. As we sometimes find ourselves in the middle of a university class discussing the death penalty and realize that we are in a bubble, and the voices are inaudible, and the sight of people is completely blurred, and we ask ourselves who are we?, yet life will be training for its next number.
I understand, therefore, our pains, all of them. My heart eats them like sugar, the same sugar that will get stuck in its arteries, leaving them chubby and making my life difficult. The sugar is delicious, I won’t deny it, but really, the pains are hard to deal with. I understand the respect we have struggled to get every day lately, I understand why I demand this respect also, because I am a woman, because I am poor, because I grasp my intelligence so hard that my nails leave deep marks on it, and I tell it that I will never let it escape from my hands, because my intelligence, still growing, still a baby, is the most valuable thing I have. I understand our smiles and our tears, and you see, sweet and salt just don’t make a good mix for me — look over there, that girl laughing hysterically, being the joy of the party; and there she stands, quiet and silent in a corner, so antisocial! I understand life, it’s not at all easy to perform a quadruple jump on ice, no wonder its ankle bones are torn to pieces. Ah, the pain again! But alright, alright, it will pass. Some restorative surgeries, a time of rest, and then we just have to start the training so that the glory is ours again.
It’s difficult being myself, because I am too many things and I fight too much with my words. You become numb inside, but the world keeps you alive in a burning red fire.
