WITH A THICK SOUL

We think we know how to manage happiness.

And, for fear – as if fear was the owner of the soul – we are used to measure expectations. Because we had suffered time and time again on those over-dreaming days, we learn how to dose, how to curb the tempers. At first only those who want fall, on the second only fall those who want, and by the third we no longer fly so high. Until it’s kind of useful to conclude that it may not be worthwhile to fly at all. After all things are not so bad down here. Preferably don’t show me what I’ve been missing out, it disturbs my soul. Let me be quiet.

Everything becomes safer in our corner. More grey, no doubt, but above all safer. Burned, we don’t come so close to the fire. And after a painful discussion, to dissolve a tiff takes longer. If it ever returns to how it was. We get used to that waste of slowness. Because  it’s safer to go slowly. Like a liquid that turns plasma, my soul runs thick in my veins, taking longer to flow.

But, there’s so little time! Always slipping away between my fingers, always in a wistful goodbye to life. When moving to a new home, just these days, saying goodbye to walls full of discovery, and soon after the same feeling when I'm on the plane taking off, returning from holidays and far away beyond the track we can still see a little part of the city... what an amazing country this is! I shall return. If there’s time. Will it be? I feel I’m continuously saying goodbye to all of this, and above all that I lack time – me of all people, I who run so much to grab it, is it because of that?

I feel I lack time to live childhood emotions, devoted with no strings attached, but I soon realize there’s no way to accelerate the heart. Who already lived a lot, he claims, he who knows to much, the once free ingenuity of risking to get attached without the fear of loss now lost forever. Without knowing how much it hurts to lose...

I still believe that, someday, without noticing the fear will slip away between this same fingers and I’ll live again without parachute. One day, maybe... well, we must give time to time! After all, that thing we call time it’s nothing more than an unfinished invention...

Gonçalo Gil Mata