Closing Drawers

La Voz de Galicia – October 8, 2021 →

Cristina PatoFor some reason, I have spent all week dreaming of drawers. Not boxes, drawers. The kind that have a frame to hold them all. The kind that are all the same and perfectly fit in their structure. Sometimes, they are inside an armoire, and at other times there appears an infinite chest, with so many drawers that they reach the sky. And there I see myself, small, looking at them from below without knowing what to do.

The most curious thing is that I don’t have any drawers at home. I never liked them. I suppose that is because if I put something in a drawer when I was a child, I would forget it forever. And it’s not that I wasn’t capable of finding it, but that I simply stopped knowing I had it: whatever went into the drawer no longer existed…The fact is that since I left home, all my dwellings have had that in common: there were no drawers or chests of drawers.

But in yesterdays’ dream I opened one of the drawers in the infinite chest. It was full of memories. I stared at its contents, and with a knot in my stomach, I closed it again. And for some reason I wanted to know if the drawers above it also held memories. And then I decided to open them all, forming a stairway to be able to reach those that touched the sky. I climbed and climbed without looking at what was in them. And when I reached the top…I did not open the last drawer. From the top, touching the sky, there were so many things to see, so many things to discover, that it suddenly made no sense to open that drawer full of memories. And that was when I awoke, at 4:20 am. And I could sleep no more. I did not feel badly but simply smiled thinking about how absurd and magical the world of dreams is, and in the simple idea of closing the drawer of things that make one remember that which no longer wants to be…

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