La Voz de Galicia – September 28, 2025 →
Suddenly, I remembered that in the inner courtyard of my mother’s house there used to be a giant tree. I don’t know when it was cut down, or when I forgot it. But as I gazed absentmindedly out of the window of my New York apartment, a sparrow landed on my fire escape and lingered there, and in that moment, the image of my father looking at that other tree that no longer exists, following the movements of the birds that once inhabited it, returned to my memory, carrying with it an indescribable emotion.
It’s curious how the dead return to us. It’s been more than twenty years since Dositeo died, yet I could see him doing his calculations at the dining table, while he looked out the window at the passing birds. It all felt so real that I even mistook the chirping of the sparrow at my window for the whistle my father used to make when he wanted to talk to the birds.
Sometimes, the memory of an object, a scent, a gesture, carries us unwillingly into a different moment from the present; and for a second, we inhabit two simultaneous realities, as if we could travel through time. It isn’t always a pleasant sensation—it depends on the memory that appears and on our circumstances in facing it—but there is something fascinating about being in two places at once, something that makes me wonder which of those places is real: the one built by memory, or the one yet to be built.
I think the sparrow stayed on my window for no more than two seconds. I think it didn’t sing. Perhaps it wasn’t even a sparrow. But on an autumn morning when everything seemed gray, that memory from the past reminded me that the future is nothing more than an imagined reflection in the present, and that without imagination we would be lost…
