Life

Immense waves hurled themselves at the coast.

The sun was just barely peeking out, weakly. I looked at the mast, red flag, no entry, swimming forbidden.

I sat down, I tried to enter that other swell that is my own self, high waves of desperation and anguish, trying to reach my conscience, wake it and shout, is it true what you saw?, what you felt was true; it wasn't a dream, nor a fantasy. They came marching in rows of five: black shirts, black trousers, shaved heads. You could hear the tac, tac of the sinister rhythm.

The Nazi march came back to my memory, from when they used to go to a victim's house to fetch them.

But… wake up! You're in Argentina, don't you hear? Those are pots being banged against the conscience of the corrupt. So the Nazis then? They were there too, they marched down Avenida de Mayo, people stepped aside, left them alone, the journalists, where were they?, the TV?, what happened?, were they blind? Or did they too sense a red flag that said do not pass, do not go into the sea.

Danger! No one says anything.

I got up, I moved away from the beach. My conscience closed the door without making a sound.

A day was beginning, a new question was settling in, until when? I thought maybe soon everything will change, we can start over, dream again… the calmer waves, but foamy, were carrying a wreath of white petals that scattered over the sand. They must be the flowers mothers throw into the sea for their dead children, whom the sea today seems to cradle.

Conscience, memory, pain, memories, forgiving and above all not forgetting.

Are they just words? Truth! What good are they? If no one listens to them, if they knock on every door that won't open. They cry out: men, listen to us, we came out of you, do not fear your own words, repeat them out loud, louder, more, more, until the sky bursts and we can fall upon you and there you will hear us.

The sea again, the waves, fall asleep on the shore, slide by silently, lulling. Young people dance on the shore, children play in the sand. Life goes on, it doesn't stop, and the sea, which understands every sorrow, every joy, is changeable just like life itself. Evening comes and the light fades away and they say that the price of light is having an inseparable shadow, and the price of conscience is memory.