Art by Mariana Crottollini (Argentina)
If I were born again on a day like today, December 18, I would live the same life again.
by Guillermo Cides
Still standing. Like a fig tree, like an olive tree, like an apple tree, like a rose bush. I’m still alive and standing. How lucky I am to have had this life, full of simple things, complications, and imperfections. How lucky I am that I didn’t get anything for free, that it cost me everything, and that I couldn’t enter some places. How lucky I am to breathe the air that I have had to breathe, to laugh the laughs that I have laughed, and to feel proud of my rose. What a privilege to have lived this far, with the successes and the mistakes. What an honor to have known those I met, to have gained their love, and to have lost those I lost because I learned from their games. If I were born again on a day like today, December 18, I would live the same life again, full of emotions, eroticism, music, joys, loves, and heartbreaks. I don’t want anything different from what I should have experienced. That is why my birthday is simple and imperfect, like my days on earth: a path that will end one day and for which I will have been honored for the mere fact of having existed.
“Happy birthday” I said to my 5-year-old daughter because my birthday is her birthday. It’s everyone’s. It is the birthday of this life that she still breathes. And as long as she does, I will breathe with her until the last breath of a candle.
Thank you for sharing this day with me and for your hugs from a distance.
G.C.
