Visits

Is there anything true about reincarnation? I don't know. What I know about the concept is that one way or another, many societies/cultures/religions in history have theorized about it. I know the inherent kindness of the Buddhism, whose followers firmly believe in the cyclic journey of the soul until it reaches the state of purity and climax: the nirvana. I know that the concept has been part of innumerable film premises throughout the young cinematographic history.

I know that the majority of the new generation have grown and have been growing with an obsession for the alternativeness and for the need of differentiation. In that obsession, the resistance to certain religion is strongly attached. The atheism has become a fashion. It has become just that of which lots of atheists ran from.

I know I'm catholic from education and from family. I know that I've set up my own personal Jesus in which I want to believe. I couldn't care less about the church, the priests, and any human and institution who thinks that has the hand in religious aspects and imposes rules, interpretations, symbolisms, etc. And I want to believe there's something beyond; that in the death, like the Scorsesian Christ says: “Is not a door which closes. It is a door which opens.”

I have schizophrenic chats with my dear departed. I talk to them and try to imagine what would they answer. But maybe I'm not imagining! I believe there's something stuck in the Mexican collective subconscious that relates strongly with death. And this goes much more farther that the stereotype.

I've heard all kinds of ghost stories. When I was little I had the obsession of listening this kind of tales and then stayed up all night. Now I beg for those sleep hours lost. But those hours of insomnia where no lost time. Those where hours in which I imagined what I've had heard, in images. They where also hours of reflexion and premature analysis. Many of the stories that worried me the most and disturbed me where the ones that had to do with visits of my dead relatives.

A few weeks ago, I was walking to my apartment. The noise of the city has become overwhelming considering the great amount of stories and characters moving and acting inside my head. It was then when it happened; something I see as someone's visit. Or at least I want to relate it with someone's visit. I was walking a block away from my destiny, when a jogging woman with her dog crossed my way. The dog was a white boxer with a black stain on its right eye. I starred at the dog 'cause I simply can't ignore those animals. When they turned to their sidewalk and I kept going straight, that dog turned its head and saw me. And when we were looking at each other, the dog didn't look to the front anymore. It kept looking at me and I did the same. The dog didn't jog with its owner anymore, he just looked at me, and you could see nostalgia in its look. Those things that you just feel. And that way we walked for a whole block, it kept ignoring the jogging, and I stayed fascinated by the experience.

I have a picture which I wanted to publish here, but I didn't find it. In this picture I appear incarnated in a 4-year-old boy next to a hallway to the patio of a middle-class house. I appeared with a smile that I haven't seen on me in any other picture until now: because those were the times in which the emotions flowed without filters. And behind me, with a nostalgic and heavy look, watching me, was El Pirata, my fisrt dog: a white boxer with a black stain on its right eye.

I think that if someone had taken my picture a few weeks ago, while that happened, I would've repeated that pure and genuine smile.