Passangers in transit

The past is like the sea: it never calms down. Houses shrink, like old people, while trees never stop growing. When we go back, after many years, to our childhood places, we find giant trees overshadowing miniature houses that once were ours. We hardly recognise the doll-bed in which we slept when we were children, or the yard, that we always found immense, and which has, after all, only two palms of length.
My father used to tell me:
- Life is a race, my son. The ones who look backwards while running, risk stumbling.
I don’t look backwards. Sometimes I walk with my eyes closed and I stumble, like everyone else, and eventually I fall; but I never look backwards. I don’t celebrate the past: I don’t collect pictures and never kept dry petals between the pages of old books. I always move forward. When someone asks me where I am going, I shrug the shoulders and laugh:
- Ahead.