The summer ended quickly, and winter came and brought more wind, plus rain and chimney smoke. I turned fourteen. My mother and sisters came back to the house for a while. My mother explained her version of events to me and promised me things would get better, that we would all start over again together, but I knew it couldn’t be like that, and in any case I didn’t care. When a person lives through intense experiences, he has the illusion of understanding many things. I thought I understood how life worked. When I finished cleaning the house I was exhausted, and I thought that I should keep going that way from then on: tire myself out and self-impose obligations in order to get ahead. I thought that would keep me safe. I wasn’t going to drift like my father, or fearfully wonder what would become of me. I was going to fight, to sniff out threats on the wind and build a life of my own. Who knows what fate awaited me alongside the Carrascos; I never found out. I left Talcahuano as soon as I could, first to work in the north with the Carrascos’ father—my last link to Pancho—and then in Santiago. I got rid of my family and the only friends I had. And I went into debt to study, and I worked twelve hours a day and spent two more riding buses, and I did all the things that people do to achieve a certain well-being, and I got tired, I became a tired person and I lived in Renca, in Recoleta, and in Quilicura, without ever knowing what the names of all those places meant.

Forgetting Freddy

Forgetting Freddy

I’m so sad I just might start keeping a diary.