Josefa’s eyes were on the horizon. The sea and the sky seemed to her a single darkness, just as the world of Genesis must have been, before God separated the waters that were above the firmament from those below it.

The sea and the sky were a single darkness, and the UFOs could just as well be above as below, flying and floating at the same time.

Last Vacation

Last Vacation

What I’m going to relate here happened the last summer of my childhood, or what I understand to be my childhood, a sort of instinctive or unconscious state that came before my life changed and took on a definitive direction. Before my older brother lost his left foot, before I went to stay with my mom for good and dropped out of school, before all the other things that led me down the path to what my life is now. A destiny that seemed clear to everyone around me—and one they didn’t consider at all good—but one that, in the end, I made the decision to follow. That’s why it makes sense to me to tell about that summer vacation. I think it was that trip, to a large extent, that shaped my decision, though I was unaware of it at the time.

I’m talking about the summer vacation of 2010, when I was ten years old and went to La Serena with my aunt Veronica and her two daughters, Camila and Javiera.

La Serena: It strikes me now as the most incredibly apt name for the days I spent there. The first memory that comes to mind is the sensation of floating there in my underwear in the warmest waters I’d ever felt, looking up at the sky and the imperceptible movement of the clouds. Serenity, and other words like it, had been a blank space in the dictionary of my life.