Second entry: The best vacation ever...

I am not so attached to any particular vacation, neither to any concert (I've never been to one; I don't like live music), I could manufacture one, but that's not the idea, is it? My hands are tied but my mouth can certainly babble a false memory as dull and insignificant as the real ones, one so inconsequential that no one would suspect. 

For the summer, I go to my paternal grandparents' house in a small town in the O'Higgins region called Peralillo in January and to my maternal grandmother's house in Concepción in February. My winter vacations, however, are always spent in my beloved hometown, Santiago. This monotony isn't upsetting, without the scales moving out of the middle, without the past succeeding in devouring the future and neither the future conquering the past. Without any interesting or especially treasured memories... my hands are tied and yet I am writing this new entry. Sand in the hair, cousins who I haven't seen since last year, clothes sticked to the body from sweating, sleepless nights, bruised knees, a bit of nature, my best friend's birthday. My vacations are a large Sunday that falls on the city or town of the day like a membrane. And Sundays are for gloomy music and having coffee and melon for breakfast. To rest for a while under the sun, in silence and solitude, after having spent ten months among classrooms and crowded streets. Learning to swim, whistling well for the first time, insects singing in unison bliss bliss bliss bliss, long limbs, sitting and watching people pass, pass, pass by outside the house. 

A photo that isn't of my authorship of the coast of Lebu, a place that I frequent almost all my vacations since I was a little girl.

Childhood memories that come from overseas, tangled and greasy, covered with starved fantasies; if you could open the body you would find each one written with a nail on the bones. The Sunday vacation: my sharp, youthful eyes running across the wasteland, but with my prematurely exhausted body slowly making its way through the cornfields. Just a long, long Sunday that like the most beautiful flower wilts when its time comes, tasting of Coca-cola and vomit after eating too much and too fast on Christmas night. Varicella, toothache. Colored crayons. Fighting with my parents, reading, shaving my head, my hand on my forehead covering me from the sun and the other one holding an ice cream cone, falling in love, falling in general. Growing up too much and too fast, summer started and summer ended. And a window open at night to let in the breeze. More cousins, more bus rides, more rust-flavored water, more years of chewing the sunglasses rods.

Another photo that I didn't take, this time of the Tanumé mansion in Pichilemu, a place I know as well as the palm of my hand.

When its time comes, a heavy curtain that was lazily lifted unhurriedly descends to the floor again. I calmly open and close my eyes, thinking that if no vacation is special then they all are!

All that is my own, the last song of Desertshore (1970) by Nico. A perfect album for the bright mornings of every vacation. 

PS: Thank you for your kind messages in the previous entry :-).