My dear friends, today we are talking about memories.
We all have them. Some make us smile, some still hurt a little, and some remain hidden in a drawer for years until one day you find them and, without even asking permission, they carry you back through time.
Today I am giving you a small fragment of mine.
No grand revelations, no bargain-bin lessons about life. Just a few old model boats, a boy who no longer exists, and everything that, incredibly, managed to survive in between.
The funny thing about memories is that they have no respect for logic.
You can forget the face of someone you spent months with, a password you used every day for ten years, where the fuck you put your keys five minutes ago.
Then you open a drawer, find an old boat, and suddenly you are eight years old again.
The human brain is magnificent.
A defective hard drive designed by a sentimental drunk.
These boats belong to my childhood.
My mother gave them to me many years ago, when of course I had no idea that one day I would photograph them, preserve them carefully, and look at them as small archaeological artifacts from a vanished civilization called me as a child.
Back then, they were simply gifts.
Today, they are something else.
It is strange how time works: as a child, you receive an object and see the object. As an adult, you look at the same object and finally manage to see the person who gave it to you.
I had plenty of toys.
Most of them disappeared.
Lost, broken, thrown away, given away, probably consigned to some box during one of those mysterious domestic genocides when parents decide that the mountain of plastic accumulated by a child no longer qualifies as a cultural treasure of humanity.
They were probably right.
Though I still consider it a crime with no statute of limitations.
Very few things survived from that little universe.
And precisely because there are so few, they have acquired a value wildly disproportionate to the materials they are made of.
Wood.
Glass.
Glue.
A few scraps of fabric.
Materials of almost no significance.
But try to buy these boats from me.
There is no price.
Because value is that strange thing the economy keeps trying to measure and life keeps cheerfully telling to go fuck itself.
What fascinates me most is that these are boats that have never sailed.
They have remained sealed behind glass.
One of them is even inside something resembling an old lightbulb, almost like an idea that has stayed lit for thirty years.
They have never known waves.
They have never faced storms.
They have reached no harbor.
And yet they have traveled farther than quite a few people I know.
They have crossed the years.
Inner relocations.
People who arrived and then disappeared.
Dreams that changed.
Jobs.
Mistakes.
Photographs.
Loves.
Disappointments.
Periods when I felt I knew exactly where I was going and others when I would have had a better chance of finding my way by tossing a coin down a storm drain.
They remained there.
Small.
Silent.
Unchanged.
While the person looking at them became someone else.
Maybe that is also why the boat has always been such a powerful symbol.
A boat is a fairly absurd thing, if you think about it.
We are land animals.
In water, without special equipment, we are pretty fucking useless.
So we built something that would let us go precisely where our nature had never intended us to go.
There is something wonderfully human in that stubbornness.
Reality says:
you cannot go there.
And we say:
hold my beer.
Then we build a ship.
Sometimes it sinks, of course.
Details.
A boat carries an idea I have always loved: setting out without ever truly owning what lies beneath your feet.
On land, we can persuade ourselves that we are stable.
Houses.
Walls.
Fences.
Coordinates.
Property.
On water, no.
The water moves.
The boat moves.
You move.
And you have to learn something we have a terrible time accepting in life:
you do not control everything.
You can choose a direction.
You can ready the sails.
You can hold the wheel.
But then come the wind, the currents, the waves, and that charming parade of unforeseen events the universe distributes with the generosity of a drunken waiter.
More or less like being alive.
Maybe that is why water returns so often in dreams and the imagination.
I do not think it is only water.
It is the part of life you cannot organize in a spreadsheet.
Emotions.
Fears.
Desires.
Intuitions.
All those things we keep calling irrational only because we do not know where the fuck to file them.
And a boat in that water becomes, almost inevitably, us.
A small, fragile structure trying to cross something immeasurably larger.
Without knowing exactly what lies on the other side.
Lovely prospect.
As reassuring as a badly worded diagnosis.
And yet when I look at these boats, there is something else.
My mother is there.
Not in a photograph.
Not physically.
But she is there.
Because a gift given to a child contains something that child cannot yet understand.
It contains time.
Thought.
Attention.
The gesture of someone walking into a store, seeing something, and thinking:
he might like this.
It seems like nothing.
As children, we grow accustomed to love very easily.
It is there.
It surrounds us.
We regard it almost as part of the furniture.
Then you grow up.
And discover that being held in someone’s thoughts is not something to take for granted at all.
Far from it.
In a world where everyone seems desperately hungry to be seen, finding someone still capable of simply seeing you has become almost a luxury.
Maybe a parent’s love also passes through these silly little things.
A model boat.
A toy.
A seemingly useless thing bought because, for a few seconds, someone thought about your happiness.
And that, frankly, is a form of love worth more than many of the solemn speeches I have heard in my life.
I like to think it works this way with us too.
There is who we were.
Who we are.
Who we remember having been.
And who we probably never truly were, but whom memory kindly rewrote because apparently it too has a certain talent for fiction.
As a child, I looked at those boats and saw adventure.
Today, I look at the same boats and see time.
Maybe twenty years from now, I will see something else again.
That is the trouble with objects that survive long enough.
They end up knowing too much about us.
And perhaps that is exactly why I keep the few toys that remain.
Not because I want to be a child again.
That time is over, and no matter how good a job nostalgia does in post-production, childhood had its shitty days too.
I keep them because they are coordinates.
Small fixed points.
Physical proof that before all this—before the worries, ambitions, women, jobs, failures, departures, returns, questions about the future, and all the other sophisticated bullshit we call adulthood—I was also that boy.
A child standing before a small ship.
With far more future ahead of him than he could imagine.
And no idea how difficult crossing it would be.
Today, I still do not know exactly where I am going.
Maybe no one does.
Some people have simply become very good at walking with a purposeful expression.
I keep searching.
I take photographs.
I write.
I leave.
I return.
I love.
I get things wrong.
Every now and then, through sheer statistical accident, I do something intelligent.
And I keep wondering what the harbor is.
Assuming there is one.
Because perhaps we have misunderstood everything.
Maybe the purpose is not to arrive.
Maybe the point is to learn how to navigate without spending the entire voyage terrified that we do not know the destination.
Those little boats are still here.
They have never touched the water.
They have never sailed out to sea.
And yet they have crossed a large part of my life.
Carrying with them a mother’s love, a child’s imagination, and the gaze of an adult who can finally understand that certain things become precious only after we stop knowing what they are worth.
Maybe one day I will no longer be here to look at them.
Maybe they will end up in someone else’s hands.
Or perhaps they will disappear, the way almost everything disappears.
But until then, they will remain here.
Small ships motionless behind glass.
Reminding me that not everything that travels necessarily has to move.
And above all that, while almost everything in life sinks sooner or later, some forms of love have this damned habit of staying afloat.