Part 15: The snow of truth

The alcohol flowed into Luz's soul as if it were trying to become part of her soul, as if it were becoming the blood of her soul.

Something inside her made her think about the "how", instead of thinking about the "is" and; to reinforce that habit, she loved to create poems and songs full of metaphors.

The feeling of accepting without really having any, an instant of pleasure in which you can only tell the truth; or so Alexis was supposed to have told her when she asked her not to judge her father or her mother.

They were both in first grade and Alexis didn't trust anyone else to tell her about his experiments.

"Alcohol wouldn't have to be so bad, it might even be better than a psychological test and already, there wouldn't be any more..."

His eyes darkened abruptly, but that was typical for him and his whole family as well. No doubt, bipolarity was something that affected her as well; but she was quite used to it by now.

"That would be fine, except if that truth test speaks the truth about your parents. You'll most likely get them in trouble."

Alexis had placed on the table a small bottle containing a blue liquid that bubbled without being boiling. No bubbles made any noise when it burst; therefore, neither Marisa nor Luz's mother noticed the novel modified liquor that Alexis had brought inside his jacket pocket.

Christmas was not far away and, since Marisa did not like Luz's father at all, Luz's mother decided to visit her friend. Only at Christmas time did Luz's father return home from 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

"This liquor does not activate the chronological memory of your mind, it activates that of your soul.

Sound is what binds us to nature and without sound you cannot utter words to speak of the past. Sound in nature is always in the present. And if the soul comes from nature, then the soul must reveal our present state... when there is some nature left in it.

If you had lived in the country, you would see nature as I see it. To me every soul is good, what it learns may be right or not so right... it may make it free or not so free."

There was the beginning of the Alexis who no longer stumbles over words when he wants to channel them to his purpose. The boy who hates the snow and prefers to be in the attic of a stranger's house. According to him, because most of the time the attic tells the past of a house.

Both he and Luz always wanted to gauge the nature of the people they were meeting.

"I'm getting tired of trying to understand the past of my father's apprenticeship or my mother's apprenticeship. Maybe, if it works, it can be a great contribution to other people. Maybe for the kids not to be in so much danger from the strange people around them; but not for me, it doesn't work for me.

I know they say that information is power, but no matter how much I make drawings, songs, poems and stories, my father does not analyze anything and my mother only admires me.

With my father's present and the psychology and psychiatry books in the attic I can deduce his sad dark past. I don't need detailed information... Or do you think there might be something different in his dark past?

Something that hasn't been written in any book?"

After spinning around in her same spot, arms folded across her chest, going over in her mind the instant she was supposed to dance with her father.

That very day was Father's Day and her father had told her he was going to the little party that was organized on the soccer field.

Father's Day was as important in the village as Mother's Day.

Legend has it that on that island a foreign girl who spoke English got lost. She was not the only one, as a native Spanish-speaking child was also lost. Some said that the child had a "dog's memory". This was because he easily forgot the next day what he had been taught the day before, such as: "If you see foreigners, just give them this drink made of snake venom".

That child cried noiselessly, as always, every night. It was as if the tears had unleashed a downpour in his mind and; during the night, his mind had been cleansed of all teaching that caused him pain.

No one knew of this practice of the child, that night he cried because one of the snakes he had seen sleeping in a tree too high for him to climb was missing.

The boy with a fresh and renewed mind went for a walk without anyone noticing. He was lost without knowing it. Then he found a little girl crying disconsolately on the rock at the foot of a waterfall.

When they tried to talk they could not understand each other and the girl was on the verge of becoming exasperated; but for the boy the problem with strangers was not language. For him, the problem was that someone had changed the common form of communication around the world. Or perhaps a group.

Either way, whoever or whatever they were, they only made a crack in the pristine wall.

The boy jumped into the waterfall and began to enjoy the warm water from the strong heat. The girl, not knowing what else to do, also jumped into the water and the two began an eternal friendship.

Their language was the dance, the gestures and the melodies they could create together with nature.

Perhaps what the child did not remember was that on that island there had been a confrontation between the foreigners who spoke mostly English and the natives who spoke mostly Spanish. A newly created language in those times.

That island belonged to slaves who managed to flee from the tyranny of those they might now consider foreigners. The slaves were willing to fight so that neither they nor their land would ever again fall into foreign and greedy hands.

Now the slaves were subduing the previous foreigners who had already tried to take over the island to plunder it and who knows what else. However, that last war had been deadly for both sides. The ghosts were already in control of nature and they wanted revenge against this whole world. A world that destroyed mine.

In those times human souls did not become ghosts, the only ghosts that existed were cats and maybe also unicorns.

Why does nature insist on this world where innocence dies every day with just a glance?

I don't know how long my world lasted, but I don't think longer than your world.

The ghosts of my compatriots spread the fires and bullets in such a way that almost all the warriors on both sides died in battle. The only ones they could not touch with the petal of a rose, even if they were part of the battle, were women or females of any species. They have always had a unique connection with nature. The duty to protect human life is not given to just anyone.

However, the boy and girl grew into teenagers. One day of heavy rain, they were both playing in the downpour and a strange feeling was familiar to them from a time their memories had no recollection of. Perhaps the time when cells first traveled to build their bodies.

No, it didn't happen the way you're suspecting, or at least not the way you're imagining it.

After "that event" the ghosts were revived, reborn and both teenagers became first-time parents.

Not only did they revive, with it also something of the essence of my old universe returned.

Essence that soaked all the land on the island.

Truth be told, for ghosts to take control of nature is because nature itself felt attacked by humans. Enough cracks were forged for ghosts to take control.

And it is that each crack is a ready whip for those most attentive to the weakness created in nature.

But why doesn't it happen in other lands?

Before these two children, how special could this island be?

"They say that reality is stranger than fiction; but I have not made this blue liquor to make you obsess more with your father"

Luz rolls her eyes because the tears for her father stayed in the bathroom. The tears had only left a hole where any harvest could be expected.

There were seeds of passion in every hole.

I can see those gaps in this small space from which I am narrating to you and directing my red shadow thanks to the self-hug points.

The clouds that surround me have just come out hollow or; I mean, they are just becoming visible to me.

Through them I can see the scene of the 13-year-old Light who is in the first year of high school. The words of the devil have just vanished into the clouds like all the promises that the father made to Luz since she has the use of conscience. And like all broken promises, a painful judgment was generated; but Luz is one of the girls who take pain with pleasure and transform it into passion.

She sowed a red shape over each hole. Yes, my red shadow has just multiplied and plays the role of the harvest.

The harvest that allows me, when approaching the holes, breathe air and feel the wind.

"Be careful Alexis, lest I look at you differently. You have a passion for material inventions. Not all of us have the advantage of obsessing over things that cannot answer you because they feel nothing.

When passion is directed at a living being, consciousness becomes animal and you know that I can get tired; but don't give up

Why don't you use Margot as a guinea pig? Maybe she doesn't have an obsession, she uses and discards; So she doesn't need to watch her brain from liquor? She doesn't need to plan, but I do need to think. At least I tell you directly that I can use you if you let yourself.

I'm honest and I don't need to be drunk. "

Luz emerged from the attic with a clear determination to wait in the frozen garden of Marisa's old house.

Her father would come to collect them. That he was going to do.

He was not going to allow her and Luz's mother to listen to Marisa's "liberal ideas" for more than two hours. Two hours because that's the shortest time he can take to get to the frozen part of the island. If he could get there earlier, he would.

It didn't matter the time or the weather, Luz was going to wait for him.

Alexis watched her from the attic window. He watched her lie down on the snow and scan the clouds in the sky.

It was as if Luz could see things that he couldn't. Well that was true and he knew it.

His imagination appealed to him, but he wasn't sure if the girl about to turn 14 was also so fascinating to him. Or even if she was really attracted to him.

Whatever the answer, I didn't want to find out. Of the two, he was the one who was more afraid of feeling too much alive for another living being. A feeling as resilient and appealing as passion. Truth be told, he disliked the existence of that feeling for another living being. This is because he knew the possible and terrible consequences that it produces. It's what he's been running from. While creating and forming, he forgets the only form that terrifies him.

She tried to focus and ignore her longtime friend. The problem was, he needed a guinea pig. It was nothing dangerous because he had already experimented with someone else. All he wanted was for Luz not to have such heavy hatred, because, apparently, she was not willing to control or repress her feelings. She only had to keep "good feelings".

He couldn't resist it, because passion was on the edge of his lips. Too close to the inside; so there was nothing left for him but to blow his passion over the edge.

Maybe that's why the demon's words disappeared from the clouds.

"It is better to be on the periphery, on the form of passion. Just living it brings one the bottom of passion; but I don't want to fall. Maybe your father doesn't keep his promises, but I do"

Passion is so delicate that when pushed it multiplies to survive. For something my red shadow has reproduced.

If passion is sheltered by the throat of the wind, if it becomes its air; then passion could be transformed into the background of something unknown and as exciting as feeling "oxygen" enter through the nostrils.

They can't see my red shadows, but they can feel their creative magnetism.That kind of magnetism by which my red shadows lie on Luz's neck to obtain the kind of light that illuminates their existences: heat.

Shadows are normally born from the encounter between light and object; on this mental plane, they would result from the encounter between heat and the skin of the soul.

The heat boils the skin of the soul and the bubbles fly up to the sky to shape the clouds. In their ascent, these bubbles take with them parts of my red shadows.

Do you remember that the fact that you are spoken to and the intensity of a tone are a sign that you exist for the other beings in your society?

That red tone serves to attract the attention of the only being that understands the society of my red shadows: our protagonist, Luz.

That is why my shadows seek to create figures in the clouds that are for the delight of Luz's eyes. "The mirrors of the soul," or so Luz believes as do all humans.

The point is that when her eyes are enraptured; the boiling heat causes Luz's entire mind to be renewed with a strange opaque luminosity. The same one that has been unveiled after the skin of Luz's soul has been quickly consumed by the heat.

The skin of the soul is renewed every time we make an iron determination, for better or for worse. This skin rises giving off beauty throughout the air. When it reaches the sky those broken promises await it, made of words easy to forget for someone illuminated by a dark red shadowed light. Dark red that illuminated the sky this afternoon like the deoxygenated blood at the borderline of her conscious present.

Each bubble enclosed parts of a future that can no longer exist, or at least not in the near future. A future that is taken by words to an unreachable dimension.

You know that impossible challenges or dreams represent an irresistible temptation. As Luz's mind was illuminated by a shadowed light; it would be very easy for the wind to steal her oxygen, the impossible dream she just decreed as her ultimate purpose:

"Words are not enough to call attention to what you have desired until your bones are burned from longing for it so much. As if the birthday candle will never really be blown out because the dream will never be fulfilled. The wind will not allow it. The wind wants the candle to last forever, even if it's inside a girl's mind.

Cold and transparent I am with one half of my dream. Warm and dark I am with the other half. In the end, only one of the two halves will win and have my soul complete.Of course, as long as the one that survives can make my greatest dream come true.

There are even times when, even if one of the two halves desires it more than the other, the part that desires it the least is the one that fulfills the dream... I DREAM OF FINDING THE CURE TO REGENERATE THE SOULS OF THE LIVING DEAD."

To steal that dream, the wind used the beauty in the air as a hook for my red shadows and they fell. They tried to breathe.

My shadows tried to bring back the bubbles in the sky impregnated with their dark red. The only way was for the heat to boil so much that it produced, at least, a small hole in the clouds surrounding the source of the red shadows.... ME, I am the form of all the red shadows.

Perhaps they could not directly bring the bubbles with the dark red hue; but they were left with the option of directing the movements of the bubbles at the margins of the sky.

Therefore, they had the bubbles grouped and overlapped in threes. The third drop of each group caused the other two to yield to the weight and fall as one on the snow. They took on the color of the snow and the same was reproduced for the other trios of drops.

To the human eyes of light, it was cold snow covering their faces with a white that sought to lighten their shadowed light a little. She stood paralyzed, letting the snow freeze the pain in her body and spirit.

When something from the sky falls to earth, the sky must appropriate a part of the earth. In this case, the sky must make a part of Luz's mind its own. In this case it would be: CLOUD FOR CLOUD.

The wind was going to leave Luz without any warmth. Without any possible or impossible dream; but, more than my supposed cunning, my recent discovery about the human heat has allowed me to understand that the creation and, perhaps, the recreation has to do not with the heat of the human being or that of the animals? IS MADE STRONGER BY THE UNION OF HUMAN WARMTH WITH THAT OF THE ANIMAL.

Would it be possible to recreate my wonderful world?

I will not let it die, because without it my dream would die. It is no longer just about me, it is about freeing myself from the enigmatic sentence against love.

The words of the song of the Light of 15 - the one she composed to Alexis when she was drunk - carry away with its rock ballad melody, a piece of the cloud that surrounds me.

The protagonist of a year later, our teenage girl protagonist from the future did have a near future.

The fact that we are narrating the events as flashbacks. From 16 to 15, from 15 to 14, from 14 to 13, from 13 to the chaotic 15 years of age.

Going from one event in the past to another without finishing resolving that event. Instead, I keep narrating, accumulated more facts in the plot without resolving the next chapter.

Maybe the future was unsure if it could be real, or maybe it felt crowded out by other dreams. However, I think he believes that I can be a good ally and, I may not be the best; but I have enough motivation to make me, my dream come true.

For now, in Luz's case, her motivation to be aware of this world has a first and last name. It glows red like deoxygenated blood. Without Luz, he was deoxygenated blood. His bubbles have molded above the clouds a future that matches Luz's. So he ran to her and pushed passion to the brink to release the words.

Could words unearth her body from the snow?

A breaking point between her conscious sapience and her unconscious passion. A breaking point between words and a fury that moans like a cat.

"Passion leaves the body unshielded because it leaves the ear without words to hear.

If I don't listen to you how can I know that it's not just my body or my face that makes you consider me a male? if I don't listen to you how do I know that my soul doesn't need a reproductive organ to be masculine?

If I use you and want to keep using you. And if you let me I can be even worse than your father. I know you too well to know that you would prefer a toad's kiss to mine; but I will kiss you and take a naked picture of your corpse if you don't wake the fuck up."

If there was one thing known about the snow of that eternal snow it was that, if you didn't wake up from the frost after an hour of your brain freezing; you would most likely remain in a vegetable state.

The dangerous thing was not freezing your body, that was easy to thaw. The problem was when the cold reached the last of the enigmatic psychic processes. This would be about an hour after the loss of consciousness. Only a strong motivation could activate the sick person's mind. Speaking the truth to him was the indispensable requirement.

Of course, only the sick who really had a powerful mind would come out of it. Because the snow only took those who wanted to be taken away, if you will excuse the redundancy.

Good or bad motivation, it doesn't matter if you wake up. And when Luz did it, she did not think that the hour she spent out of her body meant too much.

If it will bring her good or bad consequences?

Well, if you are alive, there can be no bad consequences... life is a game of exciting challenges.