Las Hojas
Vuelan & Deslizan
The Garden
by Nathaly Muñoz
“Did I finally wake up?” I whispered, “What about now?” I closed my eyes so tight and opened them to see if “I had finally woke up…” I didn’t. It could be that it wasn’t a dream or nightmare after all, maybe it was the reality of my own hell that I was living. I still could breathe the heavy, trembling, cold air from my icy dry lungs. It hurt. It hurt a lot not being able to go away from this place, from this old garden full of forgotten statues of people or angels, and kids playing around. They followed every step I took any time I went to sleep, with those scary crystallized eyes. In the night, they only seem to vilify me with their stagnant mouths and their grayish beauty, and at the same time, deathly pupils. I recall that some of them did not have a head. Not missing an arm, or a leg-their bodies were complete-but missing the head. And still I felt
their sharp look.
The snow was always white and so uniform. But why? I thought. So perfect the snow fell and never melted once it hit the invisible ground. I try to rescind the idea of knowing that at night, I could hear the surroundings clamor contracting and growing louder by the time I try to run from that world. It was just impossible. I was irresolute on which way I could choose-dying here or surviving the nightmare that never ends. But it was always too much for me…
“Maybe, maybe I did something wrong,” I groaned, “maybe I killed someone’s soul, I was able of ignorant duplicity…and now I am paying the price of my ignored acts. Maybe, m-m-maybe, maybe…” I repeated over and over again, trying to find explanations or questions of my own living answers. My madness was untenable to be proved wrong. I could only whisper to myself an equivocal reason that could explain why I ended in the middle of the Old Kid’s garden. I just waited for it to come as every day, until he would finish his laugh, like if I was some kind of ludicrous case in his waste less life. “ The end of your darkest journey is about to begin,” the uncertain ghost of his soul said to me, “ What do you choose to do with your still beating heart, Dear?” he asked. Then, standing up from my suffocating terrors, just like the shining moon rises trough the night, I begin to search for the last scent of hope through the air and touch for the last time the softness of my white pale skin. As if trying to feel alive.
My last and final whisper was blown away. “Dying here.”
But I just stood there, lost in the wilderness of the garden. Thinking of it now, it wasn’t that cold anymore. All the whiteness that surrounded me, makes me feel in peace now. No danger, no one to hold on to…just myself and the snow. The light of those crystal eyes is not that harsh anymore and scratchy to the touch either. It was good, it was pleasant, elegant…it was profoundly mysterious and hollow. But most of all, it was heaven.