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| Photo by: Edgar A. Morales |
I consider myself a
very fortunate individual. Even though I am not swimming in money I have, in
one way or another, obtained everything I really wanted. Sometimes I worked for
those things, and others they were just given to me.
I am grateful for all.
But there is one
present in particular that meant a lot to me, actually there are two, and they
were given to me by the same person at two different times in our relationship.
To be able to know what those presents meant you would have to know the context
in which they were given, but this time around I’ll only tell you about the
first one.
You would have to know
that I fell in love with her long before I got those presents, and that I was
certain that she loved me back. I am not going to go into too many details, but
I’ll tell you that our relationship has been one of steady growth.
We went out on a picnic
once. It was but a couple of months into our courtship, and we were getting
along famously. I had actually been looking forward to this day because she
said we were going to a place she enjoys very much.
She made a prosciutto,
mozzarella, sun-dried tomato and garlic sandwich that was absolutely delicious
(even accounting for the excessive garlic) and come to think of it, I hope she
makes me another one those soon (hint). We accompanied that with a merlot and
headed for the beach.
She loves the beach.
She can spend hours upon hours contemplating the sea, thinking and admiring its
beauty. There is a spot somewhere in Baja, five miles away from Rosarito, behind
an old beach house that has a bench facing the ocean. It’s like a balcony with some
loose stones underneath and the beach right after. When the tide is high enough
it reaches the rocks beneath the balcony.
We sat there and had
our picnic. We spoke. We laughed. We contemplated the sky and tried to make
sense of the different shapes in the clouds. We saw the ocean and some lights out
in the sea, I thought they were boats, but she said they were tiny bonfires in
the middle of the nothingness, and I believed her. We saw the sunset too.
We went back home and
when I was dropping her off she went inside her house and asked me to wait for
her in the driveway. When she came back, she asked me to close my eyes and
extend my hands. She placed something in them and when I opened them I saw a
rock in the shape of a heart.
She loves to walk on
the beach and collect rocks that look like hearts. They are not easy to find,
believe me I have tried. She said she found that one just a few days earlier
walking in the beach. She said that when she found it she was thinking about
me. And now I was holding it in my hands.
I don’t know if that
was her heart that she was giving me to care for, or if it was my own heart
that she had found after all these years. Nowadays, I like to think that it is
a combination of the two.
