By Lorenzo Martín
HAVANA TIMES – It had been a while since I wrote because I’ve been depressed, perhaps for too long. Looking around and seeing everything crumble is oppressive, depressing. The city is falling apart, society is crumbling, the family is falling apart, life is falling apart…
Finally, I found a way to wake up from this lethargy and try to resume my life. A bad time to do so. The end of the year only brings back old memories that I try to reclaim, but reality surpasses them. Finally, I realize that it’s not that I am depressed, but that my island of joy, that same island of tobacco, rum, and guaracha, is depressed, sad, definitely broken… and, friends, depression kills.
This Christmas, thanks to the money my daughter sends from her cold current geography, there was no shortage of food on my table. It’s true that pork was expensive, and don’t even mention the beans, but I needed to make dinner, more for mom than anything else. Mom doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t complain, but she misses, and I read it in her eyes.
Mom has always been strong, enduring life’s hardships with admirable stoicism. If something affects her, it’s loneliness, not being able to gather her loved ones occasionally. It affects her not having her children together, even if there’s an argument that forces her to play the role of referee. It affects her a lot not having grandchildren roaming the kitchen to ‘steal’ a plantain chip or a piece of the most roasted meat.
Mom doesn’t complain, but the sadness in her eyes threatens to be definitive, deadly, as if she expects nothing from life anymore and only desires that fatal and terrible blow fr