Red Days

Today, I cried at being gifted slippers, at a happy ending that was wrong for the story, at The Burial of the Dead and knowing this may not be the cruellest month, at seeing my father’s face on video-call and being unable to say everything. The threshold is in the cellar and I don’t have a cellar. These are red days but which days have not been red since Caleta de Fuste? On Instagram, rappers are on live with amateur porn stars and influencers are sharing their skincare routines but not their cosmetic surgery doctors. And in a house in another city, a mother will never sit with her teenage son again, couldn’t sit with him when the fear overtook his tongue, when his mouth was parched and dry from the ventilator tube. I remember those days on the blade. I remember the moment. Time is a film and here is the frame. Here, the medics take your child and you stand alone. Take this baby elephant, take this blanket—my child—and return to me alive. Here is the phone call. Here a voice, saying your child has lived, come to her. A voice, saying your child has died, bury him. Bury him without wailing over his body. Bury him without clinging to your own mother. Bury him, your baby. A country of mothers weeps with you. Your country is red.