But I forgot how to be a child a long time ago.
Listen carefully and pay attention, Francisco.
Now I can hear him clearly, as if he were speaking into my ear, but I resist. He’s calling me with his familiar voice, singing to me with his beloved voice, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid to look him in the face and admit to him that for years I denied him and that for decades I closed my ears and eyes, on purpose, to his calls. That the last fifteen years I have wasted doing nothing, and now that I can see, hear, and understand the things I could not before, I recognize that his call to me was there, ever present, constant, strong.
I’m afraid to look him in the face and read his disappointment in me there.
100
But Now These Bees Are Flying around Us,
and I understand what they want to tell me with their murmur: Come-come-come-come, come quickly, come quickly, run. And I know that he sent them to guide me to him.
Now I hear, too: it’s a little child’s sigh coming from inside me. I search inside myself, deep inside, and I find the boy that I was. He didn’t disappear with the years, as I’d believed. He was waiting for me, and he spoke to me like Simonopio did: protected in the depths of my memories, silent sometimes, but patient, waiting to be invited out.
In him, in me, there’s no place for rancor or resentment anymore, and he’s excited, I’m excited, because the day has arrived at last.
He greets me like an old friend and reminds me that we were once brave and bold, that we didn’t stop for anything. He asks me to set off as soon as possible; he’s bored, he says, and the excitement that he feels to get back to our orange wars, to run free, to climb trees at will, to play hide-and-seek, to swim in the river, to hold Simonopio’s safe hand, fills me and infects me.
And I allow it to do so.
The memories are no longer distant. They’re no longer measured in years. They begin to be measured in pure excitement.
Now he holds my hand. I hold his. He asks me to follow the bees along Reja’s road, because at the end of it, our brother is waiting for us. And I say to him, Wait a minute. There’s something I have to do first, because though I’m starting to cast away the old man that I became day by day, I’m still tied to a most basic feeling of responsibility—to the last bond to my mama’s teachings. I can’t forget it so easily. I can’t go, just like that, purely because of the enormous excitement of a reunion.
I look at you, Nico, and I know that you already know what I’m going to say:
“I’m not coming back with you.”
You look at me in astonishment, but nothing will stop me now.
“Take all the money from my wallet but tell this story to my children. They only know pieces of it. It’s time for them to know all of it. Tell them I loved them very much, that they were worth the years I spent without seeing my brother. Tell them to walk in the shade. To listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears, because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel it.”
I know all too well that these lessons come late, but I wasn’t ready to teach them until today.
I’m filled with regret at all the time I wasted, in which I could’ve told them everything in person, when it counted: when they were small, when they looked at me with stars in their eyes. Now it’s too late, and the message, delivered by a stranger, will have to be enough.
“A safe journey to you and to me. I’ll leave you now, because the boy that I was, the one called Francisco Junior, is insisting and insisting. Right now, he’s saying, Come on, Francisco, let’s go now, stop talking, I want to get out.”
And all I can do is listen and pay attention.
Because this boy’s always been very tenacious or very stubborn, depending on the situation and on who was saying it. Which is why I know that, before we reach our destination, he will have managed to get all the way out, to leave the old man behind once and for all, and to run like he hasn’t run for so long. He wants to reach his destination quickly. The blossoms’ destination, Simonopio’s, his own, his, mine, before the sun sets. Because once there, with his little hand—now with no visible veins, no blemishes, no lines—he’ll take his brother’s young hand.
As he has waited for so long to do.
I turn around and take a hesitant step. Then another. I realize there’s more strength in my body than there has been in years. I follow the bees, growing more and more agile and quick, with the old horizon behind me. We walk without looking back, because on this journey, all we care about is our destination.