I haven´t travel out of my hometown since the beginning of March, but my mind travels every day in remote spaces and times through the books. Truth to be told, I am living in a big, European city - Berlin - which is a universe in itself and every other day I find something interesting to do without leaving its confines. The generous natural environment keeps me mentally sane as I get my portion of hiking and nature walking every other day, and the exciting historical and cultural offer never gives me a reason to feel that my brain is about to explore, overwhelmed by boredom. Book, are a different kind of treat that keep me inspired while helping me to hone my writing skills waiting for the day when will be able to travel again and share my passion to the world wide web.
One of perks of spending so much time at home, without any travel to plan or enjoy is the high diversity of books and authors I had the priviledge to read. In the last months I made a luxurious tour of the world discovering new interesting voices from all over the world, especially from those places I long to see - hopefully soon, hopefully in our days. Spending two full months in a hospital with days and nights measured in the rhythm of the personnel shifts and regular checkings - plus some extra occurrences will maybe write more about it one day - gave me the chance to read almost without interruption. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of books that I had on my TBR were effed in just one or two days of nonstop reading because my mind needed to be taken away from the machines and blood tests that were then my routine.
At a great extent, I was taken back to my childhood, the happy, out-of-time and politics times of it, when together with Y. we were spending days after days outdoors reading all that we´ve found in my late paternal grandfather - that we never meet but we had a glorious mythical image of it as a rebel and fighter for the rights my parents were too lenient to risk their comfort for - library and when we were done, fetching our hunger for books from the neighbours and relatives libraries. One of my favorite selection included fairy tales set in different parts of the world and historical epic poems - like Gilgamesh and Shahnameh (every time some Persian acquintances is wondering how comes that I know Ferdowsi´s epic I am answering on a neutral tone that, sorry dear we had it at home, but there is so much story behind this statement that I am trying to make it as matter-of-factly as possible) or Marco Polo travels or the 1001 Nights. Through my reading I´ve not only discovered that far, far away there were places called Persia or China or Russia (I dare to confess that I cried reading Mother by Gorki and got excited about the fights between the White and the Reds as related in the short stories from the Revolutionary Russia in the making).
Despite so much reading, we were not lonely. Me and Y. we used to have friends to play with and sometimes some children of relatives on the way to ´the country´ and the Roma children one block away and the many Hungarian friends that updated our fainted language knowledge and the Armenians whose grandparents were, like my parents, living to share their silent stories of trauma.
In our kitchen in the big city, in that match-of-boxes kind of apartment that we always hated, we had a huge map of the world. Eating - a precarious experience after my mom took hold of the kitchen after our Nana sunked into dementia - was accompanied by stares at the map, reading the name of the countries and imagining how life may be there. We were well informed enough to do not expect to travel there any time soon, we just were curious how it is life in Papua - New Guinea, for instance - ´They are canibals there´, one day my engineer stepfather announced us and suddenly the tasteless food become unbearable to keep in our diminished stomachs.
Despite all the shortcomings, and a mother slowly advacing into her world of depression building her universe behind stumbling blocks that were more resistant than our longing for normal emotions and a simple hug, and the relatives who were disappearing one by one and our own social status that was degraded and our food and light and anything else shortages we had our books that kept our sanity. As during those two unexpected hospital months of 2020, books and thinking out of our walls and limits - physical ones included - kept me safe. Before the many interventions and surgeries and ´routine checkings´ whose number I forgot to count, I set to have something in my mind to think about, related to the last book. Some deep question about history and life and love that I expected to analyse and explore while the doctors were investigating my body. It worked, as smoothly as it worked for months to ignore the desperate signs my body was sending to my absent mind (´it will pass, it´s just a psychosomatic condition, I will get my voice back once I will settle my problems´, I used to say in denial, supported wrongly by some medical doctors that were incredulous and maybe inexperienced too to believe that at my young age I can face such a verdict, like sickness should get an age ticket before entering your body).
But I was lucky and was in the end in very good medical hands and I survived. And while I am carefully doing my recovering treatments and filling my life with love for my little and big people in my life, I keep sharing with my little son the love for travel and respect for diversity. We learn together books about my ancestors and his ancestors, about what makes us one despite the different foods we eat and the different place of births in our certificates, about far away lands that we hope one day to visit together, once those bad people will be overcome by the many good people they keep under opression. I teach my son about how big the world is, and how many languages he can learn - at least the languages of our so diverse grandparents. But first and foremost, before we can travel again and see how diverse the world is, I am teaching my son to respect everyone´s right to be different and proud of it. And books do help us a whole lot during those staycation journey.
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